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

Russian police guarded the old mansion. As I approached, I flashed my diplomatic ID card, which they examined and returned; then they stood back. I could proceed to the main door. I rang the bell and a U.S. Marine sergeant opened the door. He recognized me. We both lived at American House. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of my reason for wanting to talk to the ambassador. His eyes widened. “Wow!” was all he said. He escorted me to the waiting room.

Ambassador Bohlen, when he appeared a few minutes later, was, as always, gracious. He immediately eased my anxiety about whether I was “bothering” him, as I put it. “Just tell me what happened,” he said. I described the scene at the Lenin Library. I read from my notes. The ambassador listened carefully, asked a few questions, and then called the sergeant and told him to get a car. We were going to the embassy, where Bohlen drafted an urgent cable to the State Department. “Thanks, Marvin. Good job,” Bohlen said. “Can I give you a lift to American House?” He was not only a superb diplomat; he was also a gentleman. We were to go through this routine one more time during my tour in Moscow. A week or two later, I happened to be at the Historical Library when students there exploded in similar fashion.

At the time I was the embassy’s only source for tracking student discontent with the communist status quo. The story was to appear for the first time in the Western press in early June, after the CIA leaked a copy of the Khrushchev speech to the New York Times . I was thrilled. Every time I read a story about the students, I remembered how I “bothered” the ambassador and earned a pat on the back for doing so.

The Khrushchev revelations about Stalin’s crimes affected everyone in Russia, but especially two groups. One was the senior leadership of the military; the other was the chief ideologues of the party. Both groups had suffered grievously under Stalin’s fanatical rule.

Ever since the late 1930s, when Stalin eliminated the top generals and marshals of the Soviet military, dramatically weakening its strength on the eve of the Nazi invasion, the Red Army had been sensitive to any party encroachment on its military responsibilities. The post–World War II leaders, such as Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the new minister of defense, wanted to build a big, thick wall between themselves and the party—but they failed in this effort. The party almost always prevailed. Until the Khrushchev speech! The military wasted no time, quickly seizing upon it as proof that the fault for Russia’s lack of preparedness lay entirely with Stalin, not with them. One day at the JPRS I spotted a small article in the influential journal Military Messenger charging that Stalin, not Hitler, had been the greatest threat to state security in 1941. Military intelligence knew about Nazi plans to attack. Stalin was informed—but Stalin did nothing to repel the Germans. He was at fault for the early setbacks and heavy casualties, and the military demanded that its good name be restored.

The party ideologues had their own problems with Stalin, but until the Khrushchev speech they, too, kept these problems to themselves. Fear ruled the day. Among the ideologues, though, nothing upset them more than Stalin’s suppression of the so-called Lenin Testament. Written by Lenin in late 1922, finished in early 1923—a few months after he suffered the first of a series of strokes that made it impossible for him to manage the fledgling Communist Party of Russia—it outlined his considered judgment (in effect, his last will and testament) about the party’s internal struggles, then threatening to tear it apart. At the time, while Lenin lay dying, Stalin and Trotsky were in mortal combat about who would ultimately emerge as the party’s leader. Lenin had surprisingly positive things to say about Trotsky and decidedly negative things to say about Stalin, describing him, among other things, as “coarse,” “unfit,” and “intolerable” for party leadership. Lenin then went one critical step further, recommending for these reasons that Stalin be removed from his current position as general secretary of the party’s Central Committee.

Every single leader of the party knew about the Lenin Testament. It was political dynamite. How would Stalin handle this crisis? Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had reportedly been bullied by Stalin, had demanded that the party not only discuss her husband’s testament but act on it—Stalin was to be dismissed. But at meeting after meeting, Stalin managed to manipulate the levers of power and retain his job until, finally, during the 1930s, he eliminated his party rivals and became the ultimate czar of the Soviet state. As a result, the Lenin Testament was never discussed or published in Russia until the 20th Party Congress in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.

On June 30, 1956, the highly influential party journal Communist , on Khrushchev’s direct order, published the full text of the Lenin Testament. It became topic number one at party meetings, dinner tables, and university seminars.

In the meantime, while communist officials pondered the underlying significance of the Lenin Testament, diplomats yearned for a break from the daily demands of Kremlinology, and Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain provided it.

The Queen celebrated her birthday twice a year—once on her actual birth date of April 21 and the other on a day of official celebration later in the spring or summer. In 1956 that day was May 31. All over the world, British embassies hosted elaborate parties honoring the Queen on her thirtieth birthday. In Moscow the British embassy occupied hallowed ground, across the Moscow River facing the Kremlin. During the worst days of the Cold War, Stalin had ordered the embassy to be moved because he did not want to look out of his office window and see the Union Jack defiantly waving in the Moscow breeze. The British, careful not to violate existing diplomatic protocols, promised to move as soon as they could find another appropriate place for their embassy. On May 31, 1956, they were still looking, and looking, and looking.

Meanwhile, on this day, the garden behind the embassy was dressed beautifully in spring flowers and crowded with hundreds of diplomats and journalists eager to partake of the delicious strawberries topped with fresh whipped cream flown from London to Moscow that morning. The sun was shining, as was appropriate on the Queen’s birthday, and roses were in bloom.

All of the embassy’s guests entered through the front door and mingled briefly in the huge lobby before spilling into the garden, where champagne was served and gossip shared. After a while the large iron doors to the garden slowly opened, which attracted immediate attention, and Nikita Khrushchev, of all people, accompanied by his prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin, entered, to be greeted by Sir William Hayter, the British ambassador.

Khrushchev wanted to pay his respects to the Queen, whom he had met the month before on a groundbreaking visit to Great Britain. He respected her, he later said. He admired her style. She wore a “plain white dress… and looked like the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy Sunday afternoon.” Before meeting Elizabeth, Khrushchev had been concerned about protocol: Would he dress the right way? Would he say the right things? The Queen made things easy. She was, he remembered, “completely unpretentious, completely without haughtiness.”

For her birthday celebration the Soviet leader wore a wrinkled white suit and a flat white hat. I had seen Khrushchev on television, in photos and, most recently, at the May Day parade, when he stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum enjoying the cheers of the Red Square crowd, but I had never before seen him up close, and certainly had never before exchanged a word with him. My initial impression was mixed. As I noted in my diary, “Khrushchev looks like a short, fat, strong, peasant-type leader. He has practically no hair. He has bad teeth. His trousers were baggy. He laughs heartily, and seems to have a good sense of humor.” He wandered into the embassy crowd like a New York politician hustling for votes, willing to talk to anyone about anything. Though raised in the suffocating atmosphere of Stalinist terror, he acted like a Bronx boss ready to fix a parking ticket. He projected the image of a tough communist leader, unafraid to scuttle Stalinism and welcome a new day.