KHRUSHCHEV AND KHRUSHCHEV: FROM THE KREMLIN TO BROWN UNIVERSITY:
MEMOIRS OF NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV


Khrushchev Remembers. The Last Testament. Translated and edited by Strobe Talbott With a foreword by Edward Crankshaw and an introduction by Jerrold L. Schecter. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1974. The volume is opened to the chapter on the 1959 visit. The first volume (published 1970) in this three-volume series had been prepared by translating a transcript, by Sergei Khrushchev; some critics questioned its authenticity. For this volume and its sequel, however, Sergei Khrushchev was able to make available copies of the tapes themselves, the authenticity of which was confirmed by comparison of voice-prints. This English version appeared in print years before the Russian version. Gift of S. Khrushchev.

Transcript of Nikita Khrushchev's dictated memoirs. (Photocopy.) Prepared at Columbia University from copies of audio tapes. Lent by the Oral History Office, Columbia University.

Transcript, with handwritten revisions, of Nikita Khrushchev's dictated memoirs (photocopy). Sergei Khrushchev donated his transcript of the tapes to Columbia University. The excerpt displayed deals with his visit to the USA in September 1959. Lent by the Oral History Office, Columbia University.

Carbon copy of a later typed version of the transcript, incorporating previous handwritten revisions, to which further revisions have been added in ink. The excerpt displayed corresponds to the passage in the adjacent earlier version. Gift of S. Khrushchev.
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Nikita Khrushchev. Vremia, Liudi, Vlast' (N.S. Khruschev Vospominania) [i.e."Time, People, Power" (half-title: "N.S. Khrushchev Memoirs")]. Edited by Sergei Khrushchev. Moscow: Moskovskiye Novosti, 1999. 4 vols. Complete edition of the memoirs. Gift of S. Khrushchev

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Nikita Khrushchev. Vospominanya: Izbrrannye fragmenty. [i.e. "Memoirs: Selected fragments"]. Edited by Sergei Khrushchev. Moscow: Vagrius, 1997. Selected chapters from the memoirs. Gift of S. Khrushchev.

Nikita Khrushchev. Dictated memoirs. 39 4-track reel-to-reel audio tapes. Prior to his death in 1971 Nikita Khrushchev, using a "Uher" tape recorder, dictated his memoirs on reels of audio tape. As each tape was completed, Sergei Khrushchev made two copies, entrusting one to his friend Igor Shanik of the Moscow Technical University and the other to Time Magazine. (The copies were made using whatever tapes were at hand. In addition to the voice of Nikita Khrushchev, two fragments of music can be heard: one of Diana Ross and the Supremes, the other of Frank Sinatra.) In July 1970, when Nikita Khrushchev was in hospital, the KGB confiscated the original tapes. Time Magazine eventually donated its copy to Columbia University. The other copy was returned to the Khrushchev family and is still in Russia. In 1991, from the latter copy, Sergei Khrushchev made another copy, which he donated to Columbia University. It is displayed here. For various reasons there are discrepancies between the sequence of dictation in the various sets of copies. Lent by the Oral History Office, Columbia University.

Sergei Khrushchev. "Nikita Khrushchev's Tapes." (Two diagrams.) Also, "Osobennosti perezapisi diktovok memuarov N.S. Khrushcheva" [i.e. "Specific features of copying the machine dictation of N.S. Khrushchev's memoirs"]. These illustrate and explain the relationship between various versions of the tapes. Gift of S. Khrushchev.

Computer hard drive. In order to rearrange the scrambled segments of the approximately 200 hours of Nikita Khrushchev's dictation, the thirty-nine reel-to-reel tapes have been copied, in digital format, onto three computer hard drives similar to the one displayed here. This was done by the staff of Brown University Library's Media Services Department, using equipment purchased for the recently-established Media Lab.

Brown University Library. Media Services Department. Printout of three screen shots of the four-track audio tapes. In digitized format the four-track tapes can be viewed on a computer screen as a set of four linear graphs. The three screen shots displayed here show portions of tape at different magnifications: from top to bottom, they are (1) three and a half hours' worth of dictation, (2) twelve and a half minutes, and (3) three seconds. (At the third magnification one can distinguish individual words from background noise; the latter appears as a flat line.) A native Russian speaker has been listening to the dictation and electronically marking and identifying various portions of it as displayed in graph form, which eventually will be cut and pasted electronically into their correct sequence.

Blank CD disk. When the editing is complete, the digitized dictation will be transferred to a set of approximately 312 CDs, for greater stability and also to facilitate the duplicating of Nikita Khrushchev's dictated for interested libraries or individual researchers.
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