In response to President Kennedy's letter protesting the placement of missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev proposes a resolution to the crisis. When the time seemed right he would offer to dismantle the missiles already on the island (the MRBMs or R-12s) if Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba.

The Chinese Embassy shares their opinion on Khrushchev's reconciliation with Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis. They believe: Khrushchev’s activities "amounted to a bowl of cold water, poured right over the Cuban people"; because of Khrushchev, those who sit on the fence have now leaned rightward; American imperialists will, under the banner of the UN, create troubles for Cuba; and Khrushchev exhausted his words to exculpate Kennedy, which invariably stemmed from the concern to arrange a Cuba deal as a starting point, with the ultimate goal to push for reconciliations to be reached on other questions.

Excerpt from a report prepared by Politiburo member Dmitry Polyansky on Khrushchev's foreign policy mistakes, presented at 14 October 1964 CPSU Central Committee plenum. Polyansky included a scathing denunciation of Khrushchev’s “adventurism” in sending the missiles to Cuba, causing the “deepest of crises [that] brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war.” Ridiculing Khrushchev’s claims of having achieved a successful “penetration” of Latin America, Polyansky dismissed his contention that the crisis had in fact ended with a Soviet victory.

This telegram, written in Khrushchev's stream-of-consciousness style, outlines the rationale behind the decision to remove the missiles from Cuba that caused the crisis: It was much better to end the crisis by giving up planes that were already obsolete—to show that the Soviet Union and Cuba had fulfilled all the promises Khrushchev had given Kennedy—and consequently to expect, and demand, full compliance with the non-invasion pledge on the part of the United States, than to retain the planes and give the Americans a justification to violate their pledge. The telegram also spells out, in Khrushchev’s words, of the reasons why the weapons were deployed to Cuba in the first place.

Protocol 71 gives details to the immediate fallout of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the Soviet perspective. Thanks to Castro’s so-called Armageddon letter and his five points, by December 1962 (date of this protocol), Khrushchev was calling the Cubans “unreliable allies.”

Protocol 66 is the first Malin note dated after the Cuban Missile Crisis, on 11 November. The tone of the protocol indicates that Castro is not pleased with Khrushchev's handling of the crisis, and there is a growing sense of distance between Cuba and the Soviet Union.

According to Protocol 63, Khrushchev probably assumed that Kennedy’s patience was at an end and the Cuban Missile Crisis might either be resolved or spin out of control, and the Kremlin again considered how it might respond to a US attack. If anyone suggested a preemptive strike, or even a retaliatory strike, against a target outside of the Caribbean, Malin did not note it for the official record.

Protocol 62 illustrates how it was Khrushchev who raised the stakes during the missile crisis and dictated a new letter to Kennedy indicating he would only remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange of the United States withdrawing its military bases from Turkey and Pakistan. The Pakistan demand would later be dropped, however and the US would only agree to remove its IRBMs from Turkey.

Protocol 61 indicates Khrushchev was already taking steps away from the crisis unfolding. Khrushchev decided that the ships carrying the IRBM missiles (the R-14s) on the high seas should turn around and come home.

Protocol 60 details the first meeting of the Communist Party during the crisis. As Khrushchev is awaiting the announcement by President Kennedy of the discovery of missiles in Cuba, he and some of his colleagues briefly considered using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a US airborne assault. But, at the suggestion of Soviet defense minister Rodion Malinovsky, the Kremlin postponed its consideration of a nuclear response pending details of Kennedy’s speech.The Kremlin wasted no time in taking steps to reduce the risks of confrontation. It ordered some ships that were still in the Mediterranean to turn around. The Aleksandrovsk, the ship carrying the nuclear warheads for the IRBMs (the R-14s), was ordered to keep sailing, however, because it was close enough to Cuban shores to dock before the blockade went into effect.