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

The librarian began shuffling papers on her desk and looking everywhere but at me. “No,” she said, “there was no announcement, and there is no lecture.”

“But,” I persisted, “there was an announcement. I saw it, several times. It was on the bulletin board.”

The librarian, cornered, snapped, “All I can tell you is that this lecture was never scheduled. Never.”

I quickly changed tactics. “When will the next lecture take place?”

“This I cannot tell you either.”

She looked uncomfortable and excused herself, picking up a few papers and leaving her desk. She was obviously under orders to say nothing about the “vigilance” lecture, which probably had been canceled because the Communist Party feared another eruption of student skepticism about the official reason for the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution.

A few days later Pravda published what amounted to an official explanation. The Communist Party newspaper lashed out at students who no longer “occupy themselves” with “socially useful labor.” A “great many” students did no work at all. Absorbed with “abstract reasoning,” they wasted their days. “Certain comrades,” especially those at universities, the newspaper continued, entertained ideas “like a bourgeois ideology.” The word “comrades” suggested that Pravda was fingering members of the Communist Party, who should know and act better. But in the aftermath of the Hungarian crisis, such “comrades” and students were demanding truthful answers to their questions, and they were not getting them.

In one case, a number of students at Moscow University in frustration took the unusual step of posting a daily wall newspaper, based not on reporting by TASS or Pravda about Hungary but on the BBC’s reporting. This ad hoc form of student journalism became an overnight sensation. Many university students depended on it for information about the uprising and its suppression. A communist official, hearing about the wall newspaper’s popularity, was outraged. He promptly scheduled a university-wide meeting at which he demanded that the student editor be dropped from the newspaper and expelled from the university. The students, defying the official, rallied behind the editor and continued reading the newspaper. The official reacted with rage, firing dire threats at the students, warning of mass expulsions, and insisting on the editor’s ouster. Remarkably, the students held fast, refusing to comply with the party official’s demands. The upshot: The editor retained his position and the wall newspaper continued to be published. Such student defiance would never have happened before de-Stalinization became the newly emerging principle of the Khrushchev regime.

Another example of exceptional defiance was not by student intellectuals at a university but by 450 workers at the Kaganovich ball bearing plant near Moscow. What they did was unprecedented. The embassy learned that on October 23 the workers arrived at their plant, checked in, as was required, and then sat down, refusing to work. In the West that would have been called a strike; in Russia there had not been a strike since the 1920s. The plant manager ranted and raved, threatening to fire anyone who did not return to work immediately. The workers refused to budge. They demanded a hearing to vent their grievances. The following morning, on October 24, the workers returned to the plant, checked in, but again refused to work. This time a communist official, no longer just the plant manager, insisted on behalf of the party that the workers return to their jobs. Immediately! They refused, again demanding a hearing. The party official, after many calls to more senior officials, agreed finally to listen to the workers.

Bravely, one man rose, a foreman obviously preselected by the workers. He told the party official that he had been released from a Siberian prison only six months before, one of tens of thousands similarly liberated from unjust imprisonment and trying to return to a normal life in post-Stalin Russia. For the last three months the plant manager had given only 200 to 300 rubles to his workers and kept the rest, measured in thousands, for himself. The foreman stated that the men would not go back to work until the manager was fired. That was their bottom line.

At first the party official described the foreman’s demand as “outrageous,” but then, after a few minutes, promised the workers that he would “consider” the foreman’s demand. The foreman rose once again and in firm tones repeated his earlier demand for the manager’s ouster. Otherwise, he warned, the workers would not go back to work.

Later that afternoon the manager was fired. The following morning the workers returned to the plant and resumed working. The strike, never called by that term, was over. For the next three weeks worker salaries shot up two to three times above the norm.

For the first time in more than twenty years, members of the Soviet working class had stood up to established power, demanding that a plant manager be fired. In this case, the party establishment caved to their demands. Before Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, it’s safe to say that such a “strike” would have been unimaginable.

Change seemed to be everywhere in the fall of 1956. On some days it looked as though the whole system of communist rule was collapsing. The students were in rebellion. Workers were summoning up the courage to question party dogma, and even, apparently, to strike. Georgians, still loyal to their now officially disgraced Stalin, a hero in their eyes, were literally up in arms in bloody protest against Moscow’s policy of de-Stalinization. And now, throughout Eastern Europe, Moscow’s writ was being challenged and its domination questioned by restless satellites eager for greater autonomy and ready to challenge Moscow if necessary. Much to their surprise, Russians learned during the Hungarian uprising that, far from being the saviors of Eastern Europe, as Pravda had been trumpeting for years, they were actually seen as the oppressors of Eastern Europe.

Hungary had jolted the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, like an electric shock shooting through the entire nervous system. It raised profound questions, often forcing judgments without adequate time for reflection. One student told me that it had a “major impact on all of us.” One casualty was his lifelong commitment to communism—it had been a central tenet of his upbringing, but now his commitment seemed to be withering on the vine. What was he to believe? Another student, Maria, a young woman I met at the History Institute, had a totally different take. “We may not be able to crush the ‘fascists’ in Hungary tomorrow, or the day after,” she said, using the Kremlin’s word for the rebels, “but we will. We will, eventually.” Her faith in communism seemed firm.

We had met after a lecture at the institute. Maria was intelligent, well-read, talkative, and opinionated—on almost every subject. We discussed the Khrushchev speech. “How could he be so cocky, so certain that socialism would triumph over capitalism?” I asked.

“He was not cocky,” Maria said. “He was simply stating the truth. He was repeating what all of us communists know. Socialism will follow capitalism. It’s the law of social and historical development.”

“But there is no such law,” I said. “Anything can happen between today and tomorrow. You know that. I think it was Herzen who said, ‘History follows no libretto.’ And he was one of your own.” Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century democrat who had fought czarism with his elegant pen, mostly from Western Europe. Had he remained in Russia, he would have been arrested and silenced.

Maria tried not to be condescending, but her explanation was patronizing and simplistic, and her approach to me was that of a mother to a six-year-old. “There are laws of social development,” she began. “We can do nothing about them. They just exist. Even if I thought communism was bad, and wanted to fight against it, I’d be fighting against something that was inevitable. And that’s just stupid, isn’t it? Communism is the inevitable result of history. It is the culmination of historical development. It will happen, whether we like it or not.”