Collectivization was begun the year before I was transferred from the Ukraine, but it wasn't until I started work in Moscow that I began to suspect its real effects on the rural population - and it was not until many years later that I realized the scale of the starvation which accompanied collectivization as it was carried out under Stalin.

I believe the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 was historically inevitable, given the circumstances of the time, and that in the final analysis it was profitable for the Soviet Union. It was like a gambit in chess: if we hadn't made that move, the war would have started earlier, much to our disadvantage. It was very hard for us - as Communists, as anti-fascists - to accept the idea of joining forces with Germany. It was difficult enough for us to accept the paradox ourselves.

For their part, the Germans too were using the treaty as a maneuver to win time. Their idea was to divide and conquer the nations which had united against Germany in World War I and which might united against Germany again. Hitler wanted to deal with his adversaries one at a time. He was convinced that Germany had been defeated in World war I because he tried to fight on two fronts at once. The treaty he signed with us was his way of trying to limit the coming war to one front.

Beria and I started to see each other frequently at Stalin's. At first I liked him. We had friendly chats and even joked together quite a lot, but gradually his political complexion came clearly into focus. I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy.

Even though I agreed with Stalin completely, I knew I had to watch my step in answering him. One of Stalin's favourite tricks was to provoke you into making a statement - or even agreeing with a statement - which showed your true feelings about someone else. It was perfectly clear to me that Stalin and Beria were very close. To what extent this friendship was sincere, I couldn't say, but I knew it was no accident that Beria had been Stalin's choice for Yezhov's replacement.

I think Stalin's cultural policies, especially the cultural policies imposed on Leningrad through Zhdanov, were cruel and senseless. You can't regulate the development of literature, art, and culture with a stick, or by barking orders. You can't lay down a furrow and then harness all your artists to make sure they don't deviate from the straight and narrow. If you try to control your artists too tightly, there will be no clashing of opinions, consequently no criticism, and consequently no truth. There will be just a gloomy stereotype, boring and useless.

I still mourned Stalin as an extraordinary powerful leader. I knew that his power had been exerted arbitrarily and not always in the proper direction, but in the main Stalin's strength, I believed, had still been applied to the reinforcement of Socialism and to the consolidation of the gains of the October Revolution. Stalin may have used methods which were, from my standpoint, improper or even barbaric, but I hadn't yet begun to challenge the very basis of Stalin's claim to a special honour in history. However, questions were beginning to arise for which I had no ready answer. Like others, I was beginning to doubt whether all the arrests and convictions had been justified from the standpoint of judicial norms. But then Stalin had been Stalin. Even in death he commanded almost unassailable authority, and it still hadn't occurred to me that he had been capable of abusing his power.

Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many prominent Party leaders and rank-and-file Party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism.

Stalin originated the concept "enemy of the people". This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven; this term made possible the usage of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations.

Khrushchev's rough manners, bad grammar, and heavy drinking caused many Western journalists and diplomats to underestimate him. But despite his rough edges, he had a keen mind and a ruthless grasp of power politics. Bluntly ignoring Western invitations for disarmament and détente, Khrushchev openly continued to stockpile weapons... many believed that he would have no qualms about using them to unleash a nuclear war.

I was impressed with Kennedy. I remember liking his face, which was sometimes stern but which often broke into a good-natured smile. As for Nixon... he was an unprincipled puppet, which is the most dangerous kind. I was very glad Kennedy won the election... I joked with him that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the Presidency over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon. When he asked me what I meant, I explained that by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians; our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.

Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs; he would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or destroyed him but when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.

Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev emerged victorious or defeated cheerful or shaken. Each had probed the other for weakness and found none. Khrushchev had not been swayed by Kennedy's reason and charm. Kennedy had not been panicked by Khrushchev's tough talk

There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure at their Vienna meeting in June 1961, and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions... There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America's power. He questioned only the President's readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are "too liberal to fight.'

Khrushchev's secret speech at the XXth Party Congress caused a political and psychological shock throughout the country. At the Party krai committee I had the opportunity to read the Central Committee information bulletin, which was practically a verbatim report of Khrushchev's words. I fully supported Khrushchev's courageous step. I did not conceal my views and defended them publicly. But I noticed that the reaction of the apparatus to the report was mixed; some people even seemed confused.

I am convinced that history will never forget Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's personality cult. It is, of course, true that his secret report to the XXth Party Congress contained scant analysis and was excessively subjective. To attribute the complex problem of totalitarianism simply to external factors and the evil character of a dictator was a simple and hard-hitting tactic - but it did not reveal the profound roots of this tragedy. Khrushchev's personal political aims were also transparent: by being the first to denounce the personality cult, he shrewdly isolated his closest rivals and antagonists, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov - who, together with Khrushchev, had been Stalin's closest associates.

True enough. But in terms of history and 'wider polities' the actual consequences of Khrushchev's political actions were crucial. The criticism of Stalin, who personified the regime, served not only to disclose the gravity of the situation in our society and the perverted character of the political struggle that was taking place within it - it also revealed a lack of basic legitimacy. The criticism morally discredited totalitarianism, arousing hopes for a reform of the system and serving as a strong impetus to new processes in the sphere of politics and economics as well as in the spiritual life of our country. Khrushchev and his supporters must be given full credit for this. Khrushchev must be given credit too for the rehabilitation of thousands of people, and the restoration of the good name of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens who perished in Stalimst prisons and camps.

Khrushchev had no intention of analysing systematically the roots of totalitarianism. He was probably not even capable of doing so. And for this very reason the criticism of the personality cult, though rhetorically harsh, was in essence incomplete and confined from the start to well-defined limits. The process of true democratization was nipped in the bud.

Khrushchev's foreign policy was characterized by the same inconsistencies. His active presence in the international political arena, his proposal of peaceful co-existence and his initial attempts at normalizing relations with the leading countries of the capitalist world; the newly defined relations with India, Egypt and other Third World states; and finally, his attempt to democratize ties with socialist allies - including his decision to mend matters with Yugoslavia - all this was well received both in our country and in the rest of the world and, undoubtedly, helped to improve the international situation.

But at the same time there was the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956; the adventurism that culminated in the Cuba crisis of 1962, when the world was on the brink of a nuclear disaster; and the quarrel with China, which resulted in a protracted period of antagonism and enmity.

All domestic and foreign policy decisions made at that time undoubtedly reflected not only Khrushchev's personal understanding of the problems and his moods, but also the different political forces that he had to consider. The pressure of Party and government structures was especially strong, forcing him to manoeuvre and to present this or that measure in a form acceptable to such influential groups.

My Russian friends learned about Khrushchev's secret speech about two weeks after it happened. A representative of the Central Committee came to the school and read excerpts at their Party meeting. No text circulated. It was a strictly confidential intra-Party announcement, and we foreign students were told nothing, then or later. I, however, learned very quickly about the speech and about many additional details which confirmed rumors that had been circulating for months. Still, it was the official truth that had the greatest impact.

To tell the truth, I was not quite ready to hear much of what they were saying, and I was shocked when they stated bluntly that Stalin had been a murderer. There were many more shocks waiting to be sure, but this one was too sudden and too momentous - the man had for so many years portrayed himself as the embodiment of everything I wanted to believe in. Now I could no longer separate Stalin from the bad side of things, could no longer assume he did not know. Now it seemed he was the very cause of all the woe.

A major source of these revelations were the prisoners who were then starting to return from the camps of the Gulag. Their stories quickly spread. It was more and more obvious that all of them were innocent, which meant that the other millions, those who could not return, those whose graves were scattered across the country, had also been innocent. This included the best-known victims of the great purges of the 1930S, a time I remembered so vividly It was a terrifying thing to learn.

Apparently most other foreign students, including those from Czechoslovakia, were insulated from this ferment until well after the Twentieth Congress. I have to admit that I hesitated to tell them what I was hearing from my Russian friends. Since my very young years, I have been inclined to think things through before making a move or a judgment, and this was no exception. It took me time to digest this flood of depressing news and to separate men from ideas and the good from the bad.

Among my Russian friends, Khrushchev was the hero of the day. The story circulated that he had dared to make the speech before the delegates against the will of the majority of the leadership, who had been involved in the mass repressions. In 1957 they conspired against Khrushchev and tried to overthrow him, but he was smarter and won the struggle against Molotov Kaganovich, and the rest.

When Khrushchev came with Bulganin on 25 April, 1956, to that by now famous dinner with the Parliamentary Labour Party, he appeared at first to be a quite new type of Russian leader - jolly, ready to laugh and be friendly, and on the surface perfectly genuine. I suspected that it was a post-Stalin policy of the Kremlin to choose extrovert, human personalities for positions of power and public office so long as they had brains and Communist convictions as well.

At the dinner Khrushchev went through the motions of not wishing to make a formal speech, wanting to leave the limelight to Bulganin, who was of course Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and Prime Minister. Bulganin spoke conventionally and courteously, friendly greetings to Britain and all that.

Mr. K. did speak, as I knew he would. He started his speech pleasantly enough with harmless, friendly material, but the longer he spoke the more he boasted. It was the usual sort of thing. The Soviet Union had won the war. Britain had done little. The men who most obviously showed their annoyance at this were George Brown and Aneurin Bevan. Soon they were making protests which Khrushchev could not pretend he had not heard.

This annoyed Khrushchev very much and he lost his temper. He made it very plain that he disliked being contradicted and that he was not accustomed to it. He was cross also when Gaitskell raised the question of the Communist imprisonments of Social Democrats.

Next day, on the eve of their departure, I attempted to cheer Khrushchev up but his anger had not subsided and he took the opportunity to denounce the entire British Labour Party.

Khrushchev is undoubtedly a clever man; either a dangerous one or a man who will be valuable to the cause of peace. It is impossible to know yet whether he is playing a part or being genuine.

The "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in i956 that initiated de-Stalinization is still secret in the Soviet Union. Only party insiders were allowed to read it. The full text was released by the U.S. State Department and has been widely published and annotated in the free world. Its general purport and some of the specific charges have percolated down to the average citizen in the USSR. Why, then, is the whole document being denied to the populace most directly concerned?

The probable answer is that the Kremlin does not want its subjects to know and ponder what Khrushchev did not say. The outside world has read far more into the speech than it contained. Evidently the regime prefers that the Soviet masses, too, should believe vaguely that all of Stalin's iniquities were confessed and repudiated. In truth the accusations and revelations dealt only with narrow segments of the Stalinist reality.

By silence, the "secret speech" and de-Stalinization have condoned the worst of the dead leader's depredations. His high-handed brutality against prominent party and military men and a few intellectuals was castigated, but not forcible collectivization, not the millionfold arrests, deportations and executions, not the man-made famine of 1932-1933 and the other major crimes and atrocities in which the whole population, rather than the elites, were victimized. Khrushchev said that "thousands of absolutely innocent people perished," though he knew there were millions; his personal contribution to the total ran into hundreds of thousands.

Indeed, he and other speakers on the historic occasion at the Twentieth Party Congress balanced excoriation with praise of Stalin. Specifically he was praised for having crushed Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and "bourgeois nationalists"; neither then nor since has the Kremlin denounced the Moscow blood-purge trials. Far from ruling out state violence, Khrushchev defended "necessary terrorism" against internal enemies, complaining only about its use against "good communists."

The much-advertised "rehabilitation" of Stalin's victims followed the same selective pattern. Khrushchev said that 7,679 had been rehabilitated and presumably several thousand more were added to the ghostly company before the process was tacitly halted. But this is a drop in the ocean of tens of millions of innocents. Only some of the well-known were exonerated and restored to posthumous respectability, not the myriad simple Ivans and Marias. Enough was admitted to encourage a new "image" but nothing basic was disowned.

By their silence, also, the de-Stalinizers accepted all of Stalin's most flagrant lies: that full socialism has been achieved; that collectivization was voluntary; that the First Five-Year Plan was a roaring success; that the Fast European satellites had freely chosen communism; that the three Baltic republics had "voted" to enter the Soviet Union; that the massacre of some fourteen thousand Polish officers at Katyn Forest during the war was a German, not a Soviet atrocity; that the USSR almost single-handedly defeated Germany and Japan. Neither the Stalin-Hitler pact, nor the invasion of Finland was mentioned. The whole Soviet mythology has been carefully preserved and reinforced.

Above all, the anti-Stalin campaign, in its inception and thereafter, did not surrender an iota of the arbitrary power used by Stalin, but merely made an implicit promise that his methods would not be employed so rashly against party leaders and activists. Having finally consolidated his supreme power by early 1955 - a process he began when he and Malenkov murdered Beria and thirty-nine of his subordinates - Khrushchev was telling his associates that they need no longer fear sudden death. It was not a liberal explosion but a power play...

On December 30, 1956, Pravda was already instructing its readers: "Stalinism above all means communism and Marxism-Leninism. We believe that when Stalin's mistakes arc weighed against his achievements it will be seen that his mistakes were secondary."

By 1963, this paper, main mouthpiece of the party, was all but restoring him to respectability: "The party fully acknowledges Stalin's services to the party and the communist movement. We now believe that Stalin was devoted to communism and that lie was a Marxist; it is neither possible nor necessary to deny it."