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

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’d be honored to meet him.” The librarian vanished for a few minutes and returned with a short man with graying hair, Professor Alexander Berkov, knowledgeable, it was soon apparent, in many fields of scholarship.

The librarian invited us into her office, shut the door, sat down in the corner, and listened to our discussion of Russian and Soviet historiography. I was amazed at Berkov’s familiarity with American scholars of the Soviet Union. He specifically mentioned Michael Karpovich of Harvard, George Vernadsky of Yale, Hans Kohn of City College, and Philip Mosely of Columbia. He also gave me valuable pointers on my Uvarov research. We spoke for about an hour, and I enjoyed every minute. We parted as friends. “Stay in touch,” he said.

I promised I would, and with an extra measure of energy and excitement sparked by our talk, I opened the Uvarov file and started reading a letter Uvarov had written to his wife in 1842. It contained no nugget, no special insight into his family life, but I was thrilled. I read one letter after another, a few more to his wife and staff and many relating to his special interest in Greek literature. He was, it was clear, a careful, meticulous man, but I saw no evidence that he was a brilliant scholar. I filled my note pad with many quotes and impressions, all valuable in the writing of a dissertation. After three hours I returned the file to the tall librarian, thanked her, and promised to return the following day.

As I left the institute I realized that I was grinning with satisfaction. It was finally happening. I was doing what could only be described as original research in the Soviet Union. Finally, Uvarov would have his day in the sun.

At 5:00 p.m., the day’s noontime sliver of sunlight long since gone, I made my way back to the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. This time, instead of asking to see the sour, unresponsive head of the manuscript division, I asked to see the library’s uchenyi sekretar , “academic secretary,” the catchall phrase for an institution’s top administrator and sometimes its principal intellectual. Much to my surprise, he agreed to see me, and he knew about my earlier request for access to the Uvarov archive. When I asked whether I could actually see the archive, he answered matter-of-factly, “Yes, of course. Why not?” I almost collapsed in surprise. After so many no’s, for the second time in one day I was getting a yes.

He could not resist the “Why Uvarov?” question, saying “Why anyone would want to study such a reactionary is beyond me.” But we were soon on our way through a maze of corridors guarded by uniformed militiamen who at each turn insisted on seeing the uchenyi sekretar ’s propusk and of course mine. When we reached the manuscript division he gave me a thick file of official letters and documents relating to Uvarov’s time as Czar Nicholas II’s minister of education. I wasted no time. I thanked him, sat down at an empty desk, and began reading the letters and documents.

At exactly 7:00 p.m. the uchenyi sekretar asked how much more time I needed. He had been sitting at an adjacent desk reading a newspaper. I told him I did not know. At 7:10 p.m. he asked me the same question, only this time with more urgency. I again told him I did not know. At 7:20 p.m. he made no pretense of politeness. He simply told me to stop working and return the file. I was surprised and puzzled and asked why I had to stop—there was still much more to do, and I wanted to get as much done as I could. With a smile of embarrassment, he whispered that he had a ticket to a movie at 8:00 p.m., and it was his responsibility to escort me out of the building, past all of the inquisitive militiamen. I understood immediately. I could never have gotten out of the building without him. As we left the library he assured me I would have no trouble resuming my work on my next visit.

I was to have one more exhilarating experience that day, when I was mistaken for a suave French singer. I hailed a cab, and the cabdriver launched into a rhapsodic report on Yves Montand’s astoundingly successful swing through the Soviet Union. Like me, Montand was staying at the Astoria Hotel. As we approached I saw a huge crowd of Russian bobbysoxers. They swarmed toward my cab as it slowed to a stop in front of the main entrance. When I got out of the cab, they broke into a loud, sustained cheer.

“Montand,” they shouted, screaming and swooning. “Montand,” they cried. They thought I was Yves Montand! They mobbed me. They demanded my autograph. They kissed the hem of my coat. Young stilyagi grabbed my hands; others ripped away my scarf. I tried telling them I was not Montand, but they did not believe me. “Montand,” they kept shouting. “He’s so modest. Just like him. He says he is not Montand.” Militiamen rushed to my rescue and escorted me into the lobby of the hotel. For a fleeting moment I thought of myself as the “False Dmitri,” who 350 years earlier had raised a terrible ruckus in Russia by pretending that he was the czar.

But I could not resist the temptation to play the Montand role. At the last minute, just before I actually entered the hotel, I turned toward the crowd, still uncertain about whether I was the real Montand or a tall foreigner pretending to be Montand, and waved and blew them all a kiss. If asked—who knows?—I might have delivered an address on the hardships of singing in Parisian nightclubs. But then, rather unceremoniously, I thought, the militiamen pushed me into the lobby, and my moment of fame ended.

That evening, when I stepped into the busy restaurant, not waiting for the maitre d’ to seat me, I spotted a man sitting alone at a small table to the left of a four-piece orchestra that seemed bent on butchering popular American songs. “May I join you?” I asked. The man seemed hesitant at first but then gestured toward the empty chair. For a half hour neither of us spoke, although I did order my dinner. Perhaps because he could hear an accent in my Russian, he finally broke the ice and asked whether I was an American. When I said yes, his face broke into a broad smile.

“I knew it,” he said. “I just knew it.” But then as quickly as he smiled, he suddenly looked sad. “How long it has been since I last spoke to an American.” He filled first my glass with wine, and then his. We clicked glasses and toasted Khrushchev’s mantra of “peace and friendship.” Moments later he erupted with questions about America and me—about New York City, where I was born; Washington, where I worked; Cambridge, where I studied; about baseball (he too was a Yankee fan), basketball, and classical music as well as jazz; about Averell Harriman and Dwight Eisenhower; and, finally, about poetry and poets. He loved Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. He thought Conrad Aiken was brilliant, and he worshipped T. S. Eliot. “My greatest delight is to read American poets,” he declared. “Many evenings when I come home from work, I pick up an old 1927 anthology I have, with an introduction by Aiken, and read the poems over and over again.” He smiled softly. “They pick me up and transport me to a dream world.”

I had stumbled upon an English-language teacher who taught in a small technical school in Leningrad. In my diary I called him Sasha, although that was not his real name. He was forty-five years old, born in Ukraine, and raised in Moscow. In 1928 his father got a better job in Leningrad, and the family moved there. “This was the closest I could get to the West,” he explained. “It is the most Western city in Russia, I would say.”

We exchanged biographical information for more than an hour, and then I told Sasha about my interest in Russian history, especially the Soviet period. I told him about Uvarov, which produced a look of disapproval. “You are not serious,” he frowned. And I told him about the Voshchenkov lecture, stressing that I had not heard anything as savagely anti-American in my time in the Soviet Union.