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

Early one evening I met Volodya, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at the History Institute. He was tall, bespectacled, sleight of build, and he spoke excellent English. After only a few minutes it was obvious that Volodya was probably a member of the Communist Party. Using the stilted language generally found in Pravda , he defended the Soviet position on every issue. He debunked the United Nations and expressed deep reservations about NATO and American policy in Europe. Over dinner at the Grand Hotel we discussed our dueling definitions of history.

“How would you define history?” I asked.

“History is the examination of the objective facts of a given period,” he replied, as if by rote, “in order to understand the vast forces at play.”

I raised a hypothetical question: let’s suppose, I said, a Russian student wanted to do an “objective” study of the 1905 revolution. He would have to have access to all relevant documents. “Could he do such a study?” I asked. “With all relevant documents?”

“Of course,” Volodya answered.

“You know,” I went on, “Trotsky was a very important figure in the Petersburg Soviet. In fact, for a while, he was chairman of the Soviet. Could this student read Trotsky’s speeches?”

Volodya took a long time searching for an answer. The band was playing a Russian version of “Love and Marriage,” a very popular American song. “Volodya,” I said, breaking into his reverie, “could an average student study Trotsky’s influence on the revolution, and, if not, can you still claim that Soviet scholarship is ‘objective scholarship’?”

When Volodya looked at me, he seemed not just troubled but trapped. His eyes, usually dark and piercing, looked vacant, searching for comfort suddenly by examining his shoes. “You hit the nail on the head,” he said, exhaling, lowering his voice to a whisper. “It’s that kind of question my friends and I have also begun to ask of late.” I chose not to press the issue. Probably for the first time in their lives, graduate students like Volodya felt they could discuss the role of Trotsky, an ideological enemy at the top of Stalin’s hit list, even with foreigners. One totally unintended consequence of the secret speech was that even the evil Trotsky was being liberated from Stalin’s hell.

A JPRS colleague and I went to dinner one evening at an Uzbek restaurant. We met a young Russian who told us he was, by the weird standards of Soviet education, a “master of basketball.” He was very tall, accessible, stylishly attired, and he loved his vodka. After only a few minutes of conversation he offered his unorthodox definition of communism. He spoke in a loud voice and seemed totally oblivious to the fact that he was sounding off in a crowded, popular restaurant in downtown Moscow.

“A communist,” he pronounced, “is a person who has a car, a family, a dacha, and earns lots of money every month.”

“That’s all?” I said. “What about communism as an ideology, as a revolutionary doctrine, as a way of changing society?”

“No,” he replied, with a mischievous grin. “A great communist has a car, maybe two, a dacha, maybe two, and a lot of money.”

“Who are the greatest living communists?” I asked, enjoying the exchange.

“Khrushchev and Bulganin,” he replied, “because they have cars, families, dachas, and lots of money.” He equated communism only with material benefits. There was no idealism in his definition, and there was no fear in his manner.

By the time we got to dessert, he had already had a few more vodkas. “War is inevitable,” he announced, echoing Stalin’s now discarded dogma. “Two years,” he said with absolute certainty. “It will come in two years.” I challenged him, arguing that Khrushchev had replaced the doctrine of “inevitable war” with one of “peaceful coexistence.” Besides, I insisted, there was no need for war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It made no strategic sense. But our Russian friend stuck to his gloomy timetable.

“No,” he insisted, “two years.”

But why? I wanted to know.

“Because the capitalists want to come here and dominate us. The Russian Ivan may not like the Khrushchev communists, but he loves Mother Russia, and he will crush the invader, as he has done many times before in her name.” Though I met many young Russians who, like our “master of basketball,” were skeptical about communism, some even sharply critical of communism, there were others who felt, as one told me, that “the communists have brought incalculable advantages to our country. They industrialized the country. They made peasants literate. For this,” he concluded with pride, “we Russians have Stalin and the party to credit. Now you in the West must look up to us. We, too, are a great power.”

On any given day I would ask myself what was more exciting: talking with Russians or hunting for Uvarov? And then I would answer myself: I can do both, or at least try. My only problem during the thaw was that the day had only twenty-four hours.

A most unusual source, a waitress at American House who was an employee of the UPDK, a security and domestic service that looked after foreigners, was baffled one evening at dinnertime when I told her of my search for Uvarov. Why in God’s name would I want to write about a nineteenth-century reactionary, she wanted to know. It made no sense to her—and, every now and then, not to me either. I told her about Harvard’s Ph.D. requirements and about my reasons for selecting Uvarov. She looked at me with puzzled impatience, shook her head, muttered “That is insane,” and then advised me that a good place to start my quest would be the Historical Library. If I thought I could not crack the state’s central archives, I would probably get nowhere.

So off to the Historical Library I went after work the next day. It was a very old building on an even older prerevolutionary street, Starosadsky Pereulok, which translated roughly as “the little street with the ancient garden.” I didn’t get there until 7:30 p.m. I joined a long line of students waiting to register for admission. After a few minutes I found myself looking down at a librarian so old and frail she must have had the job since czarist times. She did not look up but asked for my name. When I answered “Kalb” and then added “Marvin” but without my patronymic (with my patronymic I would have had to say “Marvin Maksimovich,” “Marvin, the son of Maksim”), she did look up. “Where are you from?” she asked, obviously picking up from my accent that I was not a native Russian. “From the United States,” I answered. Her attitude turned frigidly professional. She pushed hard against the back of her seat, as if she wanted to get as far away from me as possible.

“What are you doing here in Moscow?” she asked cautiously. I told her I worked at the JPRS, but I was also a Ph.D. student.

“What university?

“Harvard,” I replied.

“Do you have your documents?”

I showed her my diplomatic propusk , my identification card. She looked at it, then at me. A group of students congregated around us, asking if there was a problem. The old lady rose slowly, ignoring the students. “ Tovarishch ,” she said, pointing at me, “you come this way, please,” which I did, following her into a small adjacent room. “Wait here.” She nodded toward a wooden chair. I waited for more than fifteen minutes. Finally she and four others returned. One was apparently the chief librarian. Everyone deferred to her.

“Why are you here?” she asked brusquely.

“To do research,” I replied.

“What kind of research?”

“I am doing work on Uvarov, Sergei Semyonovich Uvarov.”