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

Khrushchev was devastated. In the early months of the war he was the Kremlin’s man in Ukraine, and although he was a Russian ruling with a tough hand, he still had a soft spot in his heart for the region. One reason was that Khrushchev had been based in Ukraine during his early rise to power; another reason was that his wife was Ukrainian.

When Khrushchev described Stalin’s unbelievable ineptness, he left one delegate with the impression that he truly “hated” Stalin. “He was a coward. He panicked,” Khrushchev had shouted. “Not once during the whole war did he dare go to the front.”

If Stalin’s failures were so obvious, then why didn’t Khrushchev and other communist leaders challenge him? Khrushchev himself asked the same question—it was on everyone’s mind. “Where were the members of the Politburo? Why didn’t they come out against the cult of personality in time? Why are they acting only now?”

The silence, so “deathly” quiet “you could hear a bug fly by,” according to one Kremlin leader, slowly turned into an anxious hum. Delegates still did not have the courage to look one another in the eye. What was the answer to Khrushchev’s question, they wanted to know. It was a moment of fear and anticipation. Dmitril Goryunov, chief editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda , the newspaper of the Young Communist League, was seen taking five nitroglycerin pills for his weak heart. A few delegates reportedly suffered heart attacks on the spot; some later committed suicide. Almost all of the delegates saw Stalin as an awesome god, powerful and omnipotent, who knew everything, bestowed goodness on his people, yet was feared by everyone. Children sang songs about him. “Stalin outshines the sun,” they sang. “He flies higher than all. He defeats all enemies. He is our very best friend.”

Many weeks later, after the news of the Khrushchev attack on Stalin had begun to circulate in the markets of Moscow, I heard stories about the 20th Party Congress. One told of how Khrushchev described Stalin’s humiliation of other Kremlin bigwigs.

“Once he turned to me,” Khrushchev explained, “and said, ‘You, khokhol , dance the gopak .’ So I danced.” Khokhol is a derogatory Russian description of a Ukrainian, and the gopak is a quick, snappy Ukrainian peasant dance, difficult for someone short and stocky, like Khrushchev, to perform. He must have looked and felt like a fool, but he danced the gopak because he felt he had to—Stalin had told him to dance the gopak ! In those days, he had no choice.

Another story heard in the Moscow market had one troubled delegate jumping to his feet and shouting, “Well then, why didn’t you all get rid of him?”

Khrushchev, interrupted by the question, looked slowly around the chamber. “Who said that?” he asked.

No one answered.

“Who said that?” he repeated more forcefully.

But again there was no answer, only a sudden chill and silence.

Khrushchev grinned. “Now you understand why we didn’t do anything,” he said drily before continuing his speech.

In his memoir, years later, Khrushchev admitted that “doubts had crept into my mind… but we couldn’t free ourselves from his pressure even after he died…. We were told not to stick our noses into things…. We did everything to shield Stalin, although we were shielding a criminal, a murderer.”

Khrushchev told the delegates of a time when he and Nikolai Bulganin, then one of his key aides, were driving home from a meeting in Stalin’s dacha. “Sometimes when you go to Stalin’s,” Bulganin related, “he invites you as a friend. But while you’re sitting with him, you don’t know where they’ll take you afterward: home or to prison.” A constant drum of anxiety and fear ran through Khrushchev’s thinking about Stalin. He thought Stalin, shortly before his death, was on the edge of arresting and killing the old guard in the party Politburo, including himself, Mikoyan, Molotov, and Malenkov. Stalin wanted to “destroy them,” Khrushchev said, “so as to hide the shameful acts about which we are now reporting.”

Khrushchev ended his emotional tirade against Stalin with an odd plea for silence. “This subject must not go beyond the borders of the party, let alone into the press. That’s why we are talking about this at a closed session of the Congress…. We must not provide ammunition for our enemies. We mustn’t bare our injuries to them. I assume Congress delegates will understand this correctly and evaluate it accordingly.” And yet by his own order, Khrushchev’s speech was quickly distributed to communist officials throughout the country and, shortly thereafter, to communist officials in his East European empire. His son, Sergei, who left Moscow to teach at Brown University and rarely returned, said, “I very much doubt that Father wanted to keep it secret. On the contrary! His own words provide confirmation of the opposite—that he wanted to bring his report to the people. Otherwise all of his efforts would have been meaningless.”

Of course, at the time the fact and drama of the “secret speech” were hidden from public view. A few days earlier I had written in my diary that I expected a “big, sensational, explosive, terribly significant” event. Though there was such an event, the Khrushchev speech, I did not know anything about it, as it happened. Nor did 99.9 percent of the Russian people. Nor did the diplomatic corps, with all of its connections. Nor did the CIA.

Not until March 10, two weeks later, did Ambassador Charles Bohlen, one of the wisest, most superbly connected diplomats in town, get a wisp of a rumor of a Khrushchev tirade against Stalin, at a reception at the French embassy.

It was as if the Kremlin had not been dusted for decades. From February 1956 to 1957, a year later dubbed “the thaw,” Nikita Khrushchev opened the windows and a fierce gale of change blew through the old fortress on Red Square. Suddenly Stalin was no longer a god and Russia was no longer a frightened police state. It was still a communist state, to be sure, was still the governing patron of an Eastern European empire, still the self-proclaimed head of a worldwide Marxist movement, but for those of us who worked in Moscow during the thaw, it was clear that Russia was turning a corner in its turbulent history.

Cautiously, Russians began to appreciate the change. They slowly shed the heavy overcoat of fear they had been wearing through decades of Stalinist terror. A few even spoke to foreigners, which had been unusual. One man asked me with wonder in his eyes whether I had ever been to Detroit—and driven a Chevrolet? Many were just then being released from Siberian prisons, eager to reacquaint themselves with their families, careers, and lives. I heard defiant university students openly raise questions in the Lenin Library about the Soviet political leadership, even about the continued viability of communism. American artists such as the violinist Isaac Stern and the tenor Jan Peerce, participating in a new East-West exchange program, performed at the Moscow Conservatory before rapturous audiences. Long lines of Muscovites eager to buy tickets blocked traffic on the busy Arbat. Hope, often in such short supply, was again in the air. Nirvana had not yet arrived; many questions remained about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, but Stalinism as a way of life and government was clearly on the way out.

Sergei Khrushchev had suspected that his father really wanted to publicize his “secret speech,” and Sergei was right.

On the night of February 25–26, only hours after Khrushchev had delivered the speech, communist leaders of Soviet bloc countries, who had attended the just concluded 20th Party Congress but had not been invited to hear the secret speech, were summoned to a special midnight briefing at Central Committee headquarters. Trusted Russian officials were told to read the speech to them very slowly so they could take notes. They were not given copies. A few days later, on March 1, Khrushchev sent an edited copy of the speech to his closest colleagues. He wanted it checked and wanted to know “if there arise no objections to the text,” distributed to party and Komsomol members all over the country, all 25 million of them (Komsomol was the Communist Party youth organization). The speech had been labeled “top secret”; now it was downgraded to “not for the press.” Khrushchev wanted to “acquaint all Communists and Komsomol members, and also nonparty activists including workers, white-collar personnel, and collective farmers,” with the essential message of the 20th Party Congress. He also wanted to stimulate broad public support for the new party line and leader.