Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes

When the tapes dictated by Nikita Khrushchev in retirement first made their way to the West, there were key gaps in the narrative. Khrushchev himself had authorized the deletions, for apparent political reasons. Two decades would pass before those gaps could be filled. This new volume includes the revelations that Stalin confirmed the "very significant" contribution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the Soviet atomic bomb project; that in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, Fidel Castro urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack on the United States; Khrushchev wanted to return the Japan islands in the Kuril chain seized by the USSR at the end of World War II, and thereby restore normal relations between the two countries. The new tapes also provide information on the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol "giving" Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia to the Soviet Union; the background on the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and Leonid Brezhnev's subsequent suppression of the author and his works; revealing asides on Brezhnev and his allies; and Khrushchev's thoughts and doubts on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the Prague Spring. The book also offers an insight into the present turbulent and shifting situation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.