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

“Well, how many times indeed?” I asked.

“I don’t know. My friends don’t know. And I’m sure that Khrushchev, ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice,’ as we call him, doesn’t know either, just as nobody in Russia these days has a real image of the future. Lenin had his image. His image was prosperity for all people, but his image has been distorted by Stalin and his friends, like the present collective leadership.”

Kostya was an idealist, a kind, decent, and intelligent young Russian who tied his dreams of political and economic prosperity to a totally unrealistic reading of Lenin’s policies and plans. Lenin wanted power to achieve revolutionary change in Russia and then the world. His vision was communist by design and universal in application. Kostya’s was more modestly limited to Russia. He understood that something was profoundly wrong with Russia’s system of government. He did not want to go so far as to repudiate the system, for that would have meant repudiating Lenin himself, for many young Russians an unimaginable idea at the time. But he did want to see fundamental reform. He did not know quite how to define the reform, nor how to achieve it, but he yearned for it with a passion he could not quite contain.

Kostya then told me about a recent meeting at the Institute of Art, where he studied. The meeting sounded similar to meetings I had attended at the Lenin Library. The meeting as Kostya described it was run by a “very sharp” communist leader named Ivanov. It started in a traditional way. The leader listed the “new tasks” facing students “today, tomorrow and the day after.” In fact, they were not new at all—they were the usual tasks of yesterday and the day before. “We all knew them by heart.”

Then an older student stood up, “a man of about thirty-five who had been wounded six times during the big war.” He wanted to know “what he had fought for.”

Ivanov answered, predictably, that the older student “had fought for Russia and the Soviet system.”

“No,” the student shot back, “I fought only for Russia. I did not fight for the Soviet system.” Kostya said that he and his friends broke into loud cheers.

Ivanov felt the need to restore order. “The reason things are not really so right in Russia today,” Kostya quoted him as explaining, “is that many mistakes had been made, but they are all now being corrected.” Sighing, Ivanov said, “It is the fault of the Stalin tragedy.”

One student yelled out, “That is no answer. A Marxist explanation demands that the system itself is at fault.” Kostya continued, “All the students then stood up, stamped their feet and shouted that Ivanov indeed had not really answered the question which was raised.” Ivanov decided at that moment that it would be the better part of valor to say nothing more. He hurriedly collected his notes, stashed them into his briefcase, and left the room. “Fled the room” might have been a more accurate description.

Kostya and a group of students then went to a friend’s house and continued their discussion. “We ranged over the entire issue,” Kostya disclosed. “Some of my buddies called for inciting an uprising. Others called for assassination of the leaders and the convocation of a representative government. But others, and I am one of these, thought force and violence would get us nowhere. If I thought that it would, I swear to God I would go to Red Square tonight with all my friends and stage an uprising. But it would yield no beneficial results.” Again he paused, deep in his own thoughts. “The Russian people are a frightfully inert mass,” he said. “They do not move easily. And we cannot do it alone. There must be a way, but so far we don’t know the way. We have no image of tomorrow. All we want is a happy Russia where people get a fair share of a powerful industrial machine, but the bureaucracy stands in the way. What we need now is leadership. We need another Lenin desperately. He could lead a revolution. Without leadership, we are nothing, and our dreams remain dreams.”

We continued our walk along empty streets, each of us absorbed in the power of Kostya’s diatribe. We passed the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, which until recently had been called the Marx-Engels-Stalin Institute, which prompted Kostya to observe, “You know, we call this place ‘The Institute for Black Magic.’ Here anything can happen. Even Trotsky can be rehabilitated tomorrow morning. All of history can be rewritten. It is like black magic. It can do anything.”

Kostya’s face suddenly lit up. He remembered a relevant story. He told me he had recently attended a public trial of six Russians accused of illegally selling Western clothing. The prosecutor rested his case on the testimony of a few of the buyers, but the approach backfired. His first witness stated in simple Russian, “I was tired of dressing badly, of living badly. I had a chance to buy a good suit, and I bought it, and I would do it again if I could.” Kostya smiled. “What was funny was that all the people who bought this clothing were wealthy Russians who belong to our new aristocracy, just like my father.”

“Was there any conviction?”

“No, the trial is still going on…. Things happen today which no one thought imaginable when Lenin lived. Most people with money have become just like the bourgeoisie of old. They want material comforts. I guess I myself am no different, for I, too, am a product of this system. The system breeds the people, and I am one of the people. The only people who have not become contaminated by the system are the peasants, because they stand above the system. They are pure.”

Kostya was indeed a modern-day narodnik , I thought, capable of believing all kinds of fanciful romances about the “pure” peasants and the inevitable improvement in Soviet society once the people rise up from their long slumber. He still believed in a fairy godfather named Lenin and was destined, in my judgment, to be deeply disappointed.

“Are there any great leaders in Russia today?” I asked. “Leaders who stand for the rights and interests of a majority of the people? Aren’t Khrushchev and Bulganin able leaders?”

“Let me tell you what they are good for. Khrushchev would make a fine district party leader, and Bulganin, good Mr. Bulganin”—he used the English word “Mister”—would be better off eating five meals a day, living in a suburban dacha, and reading Pushkin. They are the kind of leaders who met the needs of the Stalin era well. They killed, and slept well afterwards. But these are not the leaders who can meet the challenge of the modern times. Now they rule sort of in between the old and the new, but they don’t realize that there is no going back to the old. There is no retreat possible at this time. Only forward movement, only change, and undoubtedly the people of Poland and Hungary have realized this too, for they don’t want us there anymore, and I don’t blame them.”

By this time, Kostya and I had circled back to the Metropole Hotel, where I was certain I could get a cab. It was 2:30 a.m. The rain had stopped but our coats were soaked. We had talked about everything, it seemed, even the historic events in Poland and Hungary, which Kostya knew could affect his life. He was hungry for fresh information, as, I assumed, were his classmates. “What is the latest you have heard?” he wanted to know.

“Well,” I began, “earlier this evening on the BBC, I heard—”

Interrupting me, he exclaimed, “We know all that. We also listen to the BBC and the Voice of America. We do so regularly. What I’m asking is, is there anything newer?” I had to disappoint him. I knew nothing newer.

In parting Kostya told me that Polish students at his institute had sent a letter to Wladyslav Gomulka, the new Communist Party leader in Poland, urging him to continue his reforms. They were thrilled by signs that a new nationalism was blooming in Poland. Kostya’s friend, Yanka, now insisted on being called Jan, his proper Polish name.