美国国家公共电台 NPR 'The Year I Was Peter The Great': A Young American In Soviet Russia

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

At age 87, Marvin Kalb has spent a great many interesting years. He was a Moscow bureau chief and a diplomatic correspondent for CBS and for NBC. He's been the host of NBC's "Meet The Press" and the author of many books. And his new book is a memoir 1 of one especially interesting year - 1956. Kalb was a graduate student doing research in Moscow as part of the U.S. diplomatic mission to what was then the Soviet 2 Union. And for reasons that we'll explain in a moment, his book is called "The Year I Was Peter The Great."

Marvin Kalb, welcome to the program.

MARVIN KALB: Thank you, Robert.

SIEGEL: And first, let's set the world stage here for a moment. 1956. It's a decade after the end of the second world war. The Cold War is underway. Joseph Stalin's been dead for three years, and his successor was a rough-hewn character named Nikita Khrushchev. And in early 1956, Khrushchev gave a famous secret speech denouncing Stalin, who to that point had been worshiped as a great wartime leader and modernizer 3. Marvin Kalb, the speech was supposedly secret, but somehow all the people in Russia seemed to know at least part of what he'd said.

KALB: Because of the grapevine system in the old Soviet Union. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the impact was so enormous that people were seen in the auditorium 4 taking nitroglycerin tablets. Some of them literally 5 passed out. A number of them, when they got back to their hotel rooms, committed suicide because they were all associated with Stalin. But the impact which was so enormous to me was the impact on the Russian people. All of their lives, historically, they had never had a feeling of personal freedom. Everything was vested in the power of the vozhd, the great leader.

SIEGEL: Well, you were witness to something. As you describe it, you used to go to the reading room of the Lenin Library...

KALB: Oh, yes.

SIEGEL: ...To do research on the dissertation 6 for the doctorate 7 that you never actually finished. Is that right? And you would go there among students, mostly Russian students. Usually they were quiet. One evening, though, you describe an amazing scene. What happens?

KALB: What was amazing was you're right. Everything was very quiet. And suddenly one young man got up and, speaking not in a loud voice, began to say what Khrushchev had said against Stalin and then said, but why doesn't that apply to Khrushchev himself? And there was a gasp 8, literally. You could hear a gasp. And then another person would stand up, and then a third, and then a fifth. Suddenly the entire room of hundreds of kids throwing copies of Pravda on the floor, denouncing Communism, denouncing Stalin, of course - that was now acceptable - but also denouncing Khrushchev.

I would go back night after night, and three out of five nights it was a repeat performance. And what was remarkable 9, the police never intervened. So they must have got the word from on high that it was all right for these kids to denounce even Khrushchev.

SIEGEL: On the Fourth of July of 1956, the top Soviet leadership came to an American Independence Day party. The U.S. ambassador, Charles Chip Bohlen, was the host. And you, as a member of the diplomatic mission, you had an assigned role.

KALB: I did. At the time - I still am sort of - 6'3", thin. I had been in the United States Army. And I rose to the illustrious rank of PFC, private first class.

SIEGEL: (Laughter) Yeah.

KALB: And the ambassador says to me, you are going to have to look after marshal Georgy Zhukov, the great hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, the defense 10 minister of the Soviet Union, the man who deals with nuclear weapons. And so the night before I read up everything I could at the embassy on Zhukov. And what I found out that was terribly important to me the next day was that he drank a lot of vodka. He arrives. I am introduced to him. And I begin to ask him questions about Stalingrad. He loved to talk about it.

Meanwhile, Tang, the butler of the ambassador whom I had briefed the day before, had a tray set up especially so that one corner of it was filled with vodka and the other corner with water. But they all looked alike. Tang set it up so that every time the marshal reached for a drink he invariably got vodka and I invariably got water.

SIEGEL: You downed a shot of water right there.

KALB: Shot of water, and he did a shot of vodka. After about 40 minutes he was getting a bit tipsy.

SIEGEL: (Laughter).

KALB: And so he grabbed me by the arm and walked me toward Nikita Khrushchev. And he said, Nikita Sergeyevich, I have finally found a young American who can drink like a Russian. Well, Khrushchev absolutely loved that line. And he looked up at me and he said, young man, how tall are you? I said, I'm six centimeters shorter than Peter the Great. He began to laugh. Everybody began to laugh. And from that moment on, even when I came back to Moscow for CBS, I was Peter the Great. That meant I could get close to Khrushchev when other reporters couldn't. And that was the power of the Russian czar Peter the Great (laughter).

SIEGEL: Now, in that year, by the time 1956 ended and this - what seemed like a great liberalization and great opening within the Soviet Union - by the end of it, Nikita Khrushchev is speaking in praise of Joseph Stalin.

KALB: That was one of the most disappointing moments in my life and, I think, in anybody who had spent any time in Russia in 1956. This thing called the thaw 11, the way in which Khrushchev's attack on Stalin had the effect of liberalizing the society, it not only liberalized Soviet society. It liberalized the entire satellite world in Eastern Europe. And the effect was starting in Poland and then going on to Czechoslovakia and going on to Hungary. And there the Hungarian people went all the way. They wanted their freedom, which meant to them that they were able to vote, they could vote whom they wanted, they could have two parties, and they wanted to be independent of the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev then had a crucial decision. He could crack down on the Hungarian Revolution and end it, no matter how bloody 12 that would have been, but he would have retained his personal power. Or he could have said to the Hungarians, go your own way. Have freedom. And what he did at the end of the year was not only re-embrace Stalin, but crack down and crush mercilessly the people who had risen to the promise of freedom that he himself had set loose.

And what the Russian people have learned in the last 50, 60 years, now with Putin, they live with their powerful vozhd, and they're happy with having a strong leader. But back in their minds is the memory of 1956. And what Putin is doing right now is saying, you Russians can have as much freedom as you like. You can talk about anything you like in your kitchen, in your bedroom with the pillows over your head. I don't care about any of that. But you will never talk against me. And that's that power that he still retains.

SIEGEL: Marvin Kalb's new memoir is called "The Year I Was Peter The Great." Marvin Kalb, thanks for talking with us.

KALB: Thank you, Robert.

(SOUNDBITE OF NIGHTMARES ON WAX'S "CHIME OUT")