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

For a moment I thought I had found a hole in her argument about inevitability. “If capitalism inevitably follows feudalism, and communism inevitably follows capitalism, and if everything in history is constantly in flux, then how do we know that another social system won’t follow communism, another system that is better than communism?”

I saw a flicker of doubt rush through her eyes, but she recovered quickly. “I forgot to mention the ‘class struggle,’” she said, smiling. “You see, in all other systems of government, there is a class struggle. It is never-ending, like workers fighting bosses. But under communism, or socialism, there are no longer any antagonistic classes. They are all harmonious. The class struggle is over, and communism is supreme.” She folded her arms across her chest, a warrior after a triumph. “You do understand now, don’t you?” she asked.

In frustration, I threw both hands in the air. “Maria, what can I say? You think you have discovered the single key to history. No such thing exists. There will always be change. Please, you must open your mind to change.”

As I became more exasperated, she became more calm. “Change there will be,” she said softly. “But at the end we will surely have communism, and with communism, an end to class struggle. It is simply a law of historical development, which will all end with the arrival of communism.”

Sensing that our conversation had just come to an abrupt end, Maria returned to the book she was reading. As I left I looked over her shoulder. She was reading a Russian translation of Keats.

If Maria could believe in communism, then surely her leader could as well; and on November 18, in a speech at the Polish embassy designed to reassure his East European allies that Russia had no interest in military solutions to festering quarrels in Eastern Europe, Hungary notwithstanding, Khrushchev strongly supported the notion of “peaceful coexistence”—and not just among socialist countries. He also had his Western adversaries in mind, principally the United States. He wanted them to understand that his adventure in Hungary did not shake his belief in “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West.

One paragraph in Pravda ’s edited translation of the speech, published the next morning, caught Anna Holdcroft’s eye, and I translated it for the embassy. It could be seen as a personal message to President Eisenhower. “There can be no question of whether or not peaceful coexistence of the various states is needed,” he said. “Coexistence is an acknowledged fact which we can see before us. We say to the representatives of the capitalist countries: if you wish, you can come and visit us; if you don’t wish, you need not come. This will not grieve us particularly. But it is essential for us to coexist. The fact that the Great October Socialist Revolution was carried out, that the Soviet Union and the whole system of states of the socialist camp exist, does not depend on you, after all. Such is the law of social development. Furthermore, this law is operating in our favor. We Leninists are convinced that our social system, socialism, will be victorious over capitalism in the long run. Such is the logic of the historical development of mankind.”

In Khrushchev’s mind, the Hungarian repression was an unfortunate, unavoidable bump on the road to the ultimate triumph of communism. But it had saved his Eastern European empire, which to him was of fundamental importance. He hoped that it would not destroy the possibility of better East-West relations, but on his list of priorities, what came first was maintaining communist rule in Eastern Europe, a concept that many years later came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrine.

At the time, as fall slipped into winter and Khrushchev’s “year of the thaw” started to refreeze, turning Moscow into an icy center of crackdown and controversy, I noted in my diary that I was living through “dark, frightening, and tragic days.” At least that was how they struck me. The stories in the Soviet press were again filled with Western “plots,” “aggression,” and “conspiracies.” In Gorky Park, where I often went to meet Russians with whom I could have casual conversations, I found fewer Russians willing to stop and chat, as if they too began feeling a familiar chill in the air. Cabdrivers, among my best translators of Kremlin policy shifts, were again turning their attention to the traffic, keeping their opinions to themselves.

At the embassy we were hearing stories of Russian atrocities in Budapest, hundreds of Hungarian rebels brutally slaughtered by Soviet troops. And at JPRS I came upon reports that Molotov, of all people, was the Soviet official charged with telling artists and writers, who had flirted with the concept of freedom, that this flirtation had to end, that loyalty to the “collective,” to the Communist Party, was to take precedence over “individualist” tendencies.

What was happening in different corners of Soviet society helped Khrushchev realize that in his effort to ration democracy one liberalizing step at a time, he was losing control of his dictatorship. To retain personal power and reimpose the Soviet equivalent of law and order, he had to tighten the screws of party authority. But how tightly? Go back to Stalin’s day, which would have invalidated his core policy of de-Stalinization? Or was there perhaps a middle ground, a place where a certain degree of democracy could coexist with a continuation of communist rule? That was Khrushchev’s hope.

But by year’s end he clearly had not found that place, and he retreated to the comfortable cliché that the party knew best, even when the evidence was overwhelming that the party was floundering in uncertainty, one day acting as though Stalin was back in the saddle and the next day acting as though de-Stalinization was still the name of the game.

Into this treacherous political swamp entered a thirty-eight-year-old Ukraine-born Russian writer, Vladimir Dudintsev, whose new novel, Not by Bread Alone , was quickly becoming a test case for the artistic limits of de-Stalinization. That was by no means Dudintsev’s intent. Like many other writers, he had more modest goals in mind: most important, publication and praise—and the perks that would flow from being a successful writer. Had he written a book consistent with the traditional, sleepy norms of socialist realism, with its emphasis on dedicated, muscular workers, he might have achieved his goals. But with Not by Bread Alone , Dudintsev had created a main character, an innocent inventor named Lopatkin, who broke the accepted rules of socialist society by acting like an individualist, more absorbed with self than with the collective, which was forbidden in the harsh lands of socialist realism. In the uncertain climate of post-Hungary Kremlin policymaking, Dudintsev could easily be defined as a troublemaker, and so he was, much to his everlasting regret.

Dudintsev was a lawyer who became a journalist and then a novelist. In the 1930s, when Stalin unleashed his bloody purges, Dudintsev was a dedicated member of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. He studied writing under Lev Kassil, a noted mentor who ran a literary circle in Moscow, and he studied law at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence. But before he got a chance to practice law, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and then the Soviet Union. For the Russian people this was the start of a horrible, costly war. Dudintsev joined the Red Army. Soon thereafter he was badly wounded. After his recuperation he was transferred to Siberia, where he served as a military prosecutor. (In Not by Bread Alone , Lopatkin is tried and found guilty by the same sort of prosecutor.)