On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Monitoring developments in the Cold War was my foremost concern in reporting from Moscow. Having observed Khrushchev’s reckless tactics in Berlin, I arrived in the Soviet capital convinced that there was a real and ever present danger that he might ignite World War III through some miscalculation. It was extraordinarily difficult to ascertain and define what were the policies and intentions of the secretive men in the impenetrable Kremlin. Correspondents lived and worked encased within a complex of walls.

  Audrey and I managed to surmount one such wall thanks to our four dauntless daughters. We were quartered in one of the so-called diplomatic ghettos for foreigners on Prospekt Mira in a four-room apartment shared with the girls’ pets: five cats, an ailing pigeon, two goldfish, and two turtles. There was only one entrance to our walled compound, at which a Soviet militiaman was posted. Neighboring Russian homes beyond the wooden wall were as remote to us as the moon. That was until the self-styled “Fabulous Four” consisting of Susan, now nine, Karen, seven, Lesley, five, followed by Robin, three, launched their breakout. The Fabulous Four pulled out boards in the wooden wall and looked into the eyes of Russian children in a playground. Without delay the Russian children taught our kids their first Russian word. It was poyedem, meaning “let’s go, let’s go and play.” Not having any idea they were trespassing on forbidden territory, our girls crawled between the slats of the wooden wall and joined their new playmates. When the Soviet guards observed this commingling, they ordered our children to return to their ghetto space. Soon after, when the children continued to defy the rules, the wooden wall came down and a construction crew put up a stone replacement. But in their transcendent wisdom, the children were not to be separated. At the first snowfall, our children built snow steps while their Russian friends did the same on the other side, and soon they were chatting atop the stone wall. When the Russian children asked to visit our apartment, Susan did cartwheels to divert the guards while Karen led their pals across the courtyard. Thereafter, the militiamen seemed to give up and wink at this clandestine traffic. Our older daughters were relaying to us gossip of the neighborhood, telling of the joys and tears of Russian life in overcrowded apartments. Hidden in family cars they were smuggled by their pals to dachas on the outskirts of Moscow beyond the travel limit for foreigners. Consumed with curiosity about everything about them, the Fabulous Four ventured ever farther. Observing Susan as she took ballet lessons, the director of the Bolshoi School, Madame Golovkina, commented that she had talent and brought her into the school. Susan enthralled us with insights to the cultural world.

  After a year, Susan and Karen, having acquired some grasp of Russian, asked if they could attend the Russian elementary school rather than the Anglo-American School for foreigners. They became the first American children in Moscow to attend a Russian elementary school. They donned the uniform of brown dress with white apron but were excused, given they were Americans, from wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the “Young Pioneers.” At PTA meetings Audrey and I met parents eager to know us. The girls never complained about the lack of anything or having to sleep on double-deckers in a tiny bedroom overstuffed with clothes and toys. Audrey and I recollected with amusement how we’d been cautioned about going to Moscow with children. At times the Fabulous Four were more at home than we were. Tumbling about, they provided us with needed respites from the harshness of life in Moscow. After a year I noted in a letter to Clifton Daniel, the managing editor: “I am convinced that it is better to send a family here, rather than a single man. The family group provides a natural buffer against many of the strains.” In our apartment we were guarded in discussing what we learned from diplomatic contacts or our Russian friends and neighbors. We lived with the knowledge that there were KGB listening devices secreted about and that our maid and the office chauffeur, however friendly, were assigned to us by UPDK, the government-run agency that serviced foreigners. One night a lighting fixture in the ceiling above the foot of the double bed in the small room where Audrey and I slept exploded and exposed a listening device. The KGB had been listening to some choice pillow talk.

  The KGB unknowingly was instrumental in transforming Audrey from sculptor into a full-time journalist. When she went to a Russian store to buy clay and tools, she was turned away by the clerk, who said he was not permitted to sell art supplies to foreigners. A distinguished Russian portrait sculptor happened to be standing nearby when this exchange took place and offered the use of his studio to Audrey. She did her sculpting there happily until one day there was a telephone call to Audrey’s language teacher from her Russian benefactor advising Audrey not to come to the studio. He explained that his friend had been arrested for associating with an American. Unable to continue sculpting, Audrey turned full-time to photojournalism, producing among other media work at least sixteen illustrated articles from Moscow for the New York Times Magazine—including such pieces as a cover story on the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to enter space, and Robert Frost, the American poet, in conversation in a café with the leading Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

  Less than two weeks after my arrival in Moscow, one of the most momentous developments in world politics began to unfold. On June 12 there appeared an editorial in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, which denounced unidentified “revisionists and sectarians.” On that day, picnicking at Uspenskaya, a sandy spit on the Moscow River, I sat beside Marvin Kalb, a CBS specialist in Russian affairs, and Max Frankel, whom I was replacing as the Times correspondent in Moscow, with a copy of Pravda spread on our blanket trying to divine just whom the vitriolic editorial was directed against. It was actually the first hint in the Soviet press of the veiled ideological polemics in progress between Moscow and Peking. We were to learn the polemics were harbingers of a dispute whose implications would alter the balance of power in the world. The Western nations would no longer be dealing with a monolithic Communist bloc. By 1969, the split would bring on clashes on the Siberian border between Soviet and Chinese troops. The Chinese would initiate construction of a nationwide system of air raid shelters against the possibility of a Soviet nuclear strike. The implications were also enormous for the United States. Seeking help in withstanding Soviet pressure on his borders, Mao Zedong eventually reached out for a new foreign support by mending relations with the United States embodied in the Shanghai Communiqué entered into with President Nixon in 1972.

  In the weeks following publication of the puzzling editorial in Pravda, similar commentaries appeared in the Soviet press. I filed a succession of dispatches quoting the commentaries and speculating that the “monsters” being denounced were the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Every such dispatch was blocked by Soviet censors. The speculation about a Sino-Soviet rift intensified in November when a summit conference of leaders of eighty-one Communist parties was convened in Moscow. In open rebuff to Khrushchev, Mao did not attend, sending Liu Shaoqi, China’s head of state, in his stead to lead the Chinese delegation. In late November, working with Arrigo Levi, a brilliant Italian correspondent for Corriere della Serra, I learned from sources in the conference that a severe ideological rift had developed with the delegations dividing and joining the opposing Chinese and Soviet camps. Liu Shaoqi, pursuing the Maoist line, was urging militant revolutionary action by Communist parties worldwide rather than reliance on Nikita Khrushchev’s newly declared policy of “peaceful coexistence.” The Khrushchev stratagem called for winning over the developing countries to the Communist bloc through political and economic attraction without necessarily resorting to violent revolution or war with the Western powers

  On the evening of November 23, I went to the Central Telegraph Office, where Glavlit, the Soviet censorship office, was located and wrote a lengthy dispatch on the ideological split based on the leaks from members of the congress delegations. I had no real expectation that it would get through censorship. The dispatch reported in detail on the exchange of hostile polemics between the Chinese and
Soviet ideological blocs. Khrushchev was gaining support for his policy from mainly the European parties, while the Latin American, North Korean, Indonesian, and Albanian delegations were leaning toward Liu Shaoqi. As required, I pushed two copies of my story through the green curtain which masked the censor’s booth and waited. After several hours, my carbons, which in keeping with the usual procedure would show any penciled-out lines, were returned to me unmarked. I was astounded. The Russians had decided for the first time to allow the ideological dispute to be made fully public and had, therefore, passed my cable. My dispatch was already was en route to New York and the next morning led the front page of the Times.

  At the moment, Western observers were not aware of the enormous price Mao was paying for daring to challenge Khrushchev. Five months earlier, in June, Khrushchev had summoned Communist Party leaders worldwide to a meeting in Bucharest during a congress of the Romanian Communist Party. Mao Zedong had refused to attend that meeting and sent Peng Zhen, the mayor of Peking, in his place. At the congress Khrushchev furiously denounced the Maoists, accusing them of “adventurism” and “deviationism,” lumping them with their Albanian ideological allies. Peng Zhen responded by scornfully criticizing Khrushchev for blowing hot and cold in his exchanges with the West. He was alluding to the inconclusive encounter of the Soviet leader with President Eisenhower the previous month in Paris when the Russian broke up an East-West summit meeting by raging about the U-2 spy flight over the Soviet Union by Gary Powers. He characterized Khrushchev as “patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical.” Peng’s retort infuriated Khrushchev, and overnight the Soviet leader impulsively ordered termination of the Soviet aid program to China. Within the next month, 1,390 Soviet expert advisers were withdrawn from China, 343 contracts were scrapped, and 257 cooperative projects in technology and science ended. What I had been reading in Pravda about unidentified “revisionists and sectarians” was a reflection of the exchange of diatribes at the Romanian congress. The communiqué issued after at the congress emphasized unity in a new action program to attain world Communism but covered up the inter-party polemics.

  The Sino-Soviet split had its early origins in the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier, characterizing him as a paranoid tyrant. Mao had little reason to grieve for the Soviet leader. The Chinese Communists had been bullied by Stalin, and from 1927 to 1945 the Soviet dictator had wavered in his support of Mao in the struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. Speaking to the Eighth Central Committee on September 24, 1962, Mao confided that Stalin never trusted the Chinese Communists, believing them to be independent-minded Titoists except for the three-year period from the time of Peking’s intervention in the Korean War until Stalin’s death in 1953. Despite his differences with Stalin, Mao expressed irritation with the denunciation of Stalin, long considered one of the heroic figures of the international Communist movement, by the upstart Khrushchev and his retreat from the concept of the militant struggle for attainment of world Communism. By inference, the castigation of the Stalin cult of personality was also seen as a criticism of the adulation of Mao in China. With the passing of Stalin, symbol of Soviet infallibility, the Chinese Communists had begun at the 1957 World Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow to challenge Soviet leadership of international Communism.

  Despite the open break at the Moscow congress in November 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai attended the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow in October 1961. From the balcony of the hall, I watched the premier sitting grim faced among the other foreign Communist leaders on the stage of the auditorium of the new Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin as one Russian leader after another denounced the Albanians, the close ideological allies of the Chinese. It was, in fact, as the congress delegates knew, a proxy attack on the Maoists. Khrushchev accused the Albanian leadership of practicing the methods of the Stalinist cult of personality. Zhou Enlai rejoined with a call for a halt in the polemics, When his appeal went unheeded, the Chinese premier abruptly left Moscow while the congress was still in session. After Zhou Enlai’s departure, Khrushchev stunned the congress delegates. Pressing his policy of de-Stalinization, Khrushchev read a decree that sent me running to a telephone. Khrushchev proclaimed: “The further retention in the Lenin mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violation by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honorable Soviet people, and other activities in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.” A few days later Stalin’s body was removed without ceremony from the mausoleum and interred near the Kremlin wall beside the graves of less distinguished revolutionary leaders beneath the plain marker “J. V. STALIN, 1879–1953.” The day after Stalin’s body was moved I strolled with our office translator through Red Square, near the Lenin Mausoleum, where groups of people stood about arguing heatedly about the justice of what Khrushchev had done. Questions were asked. “Why were we not told before?” Prior to Stalin’s death in 1953, despite his cruelties, many Russians worshiped Stalin as a father figure. He had sustained the country during the Nazi invasion and had achieved victory in World War II. One of the people we spoke to was a uniformed serviceman, a pilot, who muttered: “I don’t believe it. I would have died for Stalin in the war.” When Audrey went to the Russian elementary school to pick up our daughters, Susan and Karen, she noticed that Stalin’s head was missing in the portrait of members of the Politburo which hung above a portal.

  After Zhou’s abrupt departure from the congress, the Peking-Moscow polemics escalated rapidly, fragmenting the international Communist movement. Between June 1959 and October 1961, the Chinese-Soviet alliance in effect dissolved, thus eliminating the ideological restraints which had inhibited the reemergence of the historical national antagonisms between the neighboring giants.

  One of the more inexplicable aspects of American policy in Asia during the 1960s was the disinclination to take cognizance or advantage of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Despite my reporting from Moscow on the ideological split, American policy makers continued to base their strategy in Asia on the theory that there existed a Soviet bloc, embracing both the Soviet Union and China, with the Kremlin as the directing center. It was not until the advent of the Nixon administration in 1969 that the momentous implications of the Sino-Soviet split began to be factored effectively into American policy making. By playing off one Communist giant against the other, Nixon was successful in managing the opening to China and obtaining concessions from the Soviet Union in negotiations on strategic arms limitation.

  In March 1961, Khrushchev abolished prepublication censorship, which dated from czarist days, although its existence had been officially denied. Correspondents were called to the Foreign Ministry and told deftly by Mikhail Kharlamov, head of the Press Department: “From this day forward, correspondents will be able to use facilities both at the Central Telegraph Office in Moscow and in their offices, homes, and hotel rooms to phone directly.” The abolition of censorship meant that I could file in much the same way as I would from any European capital. I would not have to worry about whether a dispatch would emerge from behind the green curtain or with deletions that would require rewriting to retain coherence. It also meant that in bitterly cold weather I would not have to trudge through the snow after midnight to the Central Telegraph Office to garner some important announcement from Pravda and push my dispatch through the green curtain.

  The lifting of censorship had another special significance for me. Beginning in the late 1940s, with its correspondents in Moscow handicapped by censorship, the Times deemed it necessary to employ an expert on Soviet affairs in New York who would provide supplementary reporting and analysis. During my stint in Moscow, the expert was Harry Schwartz. Schwartz had never served as correspondent in Moscow, but he was fluent in Russian, had impressive academic credentials as an economist, and during World Wa
r II had been trained as a military analyst. His articles for the Times were based on regular perusal of some thirty-five Soviet articles and interviews with returnees from the Soviet Union. I found Schwartz’s articles useful, but I had reservations about some of the conclusions arrived at far distant from the scene. The lifting of Soviet censorship, which I exploited at once by filing broader, more explicit analysis pieces, led to the transfer of Schwartz to another beat. I was no longer second-guessed by him.

  Although censorship had been lifted, there was always the possibility hanging over correspondents of expulsion for what they were writing. Moscow was a vital post, and given the dangers of the Cold War, I was determined to stay on. Therefore, I avoided any snide reporting about the personal demeanor of Soviet leaders. The fact that Khrushchev got tipsy after too many vodka toasts at diplomatic receptions concerned me less than what he was revealing about his thinking and policies. Whitman Bassow, bureau chief for Newsweek, one of the ablest and most experienced of the Moscow correspondents, inadvertently stepped over the line in August 1962 and was expelled for writing “crudely slanderous dispatches about the Soviet Union.” Bassow believed, as he explained in his book The Moscow Correspondents, published in 1988, that the ax fell on him most likely because of a humor feature which he tried to cable. It was a joke which he was told was circulating among Muscovites after Khrushchev ordered Stalin’s remains moved to the Kremlin wall. The joke:

  “A little boy asks his grandmother about Lenin.”

  “Ah, he was a great and good man.”

  “What kind of man was Stalin?”

  “Sometimes he was good and sometimes he was very bad.”