Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (14 page)

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.

The showdown took place at a Presidium meeting held late on June 18, 1957, a date chosen because many Khrushchev loyalists were absent from Moscow then. Malenkov immediately disputed Khrushchev’s right to preside and moved that Bulganin assume the chair. Most of those present were taken by surprise, but unease at Khrushchev’s behavior was widespread, and the vote carried. Malenkov bitterly accused Khrushchev of undermining collective leadership by making up policy on the hoof and demanded that he resign. In the heated debate that followed, the plotters labeled Khrushchev’s agricultural policies (including his authorization of limited private production) a
“rightist deviation” and his foreign policy “Trotskyist and opportunist.” His tomfoolery was summed up by his mania for planting corn, a crop that was unsuited to many Soviet regions. It was time to hit the brakes on de-Stalinization, before the entire system flew apart.

Over Khrushchev’s strenuous objections the plotters moved to vote on dismissing him as first secretary. The motion carried seven to four, but to their surprise, the flinty-eyed rustic refused to budge,
declaring the action illegal on the grounds that some Presidium members had not been notified of the meeting. He insisted on putting the matter to a vote by the full Central Committee, but his opponents refused, knowing full well that Khrushchev had packed it with his own people. Bulganin had stationed guards around the building, but a Khrushchev ally got word out to some Central Committee members who were in Moscow. Eighteen or twenty arrived, forced their way past the guards, and delivered a petition demanding a Central Committee plenum.

Uproar broke out in the Presidium chamber, and some of the missing members returned to find their colleagues deadlocked. Khrushchev’s supporters, meanwhile, summoned Central Committee members from the provinces and foreign embassies; Georgy Zhukov, now minister of defense, flew many in on military planes. Three hundred nine made it to Moscow in time; at least a third owed their positions to Khrushchev. The plenum opened four days after the first showdown and turned into an eight-day-long attack on the plotters. Speakers vied to accuse them of factionalism and complicity in Stalin’s purges, reviling them as murderers, criminals, and sadists whose hands dripped with innocent blood.
“Only you are completely pure, Comrade Khrushchev!” Malenkov bitterly retorted. “Didn’t you sign death warrants in Ukraine?” Kaganovich asked rhetorically. “All of us together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit!” Khrushchev screamed.
“You are young! We will correct your brains!” barked the increasingly senile Voroshilov, the ceremonial head of state, jumping up and waving his arms. Yet by the end he, too, had denounced the plotters, as had Bulganin. When Zhukov appeared and added his voice, Malenkov and Kaganovich confessed their guilt; only Molotov doggedly held out. Dubbed the Anti-Party Group, they were removed from their jobs and expelled from the Presidium and the Central Committee.

Khrushchev had lately made a habit of turning up with his friend and ally Mikoyan, now deputy premier, to the National Day parties thrown by foreign embassies. When the next one came round, he made a beeline for the gaggle of Western correspondents, to boast
that his opponents were alive and being found employment for which they were qualified. Show trials belonged to the past, but their jobs had been chosen with a sense of humor. Molotov, Stalin’s globetrotting foreign minister, was dispatched as ambassador to landlocked Outer Mongolia. Malenkov, an electrical engineer, became manager of a hydroelectric plant in eastern Kazakhstan; though life there was limited, Stalin’s intended successor was later said to be happier away from the pressures of the Kremlin. Kaganovich, the master builder of Moscow’s glorious Metro, was sent to run a cement plant east of the Urals. Voroshilov and Bulganin were reprimanded but stayed in their posts. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him a full member of the Presidium, but he was scared of the war hero’s popularity and power. Four months later he sent him on a tour of the Balkans and sacked him for “Bonapartism” while he was away.

Now, beyond doubt, Khrushchev was first among equals. It was still not enough.

ON JULY
28, a month after the ructious plenum, the
World Festival of Youth and Students took over Moscow. Its political bias was evident from the list of previous host cities (Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest, and Warsaw), and its joint organizers, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students, were known in the West as Kremlin fronts. Still, thirty-four thousand young people from one hundred thirty countries arrived in the broiling Soviet capital for two weeks of music and sport, among them sixteen hundred Britons and one hundred sixty Americans who consisted of rebels traveling against State Department advice and a roughly equal number of
CIA plants.
Three million Muscovites came out to welcome them as they paraded on trucks to Lenin Stadium for the opening ceremony. As the Americans waved the Stars and Stripes, the crowds strained past the police lines, bombarding the visitors with souvenir pins and candy and shouting the festival slogan
Mir i druzhba!
—“Peace and friendship!” The locals were supposed to meet foreigners in groups, under KGB or police supervision; one
young Soviet journalist whose father had just returned from the Gulag panicked as a truckload of Italians laughingly pulled her aboard. Yet the operation spun out of control, and Moscow’s youth was soon reveling in unprecedented and virtually unfettered contact with Westerners. The Soviets asked for news about émigrés such as Stravinsky, and the visitors asked why Moscow was so poor and shabby even though it had just been given an expensive face-lift. In the sunny evenings, they clustered on the broad pavements of Gorky Street, the main drag known to Americophiles as
“Brodvay,” and engaged in passionate discussion. Many Muscovites repeated the old line that the United States was in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were gearing up to achieve world domination in a terrible new battle. They could not understand why the West was so antagonistic toward them.
“Why should anyone want to oppose the Soviet Union?” an interpreter asked an American journalist; the Communist Party was so clearly correct on all international questions that it was hard to imagine another viewpoint.