Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

After a few minutes I violated one other element of protocol. I asked a question of a colonel in the third row. That was a no-no, for if the colonel did not know the answer, he would be embarrassed. I asked a simple question: Who was more important, Marx or Engels? He gave me the right answer, and we continued. Why?, I wanted to know. The course proved to be a success. I got a round of applause after the fourth session. A crazy thought ran through my mind: maybe I’ll now make corporal.

One night, back at Fort Meade, when I was on guard duty, Major Ernest Netzloff, executive officer of the Army Security Center, entered command headquarters, where I was monitoring two phones resting mute on a clean desk. He was a handsome, graying-crew-cut native of Oklahoma, who had fought in both World War II and Korea. His khaki shirt was covered with medals. His manner was always correct and friendly. I leaped to attention, but he quickly dispensed with formality. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time, Private,” he said, taking the seat behind the desk.

“Yes, sir?” What was on his mind?

“Have you ever wondered why you haven’t made corporal?” he asked, to my astonishment. Actually, I had wondered why a number of my colleagues had been promoted, and I had not. PFC was my apparent ceiling. I did not answer him. I just stood there.

“You’ve never made corporal,” he continued, “because Colonel Lively doesn’t like Jews.” Colonel Lively was Major Netzloff’s commanding officer, too. “You’ve done your work admirably. Your lecture course was well received. You deserve a promotion, but he will never give it to you.” Clearly, Major Netzloff was violating every rule in the army manual. He was accusing his commanding officer of anti-Semitism. He could get into bad trouble. I was suddenly tongue-tied, not my usual condition. What was he doing?

“I just wanted you to know,” he said, pushing back on his chair. Then, more softly, “Just wanted you to know.” He stood up, snapped to attention, turned smartly toward the door, and left. Years later, when I had already become a network correspondent, I got a letter from Major Netzloff, saying he had retired from the service shortly after our time at Fort Meade. I lost his letter, but I remember he wrote that no form of discrimination was acceptable to him in the U.S. Army and that so long as Livelys remained in the service, he had to leave. He did not fight against fascism in World War II, he continued, to be a silent witness to anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army. He offered an apology, saying he hoped that one day Colonel Lively would do the same.

A footnote: My army service ended in June 1955 and I immediately returned to Harvard, where I enrolled in summer school, preparatory to pursuing work on my Ph.D. I met a lovely student from Virginia. Her name was Ginny, and her father was an army general. One day I shared the Netzloff story with her. She was shocked. She asked if she could tell the story to her father. Why not?, I thought. Months later I got a letter from Ginny, telling me that Colonel Lively had been officially reprimanded and told that he would never make general and that perhaps he should resign. He did, shortly thereafter. In a way, his resignation was my promotion to corporal. Thanks, Ginny.

December 1955 was Cambridge, cold and intellectually stimulating. January 1956 was Moscow, colder still and even more intellectually stimulating. What a difference a month could make—from one month to the next my location and life had changed. I went from being a Ph.D. student at Harvard to being a translator for the American embassy in the Soviet capital. On occasion, I also served as a press attaché. It all seemed to happen overnight.

One day in late December, Marshall Shulman, once Dean Acheson’s speechwriter at the State Department and now associate director of the Russian Research Center, asked a question that took me totally by surprise: Would I accept a Moscow assignment as a State Department translator, and would I be prepared to leave in a week or two? It was helpful, he said, that I had recently held a top-secret clearance at the Army Security Center. And, by the way, he added, he needed an answer by tomorrow. I gulped.

“Could I have another day or two?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, a smile spreading across his face.

Shulman was my friend, a man of exceptional decency and good humor. If he could have given me more time, he would have, but only that morning he had received an urgent call from friends at the State Department.

”Know anyone who speaks Russian, has a clearance, and can leave for Moscow in the next week or so?” they wanted to know.

“Yes,” Shulman replied, guessing correctly that I would jump at this opportunity.

I checked with a few of my colleagues, who all responded with the Monopoly equivalent of “Go! And don’t stop to collect two hundred dollars.” My father shared their enthusiasm but my mother, characteristically, was more cautious and proved to be more prescient. She wondered whether it would be wise for me to accept a Moscow assignment when I was only a month or two into my Ph.D. program. Might the allures of Moscow not preempt serious scholarship?

There was another reason, too. My brother, a reporter for the New York Times , was then covering another of Admiral Richard Byrd’s missions to the South Pole, and she did not want her other son to be in Moscow at the same time her first son was in the Antarctic. Too dangerous, she thought. Besides, who would believe that one son would be at the South Pole and the other in Moscow?

Still, Moscow beckoned. I had been studying Soviet policy and communist ideology for more than five years and I was intensely eager to see whether a deep immersion in Soviet studies could ever properly prepare someone for the real thing.

When I told Shulman the next morning that I would be honored to accept the State Department job in Moscow (and, for me, “honored” was the right word—it was not just a matter of protocol), I thought I might even find a way of combining my official job with some unofficial scholarship for my dissertation. Shulman was pleased. We then talked about the Cold War. He was worried that we might be misreading Soviet intentions and they misreading ours, producing a deeper spiral of distortion and distrust in superpower relations. Ever since 1949, when the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb and Mao Zedong seized control of the Chinese mainland, two events of global consequence, the Cold War had turned frigid and Shulman saw troubling signs of habit, not reason, governing policymaking in Washington and Moscow.

“Observe and write,” he urged as we said good-bye. “Observe as much as you can, and write to us as often as you can.” Then, whispering, he added, “Wish I were going with you. There’s so much we have yet to learn.” Shulman, patting me on the back, gave me the name and number of a State Department official. “Call him when you get a chance,” Shulman added. “Like now.”

The official’s name was Robert, and he had a soft, cultivated voice suggestive of an upbringing in New England. He was all business. “When can you get to Washington?” he asked. “Monday,” I replied, and we arranged an 8:00 a.m. meeting at the State Department. I would be briefed in Washington for a week. I went to my room, packed, and headed for the train station. I had a job. I was going to Moscow, and I could not have been happier.

My week in Washington was intense, interesting, and even, in its way, amusing. I went from one briefing to another, most of them devoted to my new job as a translator, not literally for the American embassy in Moscow, as it turned out, but for an international organization called the Joint Press Reading Service (JPRS), which lived in Moscow under a separate diplomatic umbrella funded by the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. The JPRS, I was told, was run by Anna Holdcroft, a remarkable Englishwoman of exceptional charm and wisdom who knew more about Russia than an army of “Russia experts.” Staffed by a dozen or so translators and typists from the four sponsoring nations, it serviced many foreign embassies in Moscow—too strapped for cash to employ their own translators—by providing them every afternoon with translated articles or editorials from the Soviet press at the modest cost of roughly $140 a year. (A few years later the Russians took a page out of a lesson book on capitalism; they set up a similar operation but charged only $100 a year. They eventually put us out of business.) The United States, by supporting the JPRS, was not engaging in an exercise of mindless generosity; the JPRS was a small corner of the Cold War. Reading the Soviet press was a political necessity in those days. It was as close as many of us got to the reality of Soviet life.