Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  Within weeks the Soviet violinist David Oistrakh followed, and astonished Americans with his virtuosic intensity. Culture mavens began to fret aloud that America was leaving the field to the Soviets, and they found an unlikely ally in President Eisenhower. Covert operations such as floating excerpts from Scripture across the Iron Curtain on balloons or air-dropping T. S. Eliot’s fiendishly difficult Four Quartets on Russia were having limited success, and Ike was beginning to suspect that a direct appeal to the emotions might better counteract Soviet propaganda that caricatured America as a nation of jive-dancing, gum-chewing rubes and goons. The old soldier even went so far as to urge his hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to include “the singing of a beautiful hymn” within his definition of psychological warfare, and Congress authorized an emergency presidential fund to support “Cold War cultural exchange.” It then voted to slash the budget in half on the basis that “soft power” was hooey dreamed up by namby-pamby liberals, but in 1956 it reversed course and made Ike’s fund a permanent body.

  The Cold War had achieved what no amount of advocacy ever did: it had persuaded the U.S. government publicly to support the arts. The International Exchange Program expanded fast, supporting twelve orchestras in its first three years and, over five years, more than one hundred performers and groups who visited more than ninety countries. The State Department was in overall charge, but unlike the CIA, whose pipe-smoking Ivy Leaguers clandestinely funneled huge sums into atonal music and abstract art, it left the choice of performers mostly to panels of practicing artists, in an attempt to promote diversity. That policy backfired when the artists turned out to be more conservative than the government. The Music Panel, which met every two or three weeks in New York, repeatedly spurned foreign-born musicians and had to be lectured that America benefited from being seen as culturally diverse. It was so prejudiced against jazz that a separate jazz panel had to be spun off. It rejected Leonard Bernstein’s hit musical West Side Story on the grounds that “showing the gang warfare in New York will not help our cultural relations.” Frustrated officials could have been forgiven for envying the Soviet system, which regarded artists as the property of the state and systematically selected, trained, and sent abroad its best. Still, in its messy way, the American effort notched up successes. African American performers were particularly admired abroad, an important consideration in light of Brown v. Board of Education and Soviet denunciations of America’s Jim Crow laws and decaying inner cities.

  At first the Soviet Bloc was excluded from the exchanges. “We are not planning to send performers behind the iron curtain because they have controlled audiences who can hiss the players off the boards,” a State Department official informed an early Music Panel meeting, though the real reason may have been a lack of confidence in American artists. Juilliard’s president, Bill Schuman, a vocal member of the group, vigorously protested but was warned that he was exceeding his remit by straying into policy.

  The issue was still being hotly debated when Nikita Khrushchev delivered the most explosive speech in the history of the Soviet Union.

  • 5 •

  The Secret Speech

  THE TWENTIETH Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was officially over. For ten days, fifteen hundred comrades from fifty-six countries had applauded through speech after speech endorsing the ideology and policies of the new regime. They had gone back to their hotels and were preparing to carry the torch home when the Soviet contingent was hastily summoned back. The session was not on the timetable, and the foreign delegates were not invited. There was no notice of what was to be discussed, and no preparation for what was about to happen. Shortly after midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev got to his feet and buried Stalin a second time.

  Gesticulating wildly, Khrushchev revealed that a dreadful perversion had infected Marxism-Leninism. A cult of personality had elevated a criminal to the status of a god. Stalin, he said, had twisted the government into a vehicle of repression and a machine of lies. He had imprisoned, tortured, and murdered innocent people and deported entire nations on a paranoid whim. Having killed four-fifths of the army command before World War II, Stalin, like a boy with his toys, had planned military operations using a globe. Dashing from accusation to denunciation, Khrushchev suddenly paused and spoke intimately. “Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious,” he recalled. “We know this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: ‘Why are your eyes so shifty today?’ or ‘Why are you turning so much today and avoiding looking at me directly in the eyes?’” Possessing unlimited power, Khrushchev added, the vozhd had “indulged in great willfulness and choked a person morally and physically.”

  The speech was not elegant or even very coherent, but its simplicity made it devastating. Like the miner he had once been, Khrushchev shone his lamp into the cells and tunnels of Stalinist Russia and ruggedly set the charges that would dynamite them into the earth. The shock was so great that several delegates collapsed and had to be carried out. The rest sat in stunned silence. Of course there was no denying the scale of the purges that had happened on Stalin’s watch. They had touched them all. Of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 had been declared enemies of the people and 848 had been executed. Of 139 full and candidate members of the Central Committee, 98 had been accused of treason. Still, to blame Stalin himself? They had not come to hear this savage demolition of everything they had worked and fought for. They had never expected to hear it. Marxism-Leninism was a secular religion that demanded blind faith, and Stalin had been its presiding deity. How could the great leader have been a deluded murderer?

  Only one group looked on with burning vindication. To put a human face on moral outrage, Khrushchev had invited along a hundred former party members who had recently been released from the Gulag camps. They were a tiny fraction of the victims he was talking about, survivors of the convulsions in the body politic that had consumed perhaps twenty million lives and stunted many more in less than a quarter century, and they were there to bear witness.

  After four hours, Khrushchev sat down. The customary storm of applause never came. The audience filed out quietly, their world upside down.

  THEY WERE coming back in droves, those nonpeople with no value to whose victimhood Khrushchev’s speech referred, stripped of humanity in the bare struggle to survive. They walked along haltingly, “with horrifyingly empty eyes,” unable to cross the street without orders, trying to readjust to life, if they were lucky, with the families from whom they’d been torn. Some compulsively recounted their sufferings and those of their dead comrades, driven to document the unspeakable even as it drove them mad. Others had forgotten their family members’ names, or even their own. Sleepless from fear and plagued by envy, they struggled to rediscover love and feeling itself. Their accusers crossed the road to avoid them or looked straight through them; a few gentler souls were consumed by delayed guilt. The novelist Alexander Fadeyev, who as secretary of the Writers’ Union had authorized writers’ arrest warrants, lurched drunkenly at his victims, trying to befriend them. One day he sobered up, wrote a note to the Central Committee—“I thought I was guarding a temple, and it turned out to be a latrine”—and shot himself.

  Stalin had worked the mincer, but many had provided the meat. Khrushchev later admitted that he himself was up to his elbows in blood. “Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs,” he had screamed to 200,000 people gathered in Red Square during the 1936 show trials: “That word is execution!” The following year, as the Moscow Party boss, he handily exceeded his quota of 30,000 enemies of the people to be arrested and 5,000 executed, boasting to Stalin that he had rounded up 41,305, of whom 8,500 deserved to die. As party leader of Ukraine, he had sped up the arrests there until there were scarcely any politicians, officials, or army commanders left to run th
e country.

  It had been an act of fear to keep silent, an act of fanaticism or callous self-advancement to lend support. Yet Khrushchev’s speech was an act of courage—he was haunted by guilt, and his humanity had risen to demand it. The risk was huge, but it was also more calculated than it seemed. By blaming everything on Stalin, he deflected guilt both from himself and the Communist Party, which after a painful reckoning could once again become the conduit for the people’s enthusiasm and energy. Khrushchev was never very clear about Marxist-Leninist theory—to his mind, it boiled down to giving everyone goulash—but he believed with all his heart that it would bring unprecedented happiness. The glorious Soviet system, the most progressive and democratic developed by mankind, the perpetual engine of history—in his account, it and the party itself were also Stalin’s victims, not the facilitators, encouragers, perpetrators, and justifiers of judicially approved genocide.

  The Stalinists were aghast, but with peasant cunning, Khrushchev had weakened them. The previous year, he had accused Malenkov of ganging up with Beria, demoted him to minister of electric power stations, and replaced him in the chair of the Presidium. He had attacked Iron Butt Molotov for conducting a bellicose foreign policy, and though the old revolutionary clung to his job, he was greatly diminished. So far so good, but Stalin’s ghost was hard to exorcise, and threats lay all around. Khrushchev would need all his native wit and guile to attempt the monumental task he had set for himself: that of building communism without terror.

  BECAUSE OF its restricted audience, Khrushchev’s denunciation became known as the Secret Speech, but he never intended it to be anything of the sort. The following night, it was read to the foreign delegates, very slowly, so they could take notes. The Polish leader Boleslaw Bierut had a heart attack and died. Transcripts crisscrossed the Soviet Union, to be read aloud to millions of party members. Some outdid Khrushchev in decrying the former regime, some saw no point in raking through old muck, and others angrily defended Stalin. In Georgia, his birthplace, four days of riots broke out.

  The speech leaked out of the Soviet Union via Israeli intelligence, and on June 5 it was published in the New York Times. Over the years the trickle of Gulag survivors who made it to the West had tried to raise awareness of Stalin’s atrocities, but without the images that seared the Nazi concentration camps into humanity’s conscience, it was easy to dismiss their talk as hysteria. Most people had no stomach for another monstrous crime of civilization, especially one perpetrated by a wartime ally against the Nazi evil. Meanwhile, to Communists and fellow travelers, it was inconceivable that a society built on equality and fraternity could be guilty of crimes whose enormity approached that of Hitler’s. Now the Soviet leader himself had confirmed the worst, and as many of Stalin’s apologists recoiled, a distinct strand of Eurocommunism was born.

  During the Congress, Khrushchev had also ditched Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy about the inevitability of war. Socialism would triumph, he confidently predicted, because it was a superior system; meanwhile, the USSR must live with the West, as it was either that or “the most destructive war in history.” In America, policy makers reacted warily. Most foresaw a split in the Soviet leadership and thought it would suit America’s interests. CIA chief Allen Dulles, the dour John Foster’s playboy brother, thought Khrushchev was drunk and warned that his emotional nature made him “the most dangerous person to lead the Soviet Union since the October Revolution.” In the end they decided to do nothing and see what happened. Still, to put out feelers, the State Department sent the Boston Symphony Orchestra to Russia that September.

  The effect was sensational. “The usually decorous elite of the Soviet capital went wild,” the New York Times reported, adding that the word in the hall was that the Americans were better than any Soviet orchestra, even at playing the Soviet national anthem. “‘Culture’ is no longer a sissy word,” declared C. D. Jackson, a leading presidential adviser on psychological warfare. But the glow was short-lived. When Sol Hurok tried to bring over the Moiseyev Dance Company, with its spectacular routines based on Soviet folk dances, negotiations foundered on the U.S. requirement that foreign visitors be fingerprinted; Khrushchev angrily retorted that Soviet citizens would never submit to an indignity “reserved for criminals.” Then, within weeks of the Boston orchestra’s triumph, student demonstrations in Hungary snowballed into a national revolution against Soviet domination. At first the Red Army stood fast as the regime fell, but when the new government announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Bloc security system formed the previous year as a counterweight to NATO, Khrushchev reluctantly ordered in the tanks. His hope that nations would choose communism of their own free will diminished with every shell, and as thousands died and hundreds of thousands scrambled to escape, all cultural exchange was called off.

  Eisenhower, who presented a sunny, homey face to the world but spent sleepless nights staring anxiously at the ceiling, was never going to risk war by intervening in Eastern Europe. Besides, his criticism of the Soviet invasion was blunted by the infuriating coincidence that the Israelis, French, and British had chosen exactly the same moment to launch a surprise invasion of Egypt to seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal—without consulting the Americans. Ike angrily brooded that the Soviets “might be ready to undertake any wild adventure. They are as scared and furious as Hitler was in his last days.” His fears seemed justified when Khrushchev threatened to deploy troops to the Middle East and fire nuclear-tipped rockets at Egypt’s attackers. The threat was widely held responsible for the humiliating cease-fire that Britain announced the following day, and Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, publicly praised the Soviet Union as his country’s savior and special friend. In private he was well aware that concerted U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure had saved him, but the Soviet Union’s prestige rose across the Middle East and the Third World, while America’s sank along with that of its irksome allies.

  For Khrushchev, luck had transformed a disaster into a triumph. He had not had the slightest intention of firing rockets at anyone, but the mere threat seemed to have magically stopped a major Western offensive in its tracks. Greatly emboldened, he bet his career and his country’s future on building a monster rocket that could hit New York and Washington before America’s bombers were even scrambled. The beast was already under development at a top-secret missile research center north of Moscow. Ten stories high, with a flared skirt of four huge booster rockets, the R-7 was designed to reach the East Coast of the United States in less than half an hour.

  His motives were both tactical and practical. The Soviet bomber fleet and its nuclear arsenal lagged far behind America’s, and Khrushchev had his sights set on slashing the military budget, not adding punishingly expensive new programs. He needed the savings to pay for two grand projects that he was convinced would prove the Soviet system’s ability to deliver. The first was a mass building program of prefabricated suburban apartment blocks that would rescue Soviet citizens from Stalinist communal apartments, with their padlocked cupboards in shared kitchens and their rows of toilet seats hung on hooks in shared bathrooms. The second was a visionary scheme to turn eighty million acres of Central Asian steppe into workable farmland that required the relocation of three hundred thousand farmworkers and fifty thousand tractors.

  The fact that the hideously complex rocket technology was not yet proven did not dissuade him from his plan, and neither did the staggering cost of building multiple launch pads. Rockets, he pointed out to Kremlin skeptics, “are not cucumbers; they cannot be eaten, and only so many are necessary to repel aggression.” Since the Suez ploy had been so successful, he decided the existence of the missiles was anyway not so important as the belief that they existed. Buoyed up with impatience and excitement, in speech after speech he began to threaten the West with nuclear annihilation. The speeches were all the more spine-chilling for being delivered in the reckless tone of a playground bully. The Soviet Union, he blustered, was turning out missiles
“like sausages.” The missiles were so far ahead of America’s that they could wipe out cities like swatting gnats. Asking visiting American politicians where they were from, he would circle their hometown on a map—to remind him, he affably explained to them, to spare it when the rockets flew. The fib was so successful that the West began diverting astonishing sums to compete with the nonexistent Soviet rockets, which was satisfying in a way but also meant that if the truth were ever discovered, the whole game would be up.

  PURSUING HIS grinning megalomaniac act, the Kremlin showman also began to uncouple a few links in the Iron Curtain. Boasting that the Soviet Union not only was unafraid of comparison with the rest of the world but also positively welcomed it, he announced that in the summer of 1957 the capital would open its gates and host the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students.

  For unreconstructed Old Bolsheviks it was all too much. A plot that had been brewing since the Secret Speech now came to a head. Malenkov was the leader: humiliated by his power station billet, he was newly threatened by Khrushchev’s attempts to decentralize industrial management. Molotov joined him; after stoically arguing against peaceful coexistence, he had been removed as foreign minister by Khrushchev, who made him the (iron) butt of many jokes. After some persuasion, Khrushchev’s old mentor “Iron Lazar” Kaganovich came on board, too: the unrepentant Stalinist had been disoriented by the recent changes. The suave Bulganin, Khrushchev’s close ally, who had taken over from Malenkov as premier, wavered but eventually fell in with the plotters.