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

“No, actually they consider him to be a cruel dictator.” The students gasped in disbelief. “When the history books on the twentieth century are written,” I continued, “Stalin will play a major role. But we do not think he was a noble person, nor that he was a good person.”

“Well, what do they think of Marx?”

“In truth, I must say we do not even think about Marx.” The students laughed, breaking the building tension. “Marx was a major political theoretician,” I went on, “but we believe that his system has been disproved time and again by the facts of history.”

Still another student interjected, “One must admit, whether you are a capitalist or not, that Stalin made many, many creative additions to Marxism and Leninism.”

I shook my head. “You may consider them creative,” I said, “but few others do.”

The student continued, “Well, but you must admit that reading Stalin on linguistics is a truly fascinating experience. He was so brilliant. He could write on anything. He knew everything.” I almost choked on the thought of having to read Stalin on linguistics. “He certainly was interesting,” I said, trying to soothe ruffled feathers. “Interesting, indeed.”

“Do you think Stalin was guilty of creating a personality cult?” another student asked. “Some people even say that pictures of Stalin are being removed throughout the Soviet Union.” He looked at me incredulously. “These things they cannot do. These things they must not do.”

When I told the students that I myself had seen pictures and paintings of Stalin being removed from museums, they angrily said no, they did not believe me. “That is not true,” one shouted. Another added, “You simply can’t remove Stalin without also removing Lenin. Both were inseparable in life, and Stalin was faithful to Lenin. In many ways, he was even better than Lenin. After all, he built the Soviet Union, not Lenin. A Georgian did this, not a Russian. No, this is quite impossible.”

The students stood united behind Stalin, leaning on his close association with Lenin as backup support. I thought I saw an opening. “Russians are once again the rulers of the Soviet Union, and they are returning to Lenin and Leninism. Even here in your own Zarya Vostoka [a Georgian newspaper], they write about the harm done by the personality cult.”

The student responded, “Those who write about the harm of the personality cult are toadies, who keep thinking that our fate is tied in with Russia. The Russians came here in 1801. Since then, nothing creative has taken place here. Now it is my opinion that we are starting to think again. Even in the arts.” He mentioned that Georgians are again studying their history and trying to rekindle the flames of their renaissance. With a mournful air, he concluded, “But yes, we have a lot of catching up to do.”

I made a point of shaking hands with every student in the small crowd around me, expressing the hope that one day they would all be free, and then I raced to the hotel for my bag and then to the train for Sochi.

Why Sochi? Because, from the moment I started planning this trip, I put Sochi in the must-see category. My reasoning was simple: it was close to Tbilisi; it was on my way back to Moscow; and, most important, it was Stalin’s favorite resort. He rarely missed a chance to vacation in Sochi during the brutal Moscow winters. He pumped hundreds of millions of rubles into this stretch of beachfront on the edge of Russia closest to Georgia, his birthplace. More than anyone else, Stalin turned Sochi, once an unimportant beach town, into one of the best resorts in the Soviet Union, a place on Russia’s riviera where the new true blue bloods of communism could spend their holidays. Foreign diplomats and businessmen would also want to vacation there, partly to rub shoulders with Soviet bigwigs and partly to enjoy Sochi’s incomparable beauty. Temperatures in the summertime rarely rose higher than the mid-eighties, and in the wintertime they were always in the moderate range. It was Russia’s Camelot, and I wanted to see it.

I knew the broad outlines of its history. After a Russian-Turkish war in the late 1820s (there were many such wars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as both nations struggled for control of the Black Sea coastline), Russia ran its flag, famous for its two-headed eagle, up the Sochi flagpole. It has remained there ever since, even though throughout much of this time Russia has had to battle local Muslim tribesmen for actual control of the city and the region. Not until 1874, for example, did the Russians feel comfortable enough to build an Orthodox church in Sochi. Normally that would have been at the top of their to-do list.

Soon after entering my train compartment, where I was hoping I would be able to type up my notes on my Tbilisi visit, I met my compartment mate, a friendly, talkative, middle-aged assistant economics planner for the Georgian republic. At first I thought that he would be the perfect companion: quiet, self-contained and cautious with a foreigner. I was wrong. Within minutes he was telling me his reason for traveling to Sochi (he was going there to pick up his wife and son, who had been there for the summer), his narrow, negative judgment of America, and his bright vision of communism. He was not a communist, but he talked like one, never more noticeably than in his description of America, which sounded like it had been lifted from a tired editorial in Pravda . Why, he started like a rocket off the launchpad, the “persecution” of Paul Robeson; the “murder” of “innocent Negroes”; the “hounding” of Jews; the “growing impoverishment of the working class”; the “forced imposition” of private cars and homes on workers, who, unable to pay the high fees, become “enslaved” to their “bosses,” whom he compared to the “ancient warlords” of China; the “inability” of young Americans to get a proper education; the “need” of the American government to start “wars of aggression” to save their “failing economies” from total collapse; and, finally, the “fact,” as he put it, that Americans soldiers were “unleashed” on the public to “rape women in the streets and chew gum.”

By the time he completed his nutty assault on America, I was ready to scream, punch him in the face, denounce Soviet communism, and move to a new compartment, if one was available, but—not wanting to create a diplomatic scene—I stuffed my temper into a duffel bag and softly suggested that since we were approaching the midnight hour, it might make sense for us to go to sleep. My companion wouldn’t hear of it. He ordered two glasses of tea and cookies and resumed his assault on the United States.

When he paused for a moment to sip on his tea, I leaped in. “Look,” I said, “we are not going to agree on anything. Listening to you, I think I am listening to a very bad Pravda editorial. Enough. Let’s take a nap.”

He responded, “No need for such sharp words. We are just talking.”

What I found interesting was the tone of his voice—level, unemotional, sounding like a parent patiently explaining something to a child who was not very bright. Finally, unable any longer to contain my anger, I erupted. I used Khrushchev’s own denunciations of Stalin and the Soviet system to make my point.

My companion seemed to wilt for an instant. “True,” he admitted, “we have made mistakes. But”—his eyes lit up—“now we are correcting them.” This open admission of mistakes was now the official fallback position. He continued, “Communism is the wave of the future. It will triumph everywhere, even in the United States.”

I told him that he was misreading history. “Communism will never come to the United States,” I said. My companion laughed at me; he seemed completely sincere, and there was no rancor or bitterness in his manner. He believed that what he said was true. He had seen the future, and it belonged to him. The zigs and zags of today were only bumps on the road to communism tomorrow.