In late 1966 or early 1967, at the state-owned dasha outside Moscow to which he had been consigned after his fall from power in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev began the series of tape-recorded monologues that make up this archive. He continued, with one four-month interruption because of illness, until a few days before his death, dictating without benefit of interviewer, papers, or a reference library. Spanning his entire career, the memoirs detail early steps up the Party ladder; first impressions of Stalin; the failures of collectivization; the years of the purges; campaigns of World War II; Stalin's behavior in post-war years; the state of Party leadership after Stalin's death; Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in the secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress; and a topic-by-topic discussion of foreign and domestic affairs in the years that followed, generously sprinkled with earthy anecdotes and vignettes of Soviet leaders. How these tapes came into the hands of Time, Inc. remains undisclosed, but they furnished the grist for two volumes that were translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, KHRUSHCHEV REMEMBERS (1970) and KHRUSHCHEV REMEMBERS: A LAST TESTAMENT (1974). The front matter of these provides all that is available as to provenance; but this archive, which includes detailed topical outlines in addition to completely new transcriptions of the tapes, in Russian, offers a much fuller record of what Khrushchev had to say. These transcriptions and the outlines have been furnished by the University's Russian Institute on a grant supplied by the donors, Time, Inc. Also included is a report of the voice-printing analyses to which the tapes were subjected to verify their authenticity.
