Nikita Khrushchev - Life in Retirement

Life in Retirement

Khrushchev was granted a pension of 500 rubles per month, and was assured that his house and dacha were his for life. Following his removal from power, Khrushchev fell into deep depression. He received few visitors, especially since Khrushchev's security guards kept track of all guests and reported their comings and goings. In the fall of 1965, he and his wife were ordered to leave their house and dacha to move to an apartment and to a smaller dacha. His pension was reduced to 400 rubles per month, though his retirement remained comfortable by Soviet standards. The depression continued. His doctor prescribed sleeping pills and tranquilizers, but even so, when one of his grandsons was asked what the ex-premier was doing in retirement, the boy replied, "Grandfather cries." He was made a nonperson to such an extent that the thirty-volume Soviet Encyclopedia omitted his name from the list of prominent political commissars during the Great Patriotic War.

As the new rulers made their conservatism in artistic matters known, Khrushchev came to be more favorably viewed by artists and writers, some of whom visited him. One visitor whom Khrushchev regretted not seeing was former U.S. Vice President Nixon, then in his "wilderness years" before his election to the presidency, who came to Khrushchev's Moscow apartment while the former premier was at his dacha.

Beginning in 1966, Khrushchev began his memoirs. He dictated them into a tape recorder, and, after attempts to record outdoors failed due to background noise, recorded indoors, knowing that every word would be heard by the KGB. However, the security agency made no attempt to interfere until 1968, when Khrushchev was ordered to turn over his tapes, which he refused to do. However, while Khrushchev was hospitalized with heart ailments his son, Sergei, was approached by the KGB and told that there was a plot afoot by foreign agents to steal the memoirs. Since copies had been made, some of which had been transmitted to a Western publisher, and since the KGB could steal the originals anyway, Sergei Khrushchev turned over the materials to the KGB, but also instructed that the smuggled memoirs be published, which they were in 1970 under the title Khrushchev Remembers. Under some pressure, Nikita Khrushchev signed a statement that he had not given the materials to any publisher, and his son was transferred to a less desirable job. Upon publication of the memoirs in the West, Izvestia denounced them as a fraud. When Soviet state radio carried the announcement of Khrushchev's statement, it was the first time in six years he had been mentioned in that medium.

In his final days, Khrushchev visited his son-in-law and former aide, Alexei Adzhubei, and told him, "ever regret that you lived in stormy times and worked with me in the Central Committee. We will yet be remembered!"

Khrushchev died of a heart attack in a hospital near his home in Moscow on September 11, 1971, and is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, having been denied a state funeral, and interment in the Kremlin Wall. Fearing demonstrations, the authorities did not announce Khrushchev's death until the hour of his wake, and surrounded the cemetery with troops. Even so, some artists and writers joined the family at the graveside for the interment.

Pravda ran a one-sentence announcement of the former premier's death; Western newspapers contained considerable coverage. Veteran New York Times Moscow correspondent Harry Schwartz wrote of Khrushchev, "Mr. Khrushchev opened the doors and windows of a petrified structure. He let in fresh air and fresh ideas, producing changes which time already has shown are irreversible and fundamental."