The Death and Transfiguration of a Peasant Prince : KHRUSHCHEV ON KHRUSHCHEV An Inside Account of the Man and His Era by His Son <i> by Sergei Khrushchev; edited and translated by William Taubman (Little, Brown: $22.95; 480 pp.; 0-316-49194-2)</i>

The scene is the Crimean resort of Cape Pitsunda in the Soviet Union. The time--the evening of Oct. 11, 1964. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev is strolling on the beach with chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Anastas Mikoyan, when an unexpected call comes through from Moscow. Comrade Khrushchev is requested by the other members of the Presidium to return immediately to the capital to discuss “some urgent questions concerning agriculture.” Suspicious, but (according to the author of this book) not unduly alarmed, Khrushchev flies back to Moscow and is met at the airport not by the entire Presidium, as is customary, but only by KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny, and by a couple of junior functionaries.

Khrushchev is then driven at top speed to the Kremlin, where the other members of the Presidium present him with an ultimatum: He must give up his posts of first secretary of the Party and chairman of the Council of Ministers immediately and go into retirement. The Presidium members are nervously respectful, but also firm. Mikoyan attempts to mediate a compromise and fails. Khrushchev argues his corner, but, at 70 years old, seems tired and subdued and makes only one request: to say a formal farewell to the upcoming Party plenum. He is brusquely cut short and refused by Brezhnev. Khrushchev bursts into tears. So, for the first time in history, ends the rule of a Soviet leader by means other than his death.

This account by Sergei Khrushchev, himself a rocket engineer and Papa Khrushchev’s favorite son, adds considerably to our knowledge of what happened to his father during those fateful days in 1964, and is the high point of a book that essentially covers the last seven years of Khrushchev’s life, beginning with this palace coup and ending with his death in 1971. But how reliable is it?

Sergei Khrushchev is obviously a partial witness. He loved his father and has written this memoir ostensibly to correct “all sorts of myths and fables,” as he puts it, that have clustered about his father’s name. Yet it seems he may be replacing them with new myths. The Khrushchev that emerges from his pages is recognizably the homespun, crude and rumbustious figure that we remember from the ‘50s and ‘60s, albeit sanitized and tidied up. But we are also asked to believe that he was a modest, sober, selfless and democratic man of the people, ascetically devoted to the common weal, endlessly hardworking, and a fount of pithy wisdom on all human and political affairs (in contrast, we are told, to the idle, self-seeking men who displaced him).

The trouble with this type of thing is that we have heard it all before. These are the standard hagiographical features of Soviet descriptions of Lenin--and of Stalin too until he was demystified by Khrushchev. This saintly figure is simply too good to be true. And it is all unnecessary, because the real Khrushchev that we remember, banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations, arguing with American farmers in the Middle West, threatening to “bury” us by the end of the century, was far more interesting than the mythical “father of his people” that takes over too many of the pages in the early part of this book. Fortunately this figure isn’t allowed to dominate. In fact, the most memorable and interesting parts of Sergei’s portrait of his father are the domestic scenes, where we see Papa settling himself comfortably into his wicker armchair by the swimming pool in Pitsunda, perusing state papers on one end of the half-cleared dining table (in preference to retiring into his study) or showing visitors around his vegetable garden to boast of his green thumb.

This is the kind of detail that has been hidden from us until very recently, and we have to thank perestroika and glasnost for opening the way to intimate and gossipy memoirs of a character that was unthinkable until very recently. Sergei Khrushchev quotes some fascinating revelations made in recently published interviews by former members of the Soviet government, which bear out or augment his own eye-witness testimony, and similar books to his own have recently been published by Sergei’s brother-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, and by his friend (often referred to in these pages) Sergo Mikoyan, son of the former President. Such intimate glimpses into the behind-the-scenes activities of Soviet leaders are unprecedented in Soviet history and offer us a whole new insight into the workings of the Soviet government.

What emerges is not entirely comforting. At one point Sergei attempts to portray his father as an honest democrat. “The problem of political power greatly disturbed Father. He worried about who would succeed him and how, and about how to create guarantees against concentration and abuse of power.” Yet a few pages later we learn that Khrushchev was distraught when his chosen heir-designate, Frol Kozlov, was taken suddenly ill and could not return to his duties. “I’m breaking my neck to figure out whom to propose for Kozlov’s place. . . . I’d like to find someone a bit younger. I used to have Shelepin in mind . . . Podgorny was a possibility. He’s a sensible man; he knows how to analyze economic questions. . . . He’s got a lot of experience, but he’s narrow. . . . That leaves Brezhnev. . . . He isn’t suited either. The job needs someone with a different sort of character.” There is not the slightest suggestion of any political consultation or concern about “the abuse of power.” Indeed, when the handover of power took place, it was because the other members of the Presidium had forced Khrushchev’s hand, not because he was ready for it. They, according to Sergei Khrushchev, had consulted one another, and one of their accusations against Khrushchev was that he was dictatorial and refused to take the advice of his colleagues. This, according to Sergei, was nothing better than “ganging up” against his father. Yet he too admits, in one of the many understatements in the book, that “Father injected himself into all matters large and small, and they (his colleagues) were irritated by this kind of tutelage.”

There is a change for the better in the later chapters of the book, where Sergei describes Khrushchev’s retirement, the recording and publication abroad of his memoirs, his final illness and death, and the farcical struggle to get him a decent burial and tombstone. Here there is less need to pretend and improve the picture. The portrait of a lonely, embittered, but ultimately chastened and wiser man that emerges is both touching and convincing. The struggle to get Khrushchev’s own memoirs recorded, then smuggled abroad and published in the West ironically turned Khrushchev into the sort of dissident writer he had once persecuted. He gained new insights into the behavior of Pasternak and the dissident intelligentsia, realized some of the mistakes he had made, and understood a little better the folly of a system that was still feudal in many respects, and depended upon an almost absolute monarch and his barons for its functioning. He did not live to see the final irony, which was the commissioning of a headstone from the dissident sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny, with whom he had had a violent shouting match in 1963, when he had poured scorn on modern art in general, and on the works of Neizvestny and his colleagues in scatalogical particular. In 1963, he had still been an omnipotent dictator, whereas at his death he was a scorned and all but forgotten former leader.

But he is forgotten no more, and one of the things this book reminds us of is the seemingly capricious way in which the wheel of Soviet history turns. As his son records, Khrushchev died an “unperson” in classic Soviet fashion, unlamented and unloved, at least in the Soviet Union. But now he is well on the way to being a hero again, and this is no accident. For Gorbachev quite clearly sees himself as continuing many of the reforms first suggested or inaugurated by Khrushchev (who coined the slogan, “back to Leninist norms,” in turn, seeking legitimation from the father of the Soviet state). It is no accident, I think, that the villain of Sergei’s story should be Gorbachev’s predecessor (and Khrushchev’s successor) Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev is portrayed here as a cowardly, lazy and vainglorious opportunist in conformity with most of the political literature of perestroika. It may be coincidence, of course, that Sergei Khrushchev saw Brezhnev in 1964 in just the terms that he is being described in 1990, but I doubt it. For all the verisimilitude of Sergei Khrushchev’s version of Brezhnev’s role as plotter and leader, it fits too snugly into Gorbachevite revisionism to be totally convincing.

It is clear that Sergei Khrushchev is not much of a writer himself. He is a rocket engineer, and has composed his book on the basis of tape recordings made for the most part at the time of the events described, with the help of some later reconstructions. His prose is wooden and littered with standard Soviet cliches (on one page alone we find: “did not stand on ceremony”; “Stalinism was not broken”; “a long, hard struggle lay ahead, defeats as well as victories awaited us”; “reversals of fortune”; “fate tossed him from place to place,” and “Later, life separated them”). The book is also far too long and could have done with some judicious pruning by its conscientious but somewhat gullible editor and translator, who tends to take rather too many of the author’s special pleadings at face value. It is, nevertheless, a fascinating read and adds up to the best description of life behind Soviet palace doors that has reached us so far. Let us hope that perestroika brings us more revelations to continue the story up to the present day.