Khrushchev and Me

Nikita Khrushchev gets bad press these days. Everybody, it seems, identifies him with the nuclear-arms brinkmanship that nearly led to war over Cuba, not to mention a whole series of impressively purple-faced rants against the West in general.

It’s true that when Khrushchev addressed a secret session of the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956, he referred to his predecessor as First Secretary (Stalin) as “a so-called benefactor [who] practiced brutal violence, not only towards everything that opposed him, but also towards whatever his capricious and despotic nature thought contrary to his belief.” It proved sufficient to cause the old-school head of the Polish government, Boleslaw Bierut, to suffer a fatal heart attack when he heard it.

But, set against all this was the harsh and at times almost psychotic impression the undisputed hardman of the Soviet regime from 1953-64 left on his ideological foes both domestically and around the world. This was how Khrushchev, then head of the Moscow Regional Committee, greeted the internal campaign of terror known as the Great Purge in August 1936: “Everyone who rejoices in the successes enjoyed in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang. That word is execution.”

After meeting Khrushchev at a summit conference twenty years later, the then British foreign secretary and future premier Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary: “How can this fat, vulgar man, with his pig eyes and his ceaseless flow of crude talk, really be the head – the aspirant Tsar – of all these millions of people and this vast country?”

As a 12-year-old English schoolboy, I once had the opportunity to meet Khrushchev, and while I couldn’t possibly judge him in terms of the accuracy or otherwise of the stereotype, I admit I came away both impressed and surprised at what I found.

Bear with me for a moment while I first touch on certain seemingly unrelated world events that took place exactly 50 years ago, and that later showed a subtle understanding of affairs on Khrushchev’s part that belies the popular caricature of him as a terrifying but faintly ludicrous peasant thug.

In August 1968, a 37-year-old, South African-born, olive-skinned professional cricketer named Basil D’Oliveira hit a coveted “century” (100-plus runs) while representing his adopted home team of England in an international – or “Test” – match against Australia in London. Nothing particularly remarkable in that, you may think. But, despite this achievement, just two days later the English team’s selectors omitted D’Oliveira from the tour of South Africa that was due to follow in the winter.

There were immediate protests that the decision had been made not on cricketing grounds but in order to appease the Pretoria government and its stated concerns about having to host a “Cape-colored” player on equal terms to his “European” teammates. It quickly became a major controversy. People around the world who never went near a cricket field suddenly knew D’Oliveira’s name. He was the subject of heated exchanges in the House of Commons, and thousands of Britons took to the streets to demonstrate on his behalf.

So bitter and prolonged was the whole debate that the “D’Oliveira Affair” became one of the key societal events that helped turn the decade of the 1960s into what we now call “the Sixties,” and one that still sharply polarizes many of D’Oliveira’s admirers and detractors today, six years after his death at the age of eighty.

This is all offered as a backdrop for what happened to me one unseasonably mild afternoon in December 1968, at a heavily-guarded government dacha in suburban Moscow.

My father then happened to be the British naval attaché to the Soviet Union. It was an interesting time to be behind the Iron Curtain: only a week or two after I arrived, as a boarding-school pupil on my summer holiday, the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia. I remember walking down the street one hot August morning and hearing an announcement growling over the loudspeakers attached to the tops of the lampposts.

“What are they saying?” I asked my father. He listened for a moment. “They’re telling us they’re granting the request of their fraternal Czech comrades for immediate protection against imperialist subversion.”

“Is that really what’s happening?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” my father replied.

One of the Russian military brass who regularly came to our flat was cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who three years earlier had become the first man to walk in space. He and my father must have become friendly, because some months later, when I was back in Moscow for the Christmas break, I was told that either Leonov or one of his colleagues  had spoken to certain parties, and, as a result, we were to make the acquaintance of a “very important person” at his nearby dacha.

This turned out to be Khrushchev. Evidently the one-time United Nations shoe-banger had mellowed in his retirement, because he was now said to enjoy the company of “reasonable capitalists,” and even their offspring, who could go out and see him by invitation. There would be four or five guests in our party, I was told, and under no circumstances was I to utter a word about it to any of my friends. Like those of other Western diplomats, our flat was bugged, so I heard about these arrangements as I played my father on the embassy’s tennis court.

When the day came, we were driven in a rather nondescript minivan on a road that followed the line of the Istra River into the city’s western suburbs. It would be nice to think that we were tailed by men in black suits, but I don’t remember any particular drama about the journey. It was less like a scene from Mission: Impossible, and more like a pleasant holiday outing, latterly down narrow country lanes flanked by tall, snow-powdered trees.

The dacha itself* was painted dark green, not large, and surrounded by a log fence. It looked like a faintly ramshackle shooting lodge in one of the more remote outposts of the Scottish highlands, although not many of the latter would have included a full-scale bomb shelter in the basement, as we found Khrushchev’s home did.

There was a large farm next door, and we were told that at one time this had been a hive of state-sponsored activity, so as to impress its famous neighbor. All we saw now were a few elderly women in overalls silently appraising us as we drove past some withered tree-stumps sticking up from the dirt by the side of the road.

The only sign of the importance of the man we had come to see was the presence of a guard-house, and several bored-looking soldiers in hooded tunics, with rifles across their shoulders, milling around at the point where the main road met the private driveway leading to the dacha. One of these came over and spoke in Russian to our driver, looked us up and down, and then walked back to laboriously open the front gate. We were in.

Khrushchev himself appeared a moment later. Then in his mid-70s, stout and bald, dressed in a baggy linen suit, he looked like a former nightclub bouncer who could still take care of himself if the need arose. When we were introduced, he gripped my arm tightly above the elbow, as if making an arrest, before offering a chortled “’Allo”. He smelled a bit musty.

I remember the whole place as dark and gloomy – you could hear the heavy ticking of a grandfather clock in the entrance hallway – although incongruously there was a rear verandah with a bright-yellow plastic awning stretched above it. Our host led us there, and indicated some wicker chairs from where we could look out over speckled green-and-white fields, the nearby river gleaming in the sun. A maid brought out glasses of tea and a plate of jam-filled pastries of the kind Khrushchev liked. We could have been somewhere in the English countryside. Was this really the man who had gone berserk in the UN and promised to “bury” us in a nuclear holocaust?

Khrushchev characteristically did most of the talking, using an interpreter, favoring us with a combination of epigrams and salty geopolitical statements. “What kind of shit is it when you have to keep people locked up behind a wall?” is one I remember.

A strikingly attractive young woman came out from time to time to whisper something in Khrushchev’s ear. We later learned that his wife Nina Petrovna had been ill in bed in her room just a few feet away, so perhaps he was merely receiving news of her condition.

My father thought the whole exercise “rum,” and came to believe we’d been brought there for a reason – possibly connected to the fact that Khrushchev was then secretly planning to publish his memoirs in the West, and had wanted an audience to bounce ideas off. There was a surreal moment when our host led us from the verandah into an adjacent room that was furnished with a small iron cot, some wooden chairs, and a British HMV record player. In the corner was a large safe, and, pointing to this, Khrushchev told us that “security forces all over the world would love to see the valuables inside.” There was some uneasy laughter at this announcement. I think Khrushchev enjoyed teasing his guests. Perhaps he also harbored the conceit, not altogether unjustified, that if given the chance he could still browbeat most of his ideological foes into seeing his side of an argument.

I had just one direct exchange with Khrushchev. Back on the verandah, he asked me what sports I liked, and I mentioned a fondness for cricket. To my surprise, he immediately launched into a long and highly animated speech, in which the name “D’Oliveira” was intelligible before translation. This was rum. When Khrushchev came up for air, the interpreter told us that he had expressed the view that “agencies of Western imperialism,” combined with “racists” and “fools,” were responsible for D’Oliveira’s exclusion from the winter tour of South Africa, “a country the civilized world needs like a dog needs five legs.” When Khrushchev leaned forward during this tirade, eyes flashing, you suddenly caught a glimpse of the man who had brought the world to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was somehow impressive and a little disconcerting that the one-time leader of 230 million Soviet citizens should know quite as much as he did about the vagaries of English cricket selection.

As we left the government dacha, Khrushchev assured us that the whole meeting had been “invisible,” and that there would be “no repercussions” as a result. I don’t know why I found this statement faintly sinister, but we later heard that an American doctor who had made the same journey as us had answered a knock on the door of his Moscow hotel room early one morning, and that KGB agents had then burst in and searched for any trace of Khrushchev’s manuscript. Then a typist’s flat was raided, and, in time, Khrushchev’s son Sergei was called in to the Kremlin and told to hand over any tapes and transcripts, or else face the consequences. He did as he was told, although by then a copy of his father’s book had also made its way, partly via a TIME magazine correspondent named Strobe Talbott (later US deputy secretary of state), and partly via the British diplomatic bag to the London offices of Little, Brown & Company, who duly published Khrushchev Remembers in 1970.

The book’s author was meanwhile summoned by his former Politburo colleagues and given to understand that it was in his family’s best interests for him to sign a statement in which he denounced his own memoirs as a “fabrication” and a “falsification.” Khrushchev did so. He died of a heart attack in September 1971, aged 77, and rated a one-sentence announcement in the following day’s Pravda, which referred to him only as a “personal pensioner” and then misstated his age.

Although we weren’t party to the smuggling out of Khrushchev’s notes and tapes – presumably the “valuables” locked up in the safe he’d teasingly shown us – our visit apparently hadn’t gone entirely unobserved by the state security forces. My father had brought his camera with him, and, with Khrushchev’s approval, took a snapshot of our host standing at his front door. The picture was then converted into a slide, and carefully filed away in a container.*

Later, when my parents returned to Moscow from a holiday, my father reported that our flat was just as they had left it. “Although that photo of the chairman of the cricket selectors had somehow turned upside down in its box,” he added.