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

For anyone familiar with Russian history, Leningrad was a must-see stop. I could not have visited Kiev and Vladimir and missed Peter’s “Window on the West.” There was another reason, too, for me to visit Leningrad. A number of Moscow librarians, knowing of my interest in Uvarov, had told me that his private papers—letters, documents, family albums—were archived in Leningrad. Maybe, they hinted, I’d be given access to them. I felt I had to make the effort. I did, and I met with modest success.

One day, while hopping from one library to another, I spotted an advertisement on a poster in front of the Pushkin Drama Theater for Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths and immediately bought a ticket. Lower Depths was a modern classic, a controversial play written in 1901 but not performed in the Soviet Union since the late 1930s. Stalin did not like it, probably because its theme, similar in a way to Dudintsev’s in Not by Bread Alone (1956), focused on the individual’s indomitable spirit rather than on the collective’s presumed strengths. It was again the individual against the collective, and it struck a powerful emotional chord among many in the audience. Time and again they interrupted the performance with sustained bursts of applause and shouts of approval. “Truth! Truth!” one man screamed, as he leaped to his feet. “Man is the only truth,” another cried. “There never has been another truth, and there never could be.” By implication, they were proclaiming their belief that truth, not the state and its know-it-all ideology, represented an ultimate goal of society. These were powerful words, and on this evening in Leningrad they apparently resonated with every man and woman in the audience. They stood up and applauded so vigorously that the performers returned for ten curtain calls. The actors blew kisses at the audience, and the audience blew kisses back. I left the theater feeling that Khrushchev’s thaw had clearly planted deep roots in Peter’s capital. Even as it was being rechilled in Moscow, it seemed to be warming to the moment in Leningrad. Or was it?

On the morning after the memorable performance of Lower Depths , while heading toward the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, where I hoped to charm the docent into letting me see some of the Uvarov treasures, I passed the Central Lecture Hall on Liteiny Prospekt. A bell rang in my mind. The attractive old mansion, once the home of a Russian nobleman and his family, was the inspiration for many of Pushkin’s most notable scenes from his short story “Queen of Spades.” The building was now devoted to state-sponsored lectures. One was scheduled for 1:00 p.m., and I decided to attend. The sponsor was the Leningrad Division of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (the Soviets were masters at creating long, sometimes baffling, titles), and the subject was “The International Position of the USSR.”

While waiting for the lecture to begin, I learned that the originally scheduled speaker, a local communist official named V. D. Smirnov, was being replaced by K. P. Voshchenkov, a more senior, presumably more trusted, party spokesman from Moscow. It was an important subject, and Moscow wanted to get it right. The audience seemed handpicked: although there were some young people, restless in their view that change was inevitable, most in the audience were older, probably members of the Communist Party, serious apparatchiks, the kind who took notes and applauded dutifully.

Voshchenkov started his lecture at exactly 1:00 p.m. He cited a glowing report by the Russian news agency TASS about a meeting, held from January 1 to 4, of the communist leaders of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary on the “Hungarian situation.” This summit meeting was proof, he said, that “good relations” existed among “all” socialist countries. Yugoslavia, East Germany, and Poland did not attend; no reason was offered as to why.

Voshchenkov spoke of a world divided into two camps: the “black forces of fascism” marked by “open American connivance” in the Hungarian rebellion, and the “peace-loving forces of socialism,” which have given a “vigorous and decisive rebuff to the imperialist camp.” He repeatedly referred to Lenin as the source of all wisdom. Stalin was not mentioned.

He asserted that the United States was “ugly,” “evil,” “responsible for insidious plots and conspiracies to bring capitalism back to Hungary…. They wish to destroy the great achievements of the socialist system in the Soviet Union and in Hungary…. They wish to establish military bases in Eastern Europe for use against the peace-loving Soviet Union. They are planning a Third World War.” I later noted in my diary that Voshchenkov “castigated America in the most vicious terms I have ever heard since I came to the Soviet Union.” And, reading the Soviet press every day, I thought I had heard quite a few.

Voshchenkov spoke with passion. He had a strong voice and a commanding presence. No one interrupted him. Hungary was clearly at the center of his concerns. “Many say that the events in Hungary have weakened the camp of socialism,” he argued. “This is false. They have weakened the camp of capitalism. They have dealt a crushing blow to American monopolists. The camp of socialism, on the contrary, has been considerably strengthened by these events.” But, he continued, “we have learned an important lesson.” He paused, stared menacingly at his audience, glanced down at his papers, then again at his audience, suggesting that if they hadn’t listened carefully before, they should now. “We thought we could get along with the capitalists, but we have erred.” He again paused. “It is impossible to get along with capitalists.” This seemed more the language of Molotov than of Khrushchev, more the language of hard-liners, who evinced no interest in “peaceful coexistence”—Khrushchev’s policy—with the capitalist West. Were Molotov and his followers gaining so much power that they could press their line in public in Leningrad? I wondered what was going on.

“They will stop at nothing,” Voshchenkov continued, pressing his argument. “They wish to restore capitalism in Hungary. But the putsch did not have a broad base. Only the fascists supported the revolt. [Admiral Miklos] Horthy and his men, equipped with American arms, took part in the revolt—not the honest workers. The Americans wanted to create a military base in Hungary, bring war very close, but we have stopped these vicious intrigues, and we will continue to crush these attempts. With the failure of the events in Hungary, the American monopolists have changed their tactics, but their aim remains the same.”

A second theme pushed by Voshchenkov that day was the recent Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, which opened the door to aggressive Russian moves into the Middle East. Here was additional proof that the “imperialists” were seeking to roll back the “peaceful progress of the socialist camp.” He painted a picture of the “capitalist encirclement” of the Soviet Union, a line out of Stalin’s handbook and one that the 20th Party Congress was supposed to have supplanted with “peaceful coexistence.” This was what he said about events in the Middle East (I took notes throughout Voshchenkov’s talk): “The attack and aggression against Egypt is just another link in a major imperialist conspiracy against all peace-loving countries, against the Soviet Union, and the [neutralist] Bandung countries. Even in Indonesia, the Americans are trying to convert the country into an American military base. Churchill, who takes an active, backstage role in instigating the West against Russia, is just as bad as Hitler, and you all know what happened to Hitler! The Dulles-Eisenhower doctrine is nothing more than another American attempt to convert the Middle East into an American stronghold, taking advantage of the weakened position of the British and the French. There is a constant threat against the Soviet Union, and its purpose is a Third World War.”