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

I met Katya at the Lenin Library during one of my many visits to do research on my favorite minister of education, Sergei Semyonovich Uvarov. She was not only the librarian but also the deputy director of the local chapter of Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization. She was tall and pleasant, with a warm, welcoming smile, and she invited me to a Komsomol ball, one of several sponsored by the library in anticipation of 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow. I was surprised and delighted to accept. I arrived at the new wing of the Lenin Library at exactly the right time.

The entryway was crowded and festooned with balloons, and on the walls surrounding an enormous stairwell leading to the second floor hung the flags of the Soviet Union and the fifteen Soviet republics. Hundreds of young Russians ignored the flags as, looking forward to the dance, they hurried upstairs to the ballroom. The women wore very tight, transparent blouses, the rage in Moscow at the time, and the men wore the uniforms of neighborhood military academies. A four-piece band played American jazz, and many danced to the quick, exciting tunes. Those who for whatever reason did not dance stood, watched, and gossiped on the sidelines. It was not uncommon for women to dance together, but men never did. Katya had organized the dance and entertainment with Teutonic precision—she was a very impressive young lady—and everyone seemed to be having a delightful time, even though, in their conversations with me, they could not conceal a deep inferiority complex.

They kept asking me, “Do you like our ball?”

“Do you like the way we dance?”

“Do we dance as you do in America?”

“Is our clothing nicely tailored?”

“Is the band all right?”

“Does it play like your small bands?”

“Is the vocalist good, up to your standard?”

“Does he sing the Latin numbers as you do in America?”

And always: “Please be frank and tell us what you do and don’t like.” There was no reason to be defensive.

When it ended, Katya found me in the crush and politely escorted me to the exit. “Good night,” she said, shaking my hand vigorously, as though she had just completed a successful diplomatic mission. “I hope you had a good time.”

“Yes, indeed,” I replied, “and thank you so much.” If I entertained the thought, for just a moment, that this friendship might blossom into something more personal, Katya killed it by spinning around and vanishing into the crowd.

Nikolai Pogodin was a Soviet playwright of no particular distinction. His play Kremlyovskiye Kuranty —roughly, The Chimes of the Kremlin —was popular, in part because it was being performed by Moscow’s top theater, the Moscow Art Theater. The play was set in 1920, and the leading male character was Lenin, always courteous and compassionate, brilliant and kind.

A young Russian dressed in Western garb applauded wildly whenever the actor playing Lenin appeared on stage. He poked me in the ribs. “It’s true, isn’t it,” he asked, “that Lenin was the greatest man of the twentieth century?” I paused, realizing there was no point in debating Lenin’s role in history with a Russian so committed to the party line. He continued, content with his reverie, “Even the most biased Westerner must admit Lenin’s genius, for he was indeed the greatest man of the twentieth century.” The Russian, whose name was Kostya, short for Constantine, smoked American cigarettes and loved the new American monthly called Amerika , 50,000 copies of which had just been published and distributed. They sold out overnight. As we left the theater, walking into a drizzly night, he complimented me by calling me a shtatny baron , which in Moscow at the time meant a “classy guy from the United States.”

Kostya wanted to talk. All I had to do was listen. We talked for a long time. He was a compelling character, with an interesting story, and I tried to remember every word. Later that evening I typed it all up. “I have had an easy life,” he said. “My father is a topflight engineer, and he makes a lot of money. I have never been in need of anything. We have always had the two most important things in Soviet Russia: money and connections.” He told me that during the summer he had spent three months in the “virgin lands” of central Asia “gathering in the harvest,” as he put it. He was especially proud of his decision. “Most of my friends did not wish to go to Siberia, but I did.” He wanted to help the people. “I want to see them live much better than they do now.” Then, sounding like the nineteenth-century narodniki —the guilt-stricken, idealistic young noblemen who went to the countryside to educate the peasants, to teach them the virtues of democracy, only to see their efforts spurned by the “dark masses”—he explained, “I wanted to talk to the peasants, to tell them what is their due, what they should expect from the [communist] system…. We went to the people.” I reminded Kostya that in their day many of the narodniki returned from the farms disappointed and despondent, believing the peasants to be hopelessly locked in their own small worlds, unable or unwilling to learn about the revolutionary changes rushing through their country. “I hope that will not be your experience,” I said.

Kostya and I walked along Gorky Street, which was almost empty because of the dispiriting drizzle. Occasionally a woman covered in a heavy shawl would pop out of a doorway, look around, and then disappear. “Possibly, you are right,” Kostya whispered. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. “You see, we have a society that is based on good, humanitarian principles, but that functions on base, narrow principles,” he continued. “The entire administration stinks of bureaucracy. Fat bureaucrats with fat mugs and fatter rears sit around for weeks, months, years, simply fulfilling quotas.” Kostya spat in disgust, stopping for a moment at the foot of the Pushkin statue.

“All my life my father has brought such people into our house. Are they interested in the principles of the revolution? No, they are interested only in themselves. They want more money and a second dacha and maybe a second car. These are the people I have seen all my life, and I must admit my father is the same way. I still believe in the principles, which I feel sure Lenin believed in. I want to see our people happy.”

“How will they be happy?” I asked.

Kostya focused on the Russian peasant. “The way my friends and I view our country—Russia is still a peasant country. About 65 percent of the people are peasants. These are the people the government should be concerned about. But instead they push them into collective farms, which they couldn’t care less about. They want their own little piece of land. They want to be masters of their fates and their harvests. They want to deliver grain to a person, a dealer, who they know and can talk to, not a collective agency…. And, you know, this is the strangest thing: from birth, people are taught to think and to act in a collective way. Yet the farmers only want their plot of land. They couldn’t care less about the collective land.”

Kostya felt he was speaking for his generation. “Our feeling, and I mean the feeling of the overwhelming majority of my friends at the institute,” he continued, “is that the peasants, the ordinary people, must begin to get a fair portion of our national production and profit. This has not happened to date, and it is about time. The Soviet system has existed for thirty-eight years—soon we shall celebrate our thirty-ninth anniversary—and still there are enormous shortages. How many times can we be told to wait until tomorrow?”