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

The hours dragged on. I fell asleep twice during his rhetorical flirtation with history. At 4:30 a.m. I appealed to his better nature. “Let us get a few hours of sleep, please.” He agreed, reluctantly.

I awoke close to 8:00 a.m., and my Georgian commissar was already up and ready for combat.

“No,” I pleaded with him, “Let’s talk about Sochi. What should I be sure to see when I get there?”

My companion was disappointed. “Don’t you want to continue our talk?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would rather talk about Sochi, baseball, or literature, but not politics. There is no common ground in our thinking. There is just a big gap, and every time you spout the communist line straight out of yesterday’s Pravda , this gap only grows wider and wider.”

My companion literally scratched his head. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You defend a system that is dying. You justify racial terrorism, and you deny that communism will conquer the world.”

I begged him. “Please, let us just sit quietly, not argue about politics, and watch the scenery.”

To my surprise he agreed, and for the next few hours, until we reached the Sochi railroad station at 10:30 a.m., we looked out the window in silence as the train descended from the mountains to a rail line along the shore of the Black Sea, deep blue under the rising sun. To my right the Caucasus seemed to leap from the landscape to the sky, disturbed, it seemed, only by an occasional cloud. Along the way we passed fishing villages, and I could see people lounging on the beach, others swimming in the sea.

The closer we got to Sochi, the more sanatoriums I saw. This was the place for sanatoriums. Every ministry, every industry or enterprise, had a right to build a sanatorium for its workers, and they all built them along the Black Sea coastline. Every worker therefore had a theoretical right to go to a sanatorium for his or her vacation, assuming of course that there was room, which was not always the case. The Red Army sanatorium was among the largest, built into the mountainside and looking out over the sea. It took no genius to understand why Stalin would choose to spend so much of his time here and why Khrushchev and Bulganin (the “two fat fools”) would vacation here too. Why not? It was lovely.

No Intourist guide was at the station to meet me, which I found refreshing. I took a cab to the Primorskaya Hotel, set on a high hill overlooking the crowded beach. It was the hotel for foreign diplomats. The ride there took thirty minutes. Sochi was small and charming. Semitropical trees grew everywhere. The stores were crowded, the restaurants were filled, the streets were clean. The women, in Soviet-style bikinis, were buxom and bronzed—all in all, quite a sight.

After checking in, I walked down to the beach to take a swim, and there stumbled upon my first disappointment. The beach, though breathtakingly beautiful, was covered with a rug of rocks and pebbles, and though Russians had no problem walking on the beach, I had a huge problem, which made it difficult for me to get to the water. But I did anyway and loved my first swim in the Black Sea.

At dinner, shared with a number of visiting Americans, I met two Soviet students, a lovely young woman from Kuibyshev and a young man from Rostov. Both were finishing a two-week vacation before returning to school. She was in engineering, he in economics. I asked her whether there were many women in the engineering field. Her friend jumped into the conversation. “Of course,” he said. “Women in this country do the same work as men, and get paid the same.”

At first, the woman nodded in agreement, but then after a moment of reflection, flatly contradicted her friend. “Actually,” she said, “only 15 percent of the students at my oil institute are women, and most of them, when they finish, get desk jobs and rarely go out into the field.” The economist decided there was no point in getting into an embarrassing argument with his friend—he knew she was right—so he raised a toast to “peace and friendship,” his way of changing the subject. I thought his suggestion was diplomatic, and his timing perfect, and we happily joined him.

He did want to make a point, though. “Last night we met a young American in this restaurant, and he told us that everything in the Soviet Union was bad, that women dressed poorly, that the food was terrible. And we began to think that all Americans were like him. This is very bad. If he does not like us, why does he come here? Why doesn’t he just go home? To us, this is the finest, the best country in the world. Granted, we have seen no other country, but we have this confidence. Maybe we are right. Maybe we are wrong, but this is what most of us believe. He is a guest here. He should respect our feelings.” I told him that I fully agreed with him, and that I hoped he would be able to meet many more Americans. We raised another toast to “peace and friendship.”

I remembered what an embassy colleague told me about the courtesies Americans ought to show while traveling in the Soviet Union these days. “Every American tourist,” he cautioned, “is a kind of poster child of American life. This year and next, they ought to be handpicked. It’s that important.” He believed that 1956, the year of the thaw, was potentially historic, perhaps in his judgment the beginning of the end of Soviet communism, and every American had to be especially careful to let history take its course and not rock the boat.

I spent the next day as the perfect tourist. Immediately after breakfast, no matter how rocky the beach, I made my way cautiously to the water’s edge and did what any self-respecting Soviet vacationer would do—I plunged into the Black Sea. The water was cool, and I thoroughly enjoyed my swim. I then dedicated myself to the worship of the sun, hoping that in an hour or two I could become as bronzed as the Russians—an impossible task, but that still didn’t discourage me from trying. In the afternoon, after a quick lunch, I rented a car with a driver for a ride to the highest observation point in the region. The view of the mountains, rolling, deep green, was awe-inspiring, and the Black Sea looked blue near the shoreline and purple farther out. Mother Nature had done a splendid job, creating a nest of beauty.

My plane back to Moscow was scheduled to leave the following day at 11:40 a.m., a proper time for departure. My monthlong summertime journey through central Asia and the Caucasus was rushing to an end.

The plane made two stops. The first was Rostov-on-Don, where the sky was beginning to cloud over. The second was Kharkov, where it had begun to rain. Moscow, when I got there, was cold, rainy, and dreary, and once again I needed my coat, scarf, and hat, which I found in my duffel bag and which sent me into uncontrollable laughter. In the morning, hot and lovely Sochi; in the evening, cold and dreary Moscow. The Soviet Union was a very large country, filled with dozens of different tribes and nationalities. Once it began to crumble, warned my Harvard professor Richard Pipes, it would be hard, if not impossible, to put the pieces back together again. It had not then begun to crumble, but after this trip I understood, perhaps for the first time, how inherently fragile this seemingly cohesive and powerful nation was.

Very quickly I returned to earth. The glorious scenery of Sochi, the mountain legends of Tbilisi, and the sandy, troublesome history of Samarkand and Bukhara receded reluctantly into my memory bank as a vacation well spent. The moment I got back to the Kremlinology of JPRS and the U.S. embassy, I realized that the “thaw,” which had generated so much hope for meaningful change, was now in retreat. Ever since Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress had delivered his historic attack on Stalin’s policies and personality, the country had been in a state of dizzying confusion. Could one really criticize the party and its leaders with impunity? How much freedom would Khrushchev actually allow? Could a dictatorship be dismantled, step by step, and still be a dictatorship? In short, had the “thaw” gone too far? And if it had, was it not time to throttle back? Left unanswered, such questions fueled deeper doubts within and outside the party. At the embassy it was assumed that a climactic battle had erupted in the Kremlin between Khrushchev on one side and such hard-liners as Molotov on the other. Which side would ultimately prevail? Bets were placed, but no one could yet collect a kopeck. One sensed that de-Stalinization might be rumbling off the rails, Russia might be losing its guiding compass, and something had to be done. But what?