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

I realized Schorr was serious. He had just offered me a superb opportunity, the job I had told him and a few others I truly wanted. “Let me think this over,” I mumbled. “Let me think.” I needed time. Suddenly I could not say yes. I could not say anything except “Tomorrow. I promise you an answer by tomorrow.” Schorr had every reason to have expected an ecstatic yes, but instead he looked at me, understanding that I was in a state of shock, unable to say yes or no. He sat back, smiled, and lit his pipe. “Let’s go back to the translation.”

That night I did very little sleeping. The job I wanted was the job Schorr offered. Why not take it? It was for me a dream come true. And yet, I realized, after heated arguments with myself, that I could not take it, and the basic reason was a promise I had made to my mother. When Marshall Shulman offered me the chance to work in Moscow, I naturally checked with my mother and father. She was a reluctant no, and he was an enthusiastic yes. My mother’s concern was that I would become so absorbed with today’s Russia that I would forget about yesterday’s Uvarov. All my preparatory research would go to waste. I would not get my Ph.D. I would not teach at Harvard or anywhere else, where a Ph.D. was the equivalent of a union card.

With my mother’s concerns in mind, I had actually tried while in Moscow to do both my day job at JPRS and my evening research at the Lenin Library, and I thought that, to a very large extent, I had succeeded. As noted earlier, I had managed to gain admission and do research in Moscow’s top libraries (an achievement in those days), and I had even gotten to admire Uvarov’s singular contributions to Russian scholarship. But deep down I knew that if I took Schorr’s offer, I would be working a twenty-four-hour day, learning the (for me) new craft of broadcasting, keeping up with a crackerjack professional like Schorr, and somehow continuing my research on Uvarov. Seriously, would I have enough time for both Schorr and Uvarov? The answer was obvious. Almost certainly not. At the end of the day, the minute-to-minute demands of CBS News would require my full attention, and Uvarov would have to wait. My Ph.D. dissertation would have to wait. And the promise I made to my mother would have to wait. That, I felt, I could not do. A promise was a promise, especially one to my mother.

By dawn’s early light I understood that I would probably never again get an offer such as Schorr’s; by declining his offer I might be crossing out journalism as my ultimate career. But I felt, then and there, that I was making the right call. And what the heck! I’d still have diplomacy and teaching on my dance card of career options.

At two in the afternoon of the following day I made my way to the Central Telegraph Office, located a few blocks from Red Square. That was where foreign correspondents gathered to write their news stories and have them cleared by Soviet censors. It was also where radio reporters such as Schorr and Levine transmitted their broadcasts directly to New York. When Schorr arrived, he spotted me, and I him. He plunked his briefcase down on an empty table and asked, “Well, what’s up?”

I gulped. “Can I have a minute when you’re finished?”

“Sure,” was his quick response. Schorr then submitted his copy for clearance and turned to a few other reporters waiting for clearance of their copy and engaged in the Moscow equivalent of office gossip—generally who’s leaving, who’s arriving, the Bolshoi’s latest ballet, the current Soviet screw-up, the weather. After a few minutes Schorr retired to a relatively quiet corner of the office, and I followed him.

“What have you decided?” he asked.

“I cannot accept your offer,” I replied, looking at everyone except at Schorr. “I promised my mother I would finish my dissertation, and I have to do that before I do anything else.”

For the next minute or so, Schorr said nothing. “Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes. I made a promise to my mother, and I feel I must keep it.”

Schorr looked at me, a somewhat baffled look, and again asked, “Are you sure?” He was trying to give me more time.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Schorr then hugged me. He might not have agreed with my decision, but he respected it. He retrieved his cleared scripts from the censor and did his broadcasts. I stood listening outside his broadcast booth, tears running down my cheeks.

A Russian driver told me this story, giggling all the way. Three Hungarian officials meet in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka Prison. “What are you here for?” one Hungarian asks his former colleagues. “I supported Nagy,” one of them replies. “And what are you here for?” he asks the other. “I was against Nagy.” Then both prisoners turn to the third Hungarian. “And you, why are you here?” His answer: “I am Nagy.”

After the Soviet crackdown of the Hungarian Revolution I spent a lot of my free time in Moscow libraries, assuming that if Khrushchev intended to restrict Soviet access to the West, and Western access to Russia, my own limited access to the Uvarov archives would almost certainly be curtailed. I thought it was only a matter of time before the Russians decided to cut off my access completely. But until then I was determined to study and absorb as much as I could about Uvarov. And so, as often as possible, I would return to the Lenin Library. Uvarov was always my stated reason, but I also had another reason, a secret yearning that I shared only with Ambassador Bohlen: to listen in on the clearly discernible dissatisfaction of Soviet youth with communism as their governing ideology. How deep did the dissatisfaction really run? Might it in time represent a threat to the Khrushchev regime? I was curious. Among the students at the library were the future rulers of Russia. What were they thinking? I had had some good luck months earlier stumbling upon library gatherings where students had raised questions about the limits of de-Stalinization, about the continuing relevance of communism, about their own sense of self. I listened to them then, and sympathized greatly, and I thought it was time for me to listen to them again, if and when the occasion arose.

One evening it arose, and then mysteriously vanished. I saw an announcement on the main bulletin board of the Lenin Library that a communist official would deliver a speech, and then take questions, on “The Vigilance of the Soviet Man.” He would speak on November 20. The use of the word “vigilance” was meant to suggest, in the Moscow mind of the day, that the “Soviet Man” lacked “vigilance” at a time when the Soviet Union, his motherland, was being tested by “capitalist encirclement” and “aggression,” and this matter had to be addressed, and swiftly. “No time to lose!” was the between-the-lines alert. This was a lecture I did not want to miss.

But when I arrived for the lecture I noticed immediately that there was none of the hubbub that usually accompanied a major communist speaker. I checked with the information desk.

“Isn’t there a lecture tonight?”

“No,” the clerk replied, trying to appear nonchalant.

“But there was an announcement,” I said, a bit bewildered. “I saw it on the bulletin board a few nights ago.”

“No,” the clerk continued, with a straight face. “There was no announcement.”

“But I saw it,” I protested.

“No, there was no announcement.”

His insistence was not persuasive, and I decided to check with the librarian who handled my Uvarov file. We had become friends, sort of. “I saw an announcement a few nights ago about a lecture here tonight,” I said. “But now I’m told there was no announcement. So I’m puzzled. What happened?”