Books by Nikita Khrushchev
“Khrushchev has such an original voice. He talked it all into a tape recorder…The informational content is extraordinary because it’s very rare that you get a national leader who gives you, with such immediacy and in such detail, his take on a whole range of things. There’s the Stalin period, his own dealings with the West, his own policies, his relationships with colleagues, etc. It’s often unexpected, because Khrushchev really was a non-standard kind of person. He has his own take on things, and he doesn’t feel a great need to wrap things up and smooth things down. That wasn’t his style. And so you get an awful lot of unvarnished observations and reactions, which I find fascinating, in that book.” Read more...
The best books on The Soviet Union
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Historian
Interviews where books by Nikita Khrushchev were recommended
The best books on The Soviet Union, recommended by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Soviet Union was the world’s first communist country and lasted around seven decades. It played a key role in defeating Nazism in Europe and became a global superpower before collapsing unexpectedly in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, recommends books that bring to life different aspects of it, from forced labour in Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey (GULAG) to the heady days of the Khrushchev thaw and including the memoir of Stalin’s beloved daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
