FOR sheer drama, few periods in modern history can match the years just before-and after the death of Joseph Stalin. It was a time of Byzantine intrigues, some engineered by the old dictator, others conceived and carried out behind his back. It was a time of brutal purges and bitter battles within the Kremlin hierarchy that led to Nikita Khrushchev's startling "destalinization" speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. This week the former Soviet Premier, who emerged from those years as the Kremlin's new boss, provides the only first-person account of those fateful struggles ever recorded. His reminiscences, excerpted from the forthcoming book, Khrushchev Remembers, are appearing in LIFE and 19 publications abroad.
Khrushchev wastes no sympathy on Lavrenty Beria, the rival he deposed and destroyed. He pictures Stalin's secret-police chief as a cruel and cynical man whose favorite remark was "Listen, let me have him for one night, and I'll have him confessing he's the King of England." In later years, says Khrushchev, even Stalin grew to fear his fellow Georgian and the power he wielded as absolute master of the vast Cheka, or secret-police, organization. The sweeping postwar purge of the Leningrad party, Khrushchev believes, was part of a scheme masterminded by Beria and his "battering ram," former Premier Georgy Malenkov; the object was to wreck the careers of a troika of promising young men whom they regarded as a threat to their own eventual ascendancy. Two of those men, N.A. Voznesensky and A.A. Kuznetsov, were arrested and shot. The third, says Khrushchev, "was hanging by a thread. I simply can't explain how he was saved from being exterminated." His name: Aleksei Kosygin, now Soviet Premier.
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