Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  In the morning’s New York Times the headline was gloomy: MIKOYAN ANGRY AS U.S. SPURNS BID FOR FREER TRADE. The next page carried the sunnier news of Van’s starring role at the fete, suggesting that the undercurrent of fellow feeling was still flowing strongly. Yet to Americans allergic to the color red, the second story raised more hackles than the first. One outraged housewife fired off a letter to Mark Schubart at Juilliard, expressing “consternation, anger and indignation” at Van’s embassy performance. “It is a pity,” she fumed, “to see an artist become embroiled in politics when he doesn’t know what the score is and, as in this case, when he accepts the patronage of people . . . who have stunned the civilized world with their unabating and wholesale criminal acts.” Probably much of official Washington agreed. Mikoyan had, after all, been one of Stalin’s intimates, while his younger brother, Artem, was co-designer of the Soviet Union’s most famous warplanes: the “Mi” in MiG stood for Mikoyan. Suspicions only grew when the deputy premier flew on to Cuba, where Fidel Castro had seized power during Mikoyan’s stay in America. The USSR had rapidly recognized Castro’s government, but in reality, no one in the Soviet leadership had heard of the bearded revolutionary; Khrushchev suggested contacting the Cuban Communist Party, who replied that Castro was a bourgeois in the employ of the CIA. Mikoyan’s task was to find out what on earth was going on in Cuba, but American hawks surmised that something sinster was afoot. As usual in the Cold War, they were convinced that their rivals exerted a diabolical grip on world events, a belief that flattered the other side’s attempts to catch up with the chaotic reality.

  IT IS not clear whether Van had heard of Naum Shtarkman’s fate before he met Mikoyan, but in any case there was little he could do. Standing up for his Soviet friend would have meant exposing himself, and however high his stock was, it did not license him to meddle in internal Soviet affairs, especially in an area where America had no claim to the moral high ground. In any case, his love for Russia ran too deep to be easily shaken, and his plans to return to Moscow that spring were derailed only when his career hit an unexpected bump. In February he was manicuring his nails in a San Francisco taxi when the vehicle went flying over a pothole and the nail file sliced into the middle finger of his right hand, which turned red and painfully swollen. He bandaged it up and played with his left hand for an audience of twelve thousand at the American Association of School Administrators conference in Atlantic City, but five days later he was admitted to New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery and underwent a delicate operation to drain an abscess. Journalists speculated about whether he would be able to play again, reporting that he had been days from losing the finger, and possibly his right hand and forearm as well. On doctors’ orders, he canceled three months of concerts and recuperated in Tucson before returning to New York to attend the Bolshoi Ballet’s debut at the Met on April 16. As in piano playing, the Soviets considered they were “ahead of the entire planet” in ballet, and the night, masterminded like most Soviet cultural visits by Sol Hurok, was the most glamorous that New York City had known in years. The capacity crowd of nearly four thousand included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Noël Coward; the orchestra played the American and Soviet national anthems; the troupe performed Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet; the audience stood and cheered; and the dancers applauded back. Yet many eyes, including those of the FBI, were on Van, standing in Smiling Mike Menshikov’s box surrounded by Soviet and American flags.

  On May 4, Van was presented with the prize for best instrumental performance with an orchestra at the inaugural Grammy Awards, which were handed out at simultaneous ceremonies in Beverly Hills and New York. His hand had finally recovered, and he was practicing hard. In June he set out on a whirlwind European tour, bringing down the house in such august settings as La Scala, in Milan, before returning to New York in time to attend the Soviet exhibition that had opened at the Coliseum as another manifestation of the new cultural exchange program. He toured the stands as an honored guest of the exhibition’s director-general, Aleksei N. Manzhulo—another fact the FBI duly recorded—and was astonished to see his face in full color on a piano-shaped box of chocolates. “My goodness, it’s me,” he said as a Soviet press officer explained that it was the best-selling candy in the Soviet Union. Elsewhere there hung a huge photograph of Van receiving his gold medal from Shostakovich. He sat at a Soviet-made “Estonia” grand piano, which he obligingly praised, and then played as the flashbulbs popped: first Schumann and Chopin, and then “Moscow Nights.” “All right, Van, go through one more routine,” a cameraman demanded, and he rattled off a Chopin ballade before recording a message for Soviet state radio, which broadcast it along with the whole impromptu concert.

  He was eternally obliging. The bon viveur in him loved the life of a concert pianist: the meetings with old acquaintances and new, the rehearsals and performances and parties, the famous friends and the attention. Yet the loner in him yearned for the self-communion of solitary practice. A few weeks later a New Yorker journalist ran into him under the marquee of the Plaza Hotel during a downpour, and they retreated to the Oak Room for onion soup. In an age of relentless publicity, the journalist asked, how did Van continue his struggle to master music?

  “Divine indifference,” said Van, happily slurping the last of his soup. “Swami Vivekananda says it is divine indifference that urges men to qualify for building an ideal. The Buddhist says ‘Neti! Neti!’—‘Not this! Not that!’ I suppose one could call it unconcern. Prestige or simple recognition is often mistaken for success. Nothing could be further from the truth. For me, the greatest possible success would be to be utterly alone without feeling the need to talk to anyone.”

  WITH VAN absent from Moscow, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic filled the gap on a State Department–sponsored tour. “Your music and ours are the artistic products of two very similar people who are natural friends, who belong together and who must not let suspicions and fears and prejudices keep them apart,” Bernstein rousingly told Russian musicians. He ended his last concert with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony; in the audience, the first time he had appeared in public since his censure, was Boris Pasternak. The effect was sensational, but it was quickly eclipsed when, on July 23, another American visitor became embroiled in the most famous verbal sparring match of the Cold War.

  Vice President Richard M. Nixon had come to open the American National Exhibition at leafy Sokolniki Park, in suburban Moscow, the counterpart to the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum. Futuristic glass-and-steel pavilions displayed chrome-finned automobiles, pleasure boats, heavy tractors, hi-fi sets, model railways, and modern art. A multiscreen film by Charles Eames called Glimpses of the U.S.A. played alongside fashion shows and dancers from Oklahoma. Muscovites flocked to have Polaroids taken of themselves and to munch on corn on the cob. At the permanently mobbed Pepsi-Cola stand—Coca-Cola had cried off—one woman complained that the brown liquid smelled like benzene, while men wanted to know if it could get them drunk. Most popular of all was the “Typical American House,” a full-scale replica of a six-room ranch-style suburban home furnished by Macy’s. The house was cut away for easy viewing, which, together with its shock value, earned it the nickname Splitnik. To its fifty thousand daily visitors, the most mind-boggling part was its kitchen.

  On a hot summer’s evening, Khrushchev gamely accompanied the famously Communist-hating Nixon to the official opening. The Soviet leader sported a roomy light gray suit and white homburg; Nixon, a dark tailored suit and dark tie. After the vice president cut the ribbon, they moved to a mocked-up RCA color television studio, where the cameras rolled and Nixon took the first jab by extolling the wonders of videotape. “This indicates the possibilities of increasing communication,” he said, grinning toothily, “and this increasing communication will teach us some things and it will teach you some things, too. Because after all, you don’t know everything.”

  “If I don’t know everything, you don’t know anything about communism—e
xcept fear of it,” Khrushchev shot back. Nixon was on the defensive; if anyone had told his opponent that a Soviet émigré founded Ampex, the firm that made the video recorder, he might have been floored. Khrushchev followed with a sharp cross, grunting that the Americans would doubtless use the video of the exchange for propaganda purposes and would not translate his words. Nixon slipped past this by promising that every word would be broadcast on American television. Khrushchev beamingly pumped his hand, and Nixon hit back that he hoped his words would be broadcast across the Soviet Union. “Da,” Khrushchev barked, slapping Nixon’s hand and going for a combination of punches. Jabbing his finger, the premier bragged that the Soviets were ahead in most things and would soon be saying “bye” as they overtook the United States. Taken by his own turn of phrase, he chortlingly repeated it in English, vigorously waving his hand to the delight of the crowd. Then he goaded a glum Nixon into congratulating the Soviets on their achievements in rocket science and astronomy. The first round ended in a draw.

  The Nik and Dick Show moved on to the model house, where Nixon scored some points by going on about how advanced America was. Standing by the railing in front of the kitchen, he aimed an uppercut at his opponent by boasting that capitalism alone could produce a comfortable home filled with laborsaving devices. “We don’t have to have one decision made at the top by one government official,” he explained. “We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice.” He ended with a low left hook: “Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?” Khrushchev bobbed and weaved, scoffing at the electric lemon squeezer and insisting that most Americans could ill afford these “typical” luxuries. Nixon gestured to a built-in panel-controlled washing machine, which a young Russian-speaking American was demonstrating, and found his mark. “In America,” he said with a smirk, “these are designed to make things easier for our women.”

  Khrushchev was on the ropes, and he knew it. In the Soviet Union, he weakly parried, women worked in every field, shoulder to shoulder with men.

  “I think that this attitude toward women is universal,” Nixon hit home. “What we want is to make easier the life of our housewives.” The vice president was not at all sure he had won. “I felt like a fighter wearing sixteen-ounce gloves and bound by Marquis [sic] of Queensbury rules, up against a bare-knuckled slugger who had gouged, kneed and kicked,” he later admitted. But in 1950s America, his blow for housewives’ convenience was decisive, and he was hailed for standing up to the Soviet bully. The bruising encounter burnished Nixon’s credentials as a statesman, and to Khrushchev’s dismay, it helped him win the Republican presidential nomination the following year.

  Ignoring the embarrassment as usual, Khrushchev bullishly maintained that it had been worth exposing his people to shiny appliances if it prodded the economy into producing desirable consumer goods. It was no use leaving faceless bureaucrats to decide what style of shoes people needed, he lectured perplexed party cadres; workers would only be more productive if they could vote with their wallets for things they actually wanted to buy. The exact mechanism by which that would happen was unclear, but when his experts calculated that the Soviet Union’s command economy could overtake the United States’ free-market economy in twenty years, he put his full faith in the figures. Khrushchev feverishly began to reorganize the Soviet bureaucracy and economy from top to bottom, impatiently demanding drastic improvements in impossibly short time frames. Soon a new national slogan was plastered on walls everywhere: CATCH UP WITH AND OVERTAKE AMERICA.

  Ever the believer, Khrushchev was convinced that communism could win on the terms set by Nixon, and he was ready to take his message to America itself.

  • 15 •

  Khrushchev in the Capitalist Den

  EISENHOWER HAD forbidden Nixon from mentioning the biggest news of all while in Moscow: just before he set off, Khrushchev had accepted the president’s invitation to visit the United States. The Soviet leader had been angling for an invitation for some time, and although his highly publicized embrace of Van the previous year certainly did not bring it about directly, it undoubtedly contributed to the modest warming of relations that made it possible.

  Khrushchev was secretly amazed and proud that he, a mere worker, should be embarking on a state visit to the capitalist superpower. Pride also made him prickle at the mere semblance of a slight, fret about behaving correctly, and resolve to be thoroughly unimpressed by what he saw. Yet in the few weeks between Nixon’s departure and his own, he was boosted by new triumphs of Soviet technology: that September, Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the moon, while the icebreaker Lenin, the world’s first nuclear-powered ship, sailed on her maiden voyage to clear sea routes in the Arctic Ocean. “Only people who refuse to look reality in the face can doubt the boundless possibilities for human progress offered by communism,” he rejoiced in a rallying speech before he left. Americans, meanwhile, contemplated the visit with a little hope and more hostility. To conservatives it was as if the Antichrist were dropping by Rome for eschatological talks with the pope.

  On September 15, 1959, Khrushchev touched down at Andrews Air Force Base in his brand-new Tu-114, a turboprop beast that was the largest and fastest passenger plane in the skies. He had been bursting to show it off and refused to back down even when engineers found cracks in the fuselage. Standing fifty feet from the ground, it was also the world’s tallest aircraft, a fact that was gratifyingly demonstrated when the airport steps proved too short to reach the forward hatch. Instead, Khrushchev, together with his wife, Nina; his son, Sergei; two of his daughters, a son-in-law, and accompanying officials and bodyguards had to clamber down the emergency escape ladder, thus presenting their rears to America.

  Khrushchev beamed at his welcome, which included a one-hundred-twenty-strong military honor guard, a twenty-one-gun salute, and the president waiting with three thousand members of the public and press. Under his gray Stetson, Eisenhower was tight-lipped. He had intended the visit to proceed only if Khrushchev backed off his ultimatum on Berlin, but his diplomats had not made the link clear, and the threat stood. As the president delivered a muted homily about universal peace, Khrushchev’s attention drifted. He held his homburg over his face to ward off the sun, fanned himself with it while mugging to the crowd, and playfully waved it to all and sundry. When the hat ran out of uses, he stage-winked at a young woman and took a dramatic interest in a butterfly that fluttered past. It was all done, noted a reporter, “with the studied nonchalance of an old vaudeville trouper.” Ike’s demeanor did not soften when Khrushchev took the stand and began crowing about the icebreaker and the unmanned rocket, which he made sure to mention had landed on the moon bearing the emblem of the Soviet Union.

  The motorcade sped into downtown Washington along a route lined with sparse crowds of curious onlookers, flag-waving Soviet embassy staff, and more than four thousand police and armed forces. Back home, Pravda reported that three hundred thousand turned out in the American capital, with hands swaying and shouts rolling like waves, adding that “not even the end of World War II brought such a sea of people onto the streets of Washington.”

  After talks at the White House during which Khrushchev presented as his official gift a model of the much-touted Soviet rocket, Ike proposed a helicopter sightseeing trip. The Soviet leader initially declined, fearing an assassination plot, but relented when he realized the president would be in the same copter. They took off at rush hour so Khrushchev could see the bumper-to-bumper cars heading to suburban houses just like the one he had pooh-poohed in Moscow. He remained studiedly silent throughout, though he certainly admired the helicopter: when he got home he ordered three for his own use.

  That evening, the Khrushchevs were the guests of honor at a White House state dinner. Ike wore white tie and tails; Nikita Sergeyevich, a dark suit pinned with medals. In his speech, Khrushchev acknowledged th
at America was wealthy but predicted that tomorrow the Soviet Union would be just as rich. “The next day? Even richer!” Music was provided by Ike’s favorite band, “a jazzy pop combo called Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians,” whose biggest hit was “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream,” but the Washington Post noted that the president had missed striking a note of harmony by not booking Van Cliburn. Van was disappointed himself, and wondered whether he would be invited to one of the Soviet receptions for Khrushchev. He placed a call to a Russian contact, with the FBI listening in, and was assured he would be included. Heartened, he announced that he was going to send three dozen roses to Madame Khrushchev at Blair House, the presidential guest residence.

  The day following the dinner was taken up with more tours and meetings, including a trip to the Agriculture Department’s experimental farm at Beltsville, Maryland, where Khrushchev declared the pigs too fat and the turkeys too thin. Photographers snapped away; luckily American editors were not as undiplomatic as the one in a well-known Soviet joke who struggled to find a suitable caption for a photograph of the premier with some prize hogs before settling on “Third from left, Khrushchev.” Still, a National Press Club dinner that evening, broadcast in prime time on the three major networks, threatened to turn into a turkey shoot. The first questioner asked why Khrushchev had remained silent while Stalin committed atrocities; red-faced and scowling, the Soviet premier refused to answer. Another pressed him on Hungary: the question, he fumed, “stuck in some people’s throats like a dead rat.” A third raised the topic of his infamous remark to a group of Western diplomats three years earlier: “We will bury you!” he had blustered, which many Westerners took as a threat to launch a nuclear strike. Khrushchev patiently explained for the umpteenth time that he had not alluded to an actual burial but to the inevitable historical triumph of communism predicted by Marxism-Leninism. Another reporter asked if he had plans to launch men at the moon, but unfortunately Khrushchev’s interpreter used a word for launch that was closer to throw. “What do you mean?” the Soviet leader thundered. “Do you mean abandoning them?” His voice mounted. “We don’t throw anyone anywhere, because we value our people highly. We’re not going to throw anyone to the moon.” Every so often the roller-coaster performance righted itself when Khrushchev’s plain, persuasive language drew applause from the hardened hacks, only to go for a loop into another cultural chasm.