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MEMOIRS OF NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV. Vol. 1, Commissar (1918-1945). Ed. Sergei Khrushchev. Trans. George Shriver, supplemental material trans. Stephen Shenfield. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xxxvi, 935 pp. ISBN (paper) 0-271-023-325.
The memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union after Stalin and was removed from office in 1964 by his colleague Leonid Brezhnev, are well known. Because so few Soviet political leaders kept diaries or wrote memoirs, his have been an indispensable source for those who study the Soviet Union. Since Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika campaign, numerous memoirs by Soviet leaders (including Stalin's close associates V. M. Molotov and L. M. Kaganovich as well as M. S. Gorbachev himself) have been published. Yet Khrushchev's memoirs, in content and volume, remain uniquely interesting to historians.
Khrushchev's memoirs were published in the West in two volumes in the 1970s and an additional slim volume was published in 1990. The first two volumes were translated and edited in the West without the supervision of Khrushchev himself, and their authenticity was denied by the Soviet government. Khrushchev, too, issued a statement denying the authenticity of the first volume (the second volume was published after his death in 1971.) Few experts in the West, however, questioned the authenticity of his memoirs, because the audiotape records of the memoirs by Khrushchev himself were available in the West. Now it has become definitively known that Khrushchev was forced under pressure from the Soviet Communist Party to deny the legitimacy of his memoirs published in the West. Although they were edited liberally, they were indeed genuine.
The present volume is a translation of volume 1 of the complete Russian edition of Khrushchev's memoirs published in Moscow in 1999 as N. S. Khrushchev: vremia, liudi, vlast' in four volumes, based on more than three thousand pages of transcripts. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 have been condensed into two more English volumes, which followed the publication of the present volume. There are slight changes from the Russian in the English edition: some repetitious reminiscences and some documents have been omitted. Still, this edition seems to be much more complete and to comply more fully with the intended narrative of...