I've been on a book-reading rampage lately, this time Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era (Sergei Khrushchev, 1990, Little, Brown and Co.).
The book covers the life of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1891-1971) in retirement; that is, after he was deposed by corrupt conspirators in late 1964.
I dunno what an expert opinion on Nikita Khrushchev is, but I always found him a compelling figure, the most "human" of all Soviet leaders.
Surely Khrushchev Remembers will in ages to come rank as one of the gigantic literary works of the 20th century.....and to think it was composed by a man who wasn't even literate until adulthood.
It used to bother me, when wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all during the mid-1990s, that so few recalled him, and those who did, recalled him with disdain.
(On the other hand, I was surprised that so many there seemed to remember something few in the west even to this day know about--that someone had tried to assassinate Khrushchev in Belorussia, but only grievously wounded him.)
The son, Sergei, alas was not gifted with the literary talents of his father; the blunt straightforward plain speaking, and so the reading can get tedious in some places, but the reader is urged to keep ploughing on.
One has to smile at the complaints of the son, that an American editor had copiously footnoted and italicized the memoirs of his father, correcting the record--omitting to remember that an American (or western) reader unacquainted with the lies of the socialists, might have unwarily taken certain of the Soviet leader's comments as fact, not fantasy.
The book covers the years 1964-1971, when Khrushchev was living in isolation, composing his memoirs, and goes into much detail about how these memoirs were smuggled west, and how they were proven authentic.
There is one utterly unneeded chapter in the book, the last chapter. The next-to-the-last chapter deals with the deathbed of Nikita Khrushchev, which is an eminently sensible place to end a book, but then much wordage is expended upon attempts to erect a miniature monument at his grave-site.
A discussion of art, aesthetics, abstractery, realism, sculpture, whatnot.
All but that last chapter's well worth a read, if one is into Russian or Soviet history.
