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

While in the Soviet Union that year I always had to remind myself that World War II had ended only eleven years before. Many cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, still showed scars of the Nazi assault. Many Russians still felt the pain of wartime losses—husbands, sons, children who died at the front. They did not want war; indeed, I thought they would instinctively oppose any policy that moved the world toward war. That was why the Kremlin always blamed the United States for any dangerous confrontation between the two rivals. The fault was never to be the USSR’s.

When he finished, Voshchenkov was greeted with a tidal wave of applause that boomed off the walls of a lecture hall that had once been noted for aristocratic elegance, Viennese waltzes, and Pushkin’s poetry. Because he was speaking in a lecture hall and not at a university, the questions were polite but still reflected the uneasy mood of the populace.

“Why weren’t Poland and Yugoslavia invited to the summit?”

“How come UN observers were not allowed into Hungary? Did the Soviet Union veto such a move?”

“Was Nagy a counterrevolutionary?”

“Is Tito a good Marxist?”

“Why are the Jews such a warlike people?”

“Why did you allow some people to read newspapers while you were speaking?”

Voshchenkov’s answers were rarely elucidating. He seemed eager to pack his papers and leave. His audience seemed content with his presentation; they accepted both his reliance on orthodox Marxist formulas to resolve complicated problems and his obvious unwillingness to provide honest answers. In his lecture I caught a glimpse of the real Soviet Union—among ordinary people a stunning lack of political sophistication, a shortage of reliable information, a willingness to live with obvious mendacity and mediocrity, and, despite the 20th Party Congress and the thaw it sparked, an underlying fear among many that a wrong word, a look of disapproval, could get anyone, even a member of the party, into serious trouble. Once again I felt sorry for the Russian people. They deserved better.

My first “official” visit to the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library was acutely disappointing. I had been led to believe that the head of the manuscript division would be both friendly and cooperative. He was neither. In a brief meeting, chilly though his office was overheated, he told me that the library had Uvarov’s archives but he needed prior approval from his superiors before he could open them to my perusal. He was really hoping that I would just go away. “Perhaps it would be more convenient if you returned tomorrow. I might have word then,” he suggested.

I answered that I would return later in the day, at about three.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated.

“Three this afternoon,” I insisted, stressing I had only a limited amount of time in Leningrad.

“More likely tomorrow,” he said, sighing, and looked down at his papers. Our meeting adjourned on this sorry note of stalemate.

Undaunted, I made my way through the crowds to the Institute for Russian Literature, where I hoped my hunt for Uvarov’s archives would meet with a happier end. And, miraculously, it did. An old man greeted me in the cloakroom with… a smile, of all things. He seemed like a prerevolutionary relic—small, polite, curious, almost charming. When he took my coat, he paused to admire it.

“How much does it cost?” he asked.

“Seventy-five dollars,” I replied, “or roughly three hundred rubles at your official exchange rate.”

The old man seemed flustered. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “impossible.” He examined the coat more closely. “This would cost three thousand rubles here, at least, and in any case we couldn’t get it. We couldn’t find one like it. No, impossible.” One of his friends, overhearing our conversation, approached and felt the material of the coat with experienced fingers. He joked, “I can get the exact same coat in Moscow for two hundred seventy-five rubles,” at which point he and the old man snickered, each with a broad smile, knowing they could not buy such a coat in Leningrad or Moscow at any price.

I asked the librarian at the information desk if I could see—and study—the Uvarov archive. Like so many other librarians, she asked, “Why Uvarov?” I gave her my standard reply: I wanted to cover both sides of Russian history, the communist and the conservative sides. She nodded and asked me to wait in the vestibule. I waited, and waited, and waited, taking in large photos of Pushkin on every wall. After a while Pushkin’s face seemed to change—he began to resemble an unappealing KGB agent. Ten minutes passed, and then twenty. After a half hour had passed, I grew restless and thought about leaving. Why not? I could always return the next day or try another library. But then, in the semidarkness of the vestibule, a tall, graceful woman appeared. She was carrying an old file. My heart skipped a beat.

I rose as she approached. “Mr. Kalb,” she said, shaking my hand. “I have a file of Uvarov’s letters for you.” I gulped. “You will, of course, have to fill out some forms, but first I have a question.” I tried to contain my excitement. For a full year I had been trying, desperately, to get my hands on Uvarov’s files, but time and again the Soviet bureaucracy would either act dumb or impose obstacles. Uvarov seemed unobtainable. Now, wonder of wonders, this tall woman with a dusty file appeared, and suddenly a treasure house of scholarly goodies opened before me—but, I had to admit, at a very inopportune time. In a single week my stay in the Soviet Union would come to an end. “Don’t complain,” I said to myself. “Smile, and be grateful.” I tried.

Her question was the one I had come to expect from every Soviet librarian: “Why are you studying Uvarov?” My answer was the one I had fashioned over many months, one that was both truthful and, I hoped, understandable. I was a student of Russian history. The communist side of that history had been explored for decades, but the conservative side, shelved throughout the Soviet period, was largely ignored. It was about time its principal architect, Uvarov, founder of the famous slogan “Nationalism, Autocracy, and Orthodoxy,” was rediscovered and brought to the bar of history. Not persuaded but gracious nonetheless, the librarian nodded. “I guess so,” she said, shaking her head and sighing.

As I filled out the required forms, she sat opposite me and began to ask questions about American life, especially the prices of consumer goods—dresses, shoes, food, cars, apartments. Before long we slipped from consumer goods to a Q and A about the need for internal passports. I told her I found the Soviet practice of carrying internal passports on all domestic travel to be “offensive” and “demeaning.”

She was amazed. “Surely you need some sort of identification in the United States,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” I replied, “a driver’s license, a draft card, a library card, but not an internal passport. That’s for foreign travel.” Many Americans traveling in the Soviet Union, I told her, felt like criminals, having to show their passport at every turn in the road, their word never trusted.

“Well,” she countered, “Russians feel like criminals whenever they have to be fingerprinted during visits to the United States. Fingerprints are for criminals, not for honest people.”

“Look,” I said, “I had to put up with the humiliation of showing an internal passport just to get into this library.”

“I guess you’ve got a point there,” she said and then quickly changed the subject. She wanted me to meet a “treasure house of a man, a genius, a gift of God, who also knows a great deal about nineteenth-century Russia.”