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

Change could be found even on a battered bulletin board. You had only to look.

Late one snowy afternoon in early February, while wandering through an annex of Moscow University located near Red Square, I spotted a handwritten notice on a second-floor bulletin board announcing a special course. The subject was not what made it special—that was “The Role of the People in the Soviet Novel.” What made it special was its lecturer, S. I. Stalina, identified only as a “Candidate of Philological Sciences.” I was not the only one who did a quick double take.

Stalina? The lecturer had to be Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, who had not been seen or heard from in a very long time. One student wondered, “Is it Svetlana, do you think? Really?” Another, trying to be helpful, suggested they check with the main office on the third floor. I followed them.

Above the door to the main office was a large photo of Stalin himself, as though the faculty had not yet got the word that Stalin was in a period of transition—from god to scoundrel. An announcement was tacked to the right of the door: “In the second semester starts the special course of Candidate of Philological Sciences, Stalina, S. I. on the theme: ‘Role of the People in the Soviet Novel.’ Registration for this course held in Literary Office.”

I rushed to the Literary Office but I was told that foreign graduate students would not be permitted to enroll in her course. Technically I was considered a graduate student. Many Russian students did enroll. Svetlana was a draw. At a time when her father was being unceremoniously stripped of his glory, she, ironically, was being given the chance to emerge from the dark shadows of forced anonymity and teach a course at Moscow University. For those skeptics still wondering whether the signals of change in Kremlin politics were real, here was yet another sign that indeed they were.

If you stood at one of the three main gateways into the Kremlin at 10:00 a.m. on February 14, 1956, you would have seen a procession of black limousines carrying communist dignitaries from all over the country and the world pass into the citadel of global communism. The snow-covered scene was one for the history books—the formal opening of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Great Kremlin Palace, the first party congress since Stalin’s death three years before. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, reported the next morning that some 1,355 voting and 81 nonvoting delegates, representing 6.8 million full members and 620,000 candidate members of the Communist Party, had joined the leaders of 55 “fraternal” Communist Parties, all except rebellious Yugoslavia’s, for this historic conclave. Of all these delegates, only a handful knew in advance that the 20th Party Congress would soon rewrite the history of Soviet communism and the legacy of Stalin.

As the delegates entered the mammoth meeting room, they noticed that for the first time in decades the huge photo of Stalin, which had always stared down on them, was missing. Lenin’s statue was still in its customary place of honor, but Stalin’s photo was gone. No delegate had the courage to pause in front of the missing photo. No one asked any questions. Perhaps a furtive glance up, followed by a quickened stride to a preassigned seat, but no more. Explanations, if there were to be any, would come later.

Like earlier congresses, this one opened with the first secretary of the Communist Party, in this case Nikita Khrushchev, delivering a lengthy report on the domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet Union. He was followed by the prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin, outlining the new five-year plan. Everything seemed normal, except it wasn’t. Every delegate at the 20th Party Congress knew, or sensed, that something big was stirring, but how big? Who would win, and who would lose? And, most important, what would happen to Stalin—to his status? This was not an academic question. Most delegates knew that their futures were linked to Stalin’s. If he was being downsized, which was likely, then they would be, too. Suddenly their futures were decidedly uncertain.

With Stalin’s death in 1953 everything had become uncertain. His death, described years later by the Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, “shook our life to its foundations. Classes virtually came to a halt, the teachers wept openly…. Enormous unorganized crowds streamed through the streets to the Hall of Columns, where Stalin lay in state. There was something awe-inspiring about these immense, silent, gloomy masses of people…. The vast procession continued on for several days, and thousands of people perished in the crush.” Stalin was, wrote the scholar Walter Reich, “the only father they had known. Through all the terror, through the mass death and privations of World War II, he was the symbol of authority, the ultimate protector, the source of all sustenance, because all power was in his hands. He had been their supreme leader.” And now there was this frightening hint in the air that their supreme leader stood on the edge of official criticism.

Of course, the Stalin legacy was so deeply carved into the Soviet mentality that many delegates simply refused to accept his downsizing. For example, when the French communist leader Maurice Thorez rose at one point to praise Stalin, many cheered. They thought that the jarring uncertainties surrounding the 20th Party Congress could probably be explained in more familiar terms—perhaps that Stalin’s successors were engaged in another of their power struggles. And if they were so engaged, what did that have to do with Stalin? He stood above petty politics. He was the untouchable one, wasn’t he? But if Stalin was untouchable, who had removed his photo? Eyes turned to Khrushchev. What would he say to explain the meaning behind the missing photo?

No fan of short speeches, Khrushchev opened the congress with a seven-hour report on the state of Soviet communism. He started in the late morning and finished in the early evening. He seemed never to tire. He spoke in a style that could only be described as bombastic, pounding the lectern for emphasis and attention. At the same time he spoke with an air of supreme self-confidence, looking for all the world, wrote the New York Times ’s Harry Schwartz, like “the successful corporate lawyer reporting to a stockholders’ meeting.” Except for the mention of Stalin’s death, Khrushchev did not allow the name Stalin to cross his lips. He spoke instead of the “cult of the individual.” He stressed that this cult must be “resolutely condemned” because it was “alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism.” It led, he added, to “an atmosphere of lawlessness and arbitrariness.” In this opening speech Khrushchev did not detail the “lawlessness”; it was enough that he linked Stalin to “lawlessness.” His message was clear.

In for a penny, Khrushchev decided to go in for a pound. He had already begun to criticize the leader he had once worshipped. Now Khrushchev would go where no sensible communist leader would have dared to go—into Stalin’s once-sacred interpretations of communist ideology. Everyone knew that for many years it had been Stalin’s belief, firmly etched into dogma, truth as taught in Soviet classrooms, that war between the communist and capitalist systems was inevitable. It was only a matter of time. To his credit, Khrushchev tossed the “inevitability of war” into a Kremlin graveyard. Indeed, he planted the flag of “peaceful coexistence.” In a world teetering on the edge of a nuclear war, in which, he said, “the living would envy the dead,” Khrushchev decided that although the triumph of communism was still inevitable, it would no longer have to be achieved by way of war, let alone nuclear war. In Khrushchev’s 1956 tinkering with communist dogma, different countries could now take different roads to communism. Even a peaceful, nonrevolutionary road to communism would be possible. Of course, Khrushchev insisted, competition between the communist and capitalist systems would still continue, perhaps even intensify, but now the ground rules would be changed—the Stalinist doctrine of “inevitable war” would now be replaced by the Khrushchev doctrine of “peaceful coexistence.”