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

It started in late June, when Poland’s Communist leaders invited businessmen from communist and capitalist countries to the Poznan International Fair. It was a perfect example of Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence, except for one thing: the workers in nearby plants seized the moment and went out on strike, demonstrating for better salaries and improved labor conditions. They attacked Communist Party headquarters and torched the local prison. Before long, Polish tanks and troops, in an effort to restore order, opened fire on the demonstrating workers, killing many of them. The streets were suddenly awash with blood. The scene was hardly a good advertisement for communism.

Not too far away, in Czechoslovakia, students went on a rampage. Like their counterparts in Moscow, they questioned not only the presumed wisdom of communism as their governing philosophy but also the leadership of the Czech Communist Party. In one university town after another, students carrying anti-communist placards blocked traffic and brought life in the countryside to a virtual standstill. Only here, unlike in Poland, the police did not intervene, the troops stayed in their barracks, and the country seemed to slow to a stop. These scenes were repeated in parts of East Germany, Romania, and Bulgaria.

The rush toward disaffection in Eastern Europe reached its climax in Hungary in late October. Angry workers and disillusioned intellectuals pushed the country into open revolt against communism and Russia. Khrushchev faced a crucial decision. If he ordered the Red Army into Hungary to crush the rebellion, many people would be killed, and the myth that Russia was Eastern Europe’s best comrade-in-arms would be exposed as a lie. But if he did not order the Red Army into Hungary, he was certain he would lose all of Eastern Europe in a swirling anti-communist rebellion, and soon thereafter his post as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev ordered his army into Hungary, feeling he had no other realistic option, and he suffered the consequences. His political position was severely weakened. In his Eastern European empire, now rent with bloody uncertainty, he was scorned and Russia was hated. And everywhere else, Russia was seen as a brutal dictatorship. All the glowing tributes he had earlier received from his anti-Stalinist shift in policy were reduced to rubble. Khrushchev knew it, and his political enemies knew it, too.

As the train rumbled slowly toward Moscow, I returned to my original question: What happened to Russia during the year of the thaw? One thing was clear: A dictatorship cannot be dismantled one speech at a time. Khrushchev had tried, and he clearly had failed in this effort. What else? After a year of conversations with Russians from Tashkent to Kiev, observing and talking with Soviet leaders (including Khrushchev), reading and translating the Soviet press every morning, and attending the Russian theater as often as my schedule would allow, and after cracking a small hole in the Soviet archives in my pursuit of the Uvarov file, four strong impressions of “Russia 1956” had formed in my mind.

1. Eleven years after the end of World War II, the Russian people were in a desperate need of peace. They had endured terrible hardships during the war. Tens of millions had been killed. No family had survived without tragic losses. More than anything, they wanted the chance to rebuild their lives. Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s rugged adherence to communist doctrine was designed in part to respond sympathetically to this popular yearning.

2. Russia was a huge, wealthy country, but it was locked into a woeful economic system that stifled creative growth, producing just enough to maintain the necessities of life but little more. The bottom line was that the system, justifiably criticized at home and abroad, somehow worked. It worked badly, but it worked. Communist leaders promised annually that “next year” industrial production would soar, and things would get better. Workers had little choice but to buy the line, however reluctantly, or to become deep skeptics of the system itself, of communism as the driving dynamic of their lives. I met both kinds of workers. Only the peasants seemed chronically miserable. They wanted to own their own land and their own livestock, and they were tired of waiting.

3. Communism as a governing philosophy had lost its revolutionary magnetism. It was a dying ideology. Young people told me they would join a revolt against communism, if they thought it would do any good—but, shaking their heads, they expressed doubt that it would. I believed that communism would decay even faster if the Russian intellectual could find an emotional substitute of comparable appeal.

4. Russia was in a period of profound transition. One student told me that Russia was “between the old and the new.” The “old” was communism under Stalin and now adjusted by Khrushchev. The “new” was an uncertain, distant dream.

When I returned to the American embassy that evening, I noted in my diary that the “Russian people are much too imaginative to live forever as the docile servants of a bloodless cause. They are no longer the illiterate and inert peasantry that Stalin ruled with an iron discipline. They now know how to read, and they are also beginning to think. In a dictatorship, thinking is dangerous.”

The following day, a somewhat subdued Khrushchev attended a diplomatic reception and, in an astounding toast, raised a glass in tribute to Stalin, the Georgian he had attacked a year earlier as a criminal, a madman, a fiend. “God grant,” he said with bombastic force, stressing the word “God,” “that every communist be able to fight as Stalin fought!” His remark produced a startled hush. Diplomats turned to one another, puzzled looks on their faces. Reporters pulled notebooks from their pockets. They knew they had a story when they thought all they were getting was a drink. Khrushchev continued: “For all of us, Marxist-Leninists, who have devoted our lives to the revolutionary struggle for the interests of the working class and its militant vanguard, the Leninist party, the name of Stalin is inseparable from Marxism-Leninism.”

Khrushchev, in rhetorical retreat, looked solemn, only occasionally cracking a smile, as he made his way out of the embassy. Had he just signaled an end to his controversial reform of Stalinist Russia? I did not think so. Too much had happened during this year of the thaw. Too many hopes had been lofted. Too much freedom had been tasted, and enjoyed, at home and throughout Eastern Europe. It could not all be put back in the bottle. The Molotovs of communism would try and, on occasion, succeed. But they, too, would be unable to hold up the train of Russian history. With the thaw, it had left the station on a journey yet to be charted.

One morning in June 1957, an assistant at Widener Library tapped me on the shoulder. “Marvin,” she said softly, “you have a call, uh, from a man who says he is, uh, Edward R. Murrow.”

“Oh, please,” I brushed her off. “Edward R. Murrow is not calling me. Obviously a mistake—just, just hang up on him.” I returned to my reading of an obscure nineteenth-century Russian manuscript, which at the time I found fascinating. I was a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard. I had recently returned from a long trip through Southeast Asia after a year-long assignment at the American embassy in Moscow.