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Life in retirement

Khrushchev was granted a pension of 500 rubles per month and was given a house, a dacha and a car. Following his removal, he fell into deep depression. He received few visitors, especially since his security guards reported all visits. His pension was reduced to 400 rubles per month, though his retirement remained comfortable by Soviet standards. One of his grandsons was asked what the ex-premier was doing in retirement, and the boy replied, "Grandfather cries." Khrushchev was made a non-person to such an extent that the thirty-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia omitted him from the list of prominent political commissars during the Great Patriotic War.

As the new rulers made known their conservatism in artistic matters, Khrushchev came to be more favorably viewed by artists and writers, some of whom visited him. One visitor whom Khrushchev regretted not seeing was former U.S. Vice President Nixon, who went to Khrushchev's Moscow apartment while the former premier was at his dacha.

Khrushchev began his memoirs in 1966. He initially tried to dictate them into a tape recorder while outdoors, in an attempt to avoid eavesdropping by the KGB. These attempts failed due to background noise, so he switched to recording indoors. The KGB made no attempt to interfere until 1968, when Khrushchev was ordered to hand over his tapes; he refused. While Khrushchev was hospitalized with heart ailments, his son Sergei was approached by the KGB in July 1970 and told that there was a plot afoot by foreign agents to steal the memoirs. Sergei Khrushchev handed over the materials to the KGB since the KGB could steal the originals anyway, but copies had been made, some of which had been transmitted to a Western publisher. Sergei instructed that the smuggled memoirs should be published, which they were in 1970 under the title Khrushchev Remembers. Under some pressure, Nikita Khrushchev signed a statement that he had not given the materials to any publisher, and his son was transferred to a less desirable job. Upon publication of the memoirs in the West, Izvestia denounced them as a fraud. Soviet state radio carried the announcement of Khrushchev's statement; it was the first time in six years that he had been mentioned in that medium.