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

And so, with Bob’s warning about Cold War sex and seduction framing my excitement about my Moscow assignment, I left Washington and hurried to New York for a farewell dinner with my parents. They were both very proud, even my mother. The next morning my father, sporting a new fedora, escorted me to the airport and I was off to Moscow on a giant Pan Am Stratocruiser, a 5,400-mile journey by way of Prestwick, Bremen, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki, and then the rest of the way by train from Helsinki to the Finland Station in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called) and finally on to Moscow. Because I had a diplomatic passport, the U.S. embassy put me in charge of a large food shipment. It was my first official responsibility. As we were clearing customs at the Finnish-Soviet border—why was it that the grass was green on the Finnish side and scraggly and unkempt on the Soviet?—a Russian customs officer asked to see my passport. Was I the officer in charge of the shipment? he asked. Yes, sir, I replied. He examined my passport, saluted, and returned it. I felt relieved. My modest mission, accomplished!

When we arrived in Moscow on the morning of January 28, 1956, it was 42 degrees below zero. As I stepped from the train onto the platform I felt the cold in a way utterly new to me, like a physical force so overpowering that for a moment I could not breathe. It was as if the cold had frozen my nostrils, throat, and lungs. I doubled back into the comparative warmth of the train. “You’ll get used to it,” shouted the embassy officer who had come to the station to greet me. He grabbed the back of my heavy coat, stopping my Napoleonic retreat.

“Welcome,” said Nat Davis, who quickly became my embassy savior and friend. “Welcome to Moscow.”

I have always believed that a person who loves ice cream has to be a good person, even if, by chance, he or she works for the KGB, the Soviet secret police. So it was with a special pleasure that the day after my arrival in Moscow, where everyone was luxuriating in a comparative heat wave (the temperature had climbed to 15 below zero), I came upon indisputable evidence of the healing properties of “ice cream diplomacy,” years before “ping-pong diplomacy” had a positive effect on U.S.-China relations.

Because I was a bachelor and the embassy was short of housing space, I was not given an apartment in the embassy building but rather a large single room at American House, a three-story, red-brick building on Kropotkinskaya Naberezhnaya, an embankment road running alongside the Moscow River. Before the Russian Revolution it had been a mortician’s home and also his place of business. It was still a gloomy place, I felt, and I wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible. On my first full day in Moscow I decided I would visit Red Square. Where else, after all? I dressed warmly, left American House, and headed toward the neighborhood stop of the Moscow Metro. Remembering my Washington guidance about personal security, I glanced from side to side, checking everyone and everything. Across the street I spotted a young man in a heavy black overcoat. My first reaction was, in truth, ambivalence: “He couldn’t be following me, and yet maybe he is,” I thought. I entered the Metro, bought a ticket, and waited for the next train. Within minutes one arrived, and I boarded it for the quick ride to Red Square. The train was crowded, but—no doubt about it—there was the same young man in the black overcoat. He stood not more than three or four steps from me. He looked at me and twitched his mustache.

Three stops later I got off the train, ascended an escalator to the street, and found myself looking at the beautiful Bolshoi Theater. But not for long—it was too cold. I pirouetted and—whoops—bumped into the man in the black overcoat. “Excuse me,” I said. He did not reply. I walked toward Red Square. Around a busy corner I saw two stunningly beautiful throwbacks to Czarist Russia: the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral. Like many other visitors I stopped for a moment to admire this famous scene, but unlike the others I was being followed by a young man in a black overcoat, and I decided to enter GUM, a giant department store fronting Red Square. The young man—undoubtedly my tail, I figured—followed me. I turned and smiled at him, but he did not smile back.

There, in a crowded corner of GUM, I saw an ice cream vendor. Even on icy days in a Moscow winter, Russians love their ice cream. I approached the stand and on a whim purchased two ice cream cones. I started to eat mine and, without looking back, extended the other to the young man, who I assumed was standing directly behind me. He took the cone, never said “Thank you,” and started to lick it with the same delight I derived from licking mine. I turned and smiled at him. He did not smile back. But I felt I had made my first Russian conquest—a KGB tail who liked ice cream.

The JPRS was my job. Sergei Semyonovich Uvarov, the minister of education under Czar Nicholas I, who came up with the popular conservative slogan of “Nationalism, Autocracy, and Orthodoxy,” was the subject of my Harvard research. In my mind, but considering, too, my mother’s concern, I felt I could link the two. Somehow.

The JPRS was located on Kropotkinsky Pereulok 26, a narrow street in what must have been a fashionable neighborhood in prerevolutionary Moscow. At one end was the Arbat, a busy avenue where one could still find bookstores and modest art galleries, and where in czarist Russia one could imagine Russian noblemen and -women showing off their best imported finery, sprinkling their speech with French colloquialisms, strutting about, or being whisked in horse-drawn carriages to a Kremlin reception or a Chekhov performance at the famed Moscow Art Academic Theater, or the MKhAT, as it was popularly called. At the other end were side streets with decaying mansions, most still walled off by tall iron fences that had kept the aristocracy safely protected from the workers—ostentatious wealth and privilege separated from the people. The JPRS was housed in one of those old mansions, one that a hundred years earlier had belonged to the Kropotkin family.

On my first morning, as snowflakes fell from a charcoal-gray sky, I got a lift to the JPRS in an embassy car, which stopped at the entrance to Kropotkin’s home. A uniformed militia man, the sort seen in front of all buildings where foreigners worked or lived, asked for my personal propusk , my crisp new identification card. He looked at it, then slowly looked at me, and then again at the card, until he finally turned and entered a small, cone-shaped sentry box, where he picked up the telephone. Obviously he had never seen me before and he wanted a higher-up’s permission to allow this stranger into the courtyard. After a minute or two he returned to the car, again looked at me and my card, and only then, after a pregnant pause, did he stand tall, salute, and wave me in.

On the front of this two-story mansion, which had clearly seen better days—paint was peeling from old classical columns—I noticed a plaque from which jumped the proud, bearded face of one of its prerevolutionary owners and just below it the words “P. A. Kropotkin was born in this house in 1842.” I was delighted. I was going to be working in the home of one of Russia’s greatest anarchists, an aristocrat who devoted his life to the destruction of the centralized state his family had helped build 700 years earlier. Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary , required reading in a course I had taken on Russian intellectual history, eloquently told the story of an idealistic aristocrat who hated the unquestioned powers of the czar, though he enjoyed all of their benefits, and concluded that societal bliss could come only from the destruction of such state power. For many years he had lived in Western Europe, banished from his homeland by the czar. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he returned to Moscow, believing he now had a chance to infuse communism with his fiery brand of anarchism. But an intolerant Lenin had other ideas, and Kropotkin was unceremoniously exiled to a small town near Moscow, where he died a slow, unhappy death of disillusionment in 1921, never to see his ancestral home on Kropotkinsky Pereulok ever again.