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

He asked me many questions about the United States, and I answered them with honesty and candor. Only when I sensed he was beginning to run out of questions did I ask him a few of my own about Georgia. I focused on the student uprisings that rocked Tbilisi in early March after Khrushchev’s startling denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. I told him that in Moscow we had heard unconfirmed stories that thousands of students, many armed, had demonstrated against the government, that about a hundred had been killed, and that the Red Army had had to be called in to contain the crisis.

“That’s all true,” he said, “only it was worse. At least 150 students were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.” What happened was that on March 4, a day before the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, a student delegation asked the rector of the university for permission to stage a pro-Stalin demonstration on March 5, the day of his death. The rector’s response was no. According to a 1955 decree, such demonstrations could only be held on birthdates, not death dates. Nevertheless, groups of students began to gather around the huge Stalin statue in Tbilisi’s central park, more of them with each passing day. Police were brought to the scene in case of trouble. On March 8, two students were killed. No one was quite sure how.

The following day everything changed. Anger turned to violence. While the Georgian Communist Party, on orders from Moscow, staged a counterdemonstration, ostensibly to honor a new statue of Lenin, hundreds of Soviet troops entered Tbilisi. The main streets were lined with tanks and the main square was cleared. Students began to clash with troops, throw stones at passing cars, and disrupt communications. Troops opened fire. Many students were killed. Later that evening thousands of other students marched toward the main post office, which was one block from the headquarters of the council of ministers. Both buildings were now being guarded by troops with machine guns. The commanding officer, speaking through a bullhorn, pleaded with the protesting students to disperse and go home. One student shouted back, saying they wanted to send a telegram to the United Nations asking for help to fight the Russians. Another student said they wanted to send a telegram to Moscow, specifically to Molotov, a known supporter of the Stalin legacy, demanding an end to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive. But the troops had their orders, and the students had only their anger. They resumed their march on the post office, and the troops again opened fire.

In Moscow Khrushchev kept a close eye on the student uprising, hoping that by the end of the day they would have “kick[ed] up a row and then calm[ed] down.” But when it became obvious that the student uprising was continuing and its message was spreading throughout Georgia, “we intervened very sharply,” Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, later recalled. Khrushchev feared that a successful anti-Soviet uprising in Georgia could quickly spread to other regions of the Soviet Union and threaten the regime itself.

For the next week Tbilisi was held in an iron grip, my student friend told me. A midnight curfew was imposed. Armed troops, supported by tanks, patrolled the streets. Schools were shut. Only the funeral parlors and the churches were busy, burying the dead. Tbilisi was the scene of the bloodiest uprising against Russian rule since the Basmachi awakening of the early 1920s.

I asked my new friend whether Georgians were still angry about the de-Stalinization drive. “We feel this very deeply,” he replied. “You are an American. You might not understand our feelings. But we are a proud people and a good people. When Stalin ruled Russia, we felt secure. Now our security has been shattered. We have never liked Russian rule. We don’t like it now. Only we are small, we are few in numbers. Will the Russians listen to us? They are so many. They don’t have to. But one thing I can assure you. They will not be able to treat us the way they treat others. We won’t allow it.”

“But surely,” I said, “you can see that things are improving now. Right?”

“Yes,” he conceded, “we all feel that a change is taking place, a definite change. How far it will go, where it will lead—we don’t know. I don’t think that even Khrushchev knows.”

When we finally said goodbye hours later, my student friend was crying. He embraced me. He asked, with tears, if I could please promise him that Georgia one day would be free of Russian control, and that America would help Georgia. I wanted to say yes, if only to make him feel better, but I said no—I could make no such promise.

In the hotel lobby after dinner I met a group of Czech tourists, and we went for a walk around town. No Intourist guide accompanied us. The Czechs spoke with amazing candor, as though they were not from a country that is a member of the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance controlled by the Soviet Union. We spoke in English. They did not know Russian and seemed in no rush to learn it. They said they had to travel in groups; individual travel was strictly forbidden. They did not need passports to travel to the Soviet Union, and they were surprised that Soviet citizens needed internal passports to travel from one republic to another, from Russia to Georgia, for example.

It was a short walk from the hotel to the central square, but it did not take long for the Czechs to express their “shock at the poverty, misery and unhappiness” of the Georgian people. They described Tbilisi as “shabby.” I disagreed. I thought it was one of the best-looking cities in the whole country.

“In comparison to Czechoslovakia,” one tourist said, “the Soviet Union is a very poor country.” In the last few years, since Stalin’s death, the standard of living in Czechoslovakia had improved “100-fold,” I was told.

“Look,” another tourist remarked, “we are here now. This we could not do two years ago. Now we want to travel west. We want to go to Paris or London. We want Prague to be a part of Europe again. Now we have the feeling it is a part of the East, and not the West, and Prague is the West.” Bluntly they stated that their government was an “Eastern imposition.” In parting they said, “Let us pray that times will get still better, and we can even travel to America. We all know what Wilson’s call for national self-determination did for us, and we never forget the kindness of America.”

I sat on a park bench near the hotel. An old woman was seated nearby. She looked at me once and then twice and asked, “You are a Russian stilyag ?” Stilyag was the unflattering name for a sharply dressed Russian.

“No,” I said and smiled. “I’m an American.”

“Good,” she replied, obviously pleased. “We don’t like Russians here, and we certainly don’t like those two fat fools.”

She seemed proud of her candor. I assumed that the “two fat fools” were Khrushchev and Bulganin.

I was determined on my last day in Tbilisi to ride the old trolley up a mountain to the very top, 650 feet from ground level. When my guide and I left the hotel at 8:00 a.m. the sky was still gray and the clouds heavy over the surrounding peaks, but the city was already active. The trolley had been a Tbilisi landmark for half a century. The seats were rickety, but the conductor, a nice-looking woman with a ready smile, seemed perfectly competent to get us to the top and back. Halfway up we saw an attractive white church standing solitary on a mountain perch. I realized immediately that it was the place where Stalin’s mother, who died in the early 1930s, was buried, as well as the Russian poet Alexander Griboyedov. The conductor promised that we could stop there on the way down. At the top was a restaurant and, behind it, a lovely park. “In the evening,” my guide told me, “many young people come here. It is so dark, and so quiet, and so beautiful, that we lose track of time, me and my girl friend.” He blushed.