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

With Hungary, the thaw lost its magical appeal, the old chill returned, and Khrushchev, pressured by hard-line Kremlin critics, readjusted his anti-Stalinist melody. By year’s end he was back to singing an old refrain. “God grant,” he pronounced at a diplomatic reception, “that every communist be able to fight as Stalin fought.” He put special emphasis on two words—“God” and “Stalin”—and then he said: “For all of us, Marxists-Leninists who have devoted our lives to the revolutionary struggle for the interests of the working class and its militant vanguard, the Leninist party, the name of Stalin is inseparable from Marxism-Leninism.”

In February Stalin had been demonized; by year’s end he was again being eulogized as a Soviet saint.

At the time, many of us in Moscow speculated that Khrushchev had lost his struggle with the Kremlin hard-liners, led by the former Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. His thaw was over, we thought, and Stalin was now assured of a new life in the Marxist pantheon. But we were wrong. Stalin remained a disreputable figure, and, surprisingly, Khrushchev held on to power until October 1964, when a mediocre bureaucrat named Leonid Brezhnev replaced him. But enough of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization survived to ensure that this champion of “the thaw” would be awarded a retirement dacha and a limousine after his many years in power came to an abrupt and embarrassing end. If there had been no thaw, Khrushchev might well have been liquidated.

Much of this book is based on the only diary I ever kept, one that I wrote on a daily or nearly daily basis during my 1956 assignment in Moscow. If I had an interesting conversation with a Russian I met in Gorky Park, or bumped into at a concert, or shared a compartment with on a train in Azerbaijan, I would try that night to recollect the major themes, using the person’s own words, on my portable Olivetti typewriter. Or if I met Khrushchev or another Soviet leader, I would write about the meeting and quote him—with accuracy, I hoped. Same for a visit to a famous site, such as Tolstoy’s home at Yasnaya Polyana, or a trip to Kiev in Ukraine or Bukhara in central Asia. Kiev then was still Kiev, not Kyiv, as it came to be called after the 1991 proclamation of Ukrainian independence.

After a while the pages would pile up in my room at American House, a gloomy building along the Moscow River once owned in prerevolutionary times by an aristocratic mortician. I had no place to hide my diary. I usually left it on my desk. It was personal, but it was not classified, and I always assumed that the Russians would read it as part of their normal snooping. That meant I had a special responsibility not to include anything that was official or secret, nor to use a Russian’s real name if I thought what he or she had told me might get them into trouble. Therefore, the “Sasha” I described meeting in Leningrad was not really named Sasha. The diary helped me to remember people, places, and conversations. I also depended for insight and analysis on my university studies, on my memory, and on the stories my mother and father used to tell me about their early years in Eastern Europe.

My mother was born in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire. My father was born in Zyrardow, a small textile town west of Warsaw in Poland, also then part of the Russian empire. Their stories were not warm, nostalgic reminiscences of a happy time. They spoke of economic hardships, religious persecution, and fear of a war soon to erupt throughout Europe. When my mother reached New York and my father disembarked in Galveston, Texas, they were, like so many other refugees, thrilled to be in the United States of America. My father often referred to America in Yiddish as the goldene medina , roughly translated as the “blessed land.”

My mother and father met and married in New York, where my father worked as a tailor. By the time I arrived in June 1930, a 10-pound, 2-ounce heavyweight—or, as the nurse informed my mother, “a two-ton Tony Galento,” a famous boxer at the time—I already had a sister and a brother. Like many others, we had very little money during the Great Depression, but we had faith in ourselves and in our country. More important, I always felt honored to be the son and brother of such wonderful people. They set an example of honesty, decency, and loyalty unparalleled in my experience. I wish others could have been so lucky.

It could be said that my journey to Moscow began in the Bronx.

A CBS colleague, Don Hewitt, famous for creating 60 Minutes , once told me that history was really a story. “Tell me a story,” he said. “People love a story.”

So, here are three stories, each a brief glimpse into an immigrant family’s determination to live the American dream. As best it could.

One story: During the Depression of the 1930s, a milk bottle, if returned, was worth a penny. Five pennies added up to the nickel my father needed to board a subway train in the Bronx for the ride to the garment center in midtown Manhattan, where, if he was lucky, he could find a day’s or a week’s work. But he needed the nickel, and there were days when he did not have even that. I remember several mornings when I got up at four or five in the morning to look through neighborhood garbage pails for discarded milk bottles. If I found five bottles, my father had his nickel, and the chance for a day’s work. In the evening, when he got home, he would give his day’s wages to my mother. She was magnificent at “stretching a dollar”; we never went hungry. It was only many years later when I wondered what would have happened if my father had gone downtown and had not found a job. How would he have gotten home? Even in the Depression, though, my father, a tailor born in the small textile town of Zyrardow, an hour by train west of the Polish capital, Warsaw, never lost his faith in America, his adopted home since 1914. If on occasion he did, he never showed it.

Another story: We lived in an apartment house on Southern Boulevard. During the summer my mother would often take me to nearby Crotona Park where I would play with friends, one of whom was named Benny. One day, when it was especially hot and humid, Benny’s mother bought a Popsicle, unwrapped it, and gave it to her son. In those days, Popsicles could easily be split in two, each with its own stick. My mother had no money and could not buy one for me. She hoped and half expected that Benny’s mother would break the Popsicle in two and give one half to me. That was what she would have done in a similar circumstance. But Benny’s mother gave her son the whole Popsicle. I watched as he started to lick it. My mother, in a fury of frustration, took me by the hand, muttered something to Benny’s mother, and we walked home. That evening I overheard my mother tell the story to my father. She was sobbing. “How could she?” she asked. “How could she do that? Marvin was standing right there.”

And still another story about those times: Though a very hard-working tailor, my father always dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. He was ambitious, the first in the extended family, years later, to own a car and a house. One day, shortly before the stock market collapsed in 1929, he came home with an exciting prospect. A friend who had done reasonably well in the hat business urged my father to buy a hat store (one was available at the intersection of Third Avenue and 105th Street in Manhattan), and my father was game. He knew nothing about hats and little about business, but he was thrilled by the vision, totally unrealistic, of becoming a successful businessman. As enthusiastic as my father was about this venture, my mother was doubly unenthusiastic, but she failed to abort the deal. My father became a hat merchant, assuming naively that the profits others enjoyed in those days, he would enjoy too. But then the market collapsed, and within a year he had to abandon his mercantile adventure and return to his more modest endeavors as a struggling tailor. But, remarkably undaunted, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II he bounced back and bought a dry cleaning and tailoring store on 188th Street in Washington Heights. My mother tended the store while my father continued working downtown in the garment district. After a while my family moved to Washington Heights. For me, this meant leaving P.S. 44, where I had many friends, and entering P.S. 189, where I had none. It was a challenge, but a manageable one.