MOSCOW, Oct 28 (Reuters) - The Cuban missile crisis, which ended 35 years ago on Tuesday, was partly a result of the inferiority complex Soviet dictator Josef Stalin bequeathed to his successor Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev's secretary said.
"Khrushchev was always anxious about our prestige, he was afraid the Americans would force us to back down somewhere. He'd worked too long with Stalin and well remembered his words, 'When I'm gone, they'll strangle you like a kitten','' Oleg Troyanovsky told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday.
Basing nuclear missiles in communist Cuba was Khrushchev's own initiative, said Troyanovsky, who was the Soviet leader's secretary. Discussions on the plan began in May 1962.
Khrushchev, a close politburo associate of Stalin who denounced his murderous career after the dictator's death in 1953, saw the missiles as a counter to U.S. rockets in Turkey and as a defence for Cuba against a feared invasion by Washington.
"Khrushchev told me we weren't going to do anything more than the Americans had already done,'' said Troyanovsky, who later went on to be Soviet ambassador to the United Nations.
But when U.S. intelligence spotted the missile bases and President John Kennedy demanded work be stopped, Khrushchev desperately sought a way back from the brink of nuclear war.
"The storm's about to break! It's too late to change anything!,'' Troyanovsky recalled Khrushchev exclaiming in the Kremlin office where he was working round the clock.
"Khrushchev began to understand he had gone a bit too far.''
The Soviet leader finally found a way out on October 28, 1962 when he agreed to remove the military installations on Cuba in return for Kennedy's guarantee not to attack the island.
The world breathed easier. But just a day earlier, according to Troyanovsky, there had been panic in the Kremlin when a middle-ranking Soviet commander ordered the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane over the Caribbean.
"Moscow found out about it only when the wreck was burning out on the ground,'' the former secretary said. "The whole great lengthy work (of compromise) was nearly wrecked...Khrushchev was very alarmed.''
12:59 10-28-97