Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament

by Nikita Khrushchev

Book Overview

Political Memior. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0233966102
• ISBN13: 9780233966106
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 602 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An interesting read

As a child growing up during the Cold War who as a child participated in air-raid drills in grade-school, my memories of Khrushchev were formed by flickering images on a black and white TV where this plump little man banged his shoe on the podium and cried out: We will bury you! It was frightening. As children, we would sing this ditty to the tune of Whistle While You Work: Whistle while you work, Khrushchev is a jerk; Eisenhower has the power to put him out of work!Years later I was told this infamous line should have been translated: We will overcome you. So much for Cold War politics. Then as a young man in college I heard that Khrushchev had written an autobiography and I was eager to read it. I was not disappointed; it gives a decidedly Russian perspective on history of the Soviet Union. For instance, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, (Stalins anti-aggression pact with Hitler) Khrushchev saw as an ploy to delay the inevitable war with Germany until Russia was better prepared for war. Although earlier in the book Khrushchev dealt with the purges of the 1930's, he does not mention the direct relationship between Stalin's unpreparedness for war and the slaughter of the officer corps during the 1930s.It is ironic that Khrushchevs last chapter is entitled, Defending the Socialist Paradise. What he does not address is that this paradise was held together by terror. True, he does acknowledge the use of terror especially in Stalins reign and the rise and fall of Beria, but it is only through terror and compulsion that communism is able to work. Even then, it is incapable of sustaining itself economically. The socialist workers paradise has left Russian and eastern Europe in an economic and environmental wasteland. But then, Western socialist are unperturbed. They believe that they can do it better than Stalin and Khrushchev. What these western socialists do not realize is that the only way a communist state can deliver its promises is through compulsion. And when people resist, they must be forced to comply. If it takes murder, genocide, and the destruction of a people and their culture to establish the socialist workers paradise, that is the price socialist are willing to pay. We cannot help but like Khrushchev after reading this book, but the reader must remember that he was a part of a system that killed millions of their own citizens, occupied eastern Europe for over fifty years and failed miserably in the end.