Welcome to an overdrive version of the Russian rulers history podcast.

Well, as I promised in my last podcast, I was going to do a reading from Krustchev's memoirs. The book is called

Krustyff remembers the last testament.

The introductions are done by Edward Krankshaw,

who I've mentioned in the podcast. Gerald Schechter is the other one, and

was translated and edited by Strobe Talbot. It's an older book. I purchased it used.

It was published back in 1974, so quite a while ago. And according to what I've read about this book, this was taken from recordings that Nikita made before he passed away in his last years of life,

trying to explain his policies and what he did while he was the first secretary and premier of the Soviet Union.

And in particular, the passages I'm going to be reading on these overdrive versions of

podcast relate to the problems with China.

Now many of us in the West didn't understand what was going on because we thought a communist

country was a communist country.

But obviously, that's not the case.

And I'd like you to listen to this biased version.

And the reason I say biased, this comes from Nikita

and this is how he thought things were going on between his two

countries and why there was a schism and the first part I'm going to be reading

is called Origins of the schism. So here goes it and I hope you enjoy it. People I meet often tell me

it would be particularly interesting if I recorded my memoirs about our country's

relations with China. You might say that China is both close to us and far

from us. It's close, and that it's our next-door neighbor, and shares a long border with our country.

At the same time China is far away and that the Chinese have little in common with our people.

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