Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (15 page)

To the authorities this novel exchange of opinions was alarming, not least because they had a major problem with disaffected youth. In Stalin’s last years, the USSR had experienced a sharp rise in juvenile delinquency, ranging from mass slacking to violent and sometimes lethal assaults in schools. At first it was blamed on a long-standing Tarzan cult, which inspired otherwise normal Soviet youngsters to swing yodeling from trees and through upper-story windows while sporting shaggy haircuts and dressing
“like parrots”; then on Western-style fashionistas, who wore zoot suits, bell-bottoms, and risqué ties and who spoke only English (or, in the case of two
educated hooligans who created a disturbance in the Hotel Moskva, English and Latin). The party youth organization Komsomol had recently declared war on the hipsters, who were known in Russian as
stilyagi
, together with
“aristocrats and other loafers and hooligans,” going so far as to suggest they should be sent to labor camps. Yet during the festival the
stilyagi
were far from alone in gaping at the visitors’ blue jeans, which became smoking hot items on the black
market, or obsessing over American cosmetics, gadgets, cars, and cigarettes. Nor were all the youngsters who flocked to jazz bands out to cause trouble, despite the common saying
“Today you’re playing jazz and tomorrow you’re going to sell out your motherland.” Millions listened to Willis Conover’s nightly jazz program on the Voice of America, mocking budget-busting
efforts to jam it, and the outlawed music was so popular that when the first American exchange students arrived at Moscow University, they
“told wild tales of Russian youth lusting to trade dormitory sex for jazz and pop recordings.” After a concert by a British jazz group at the festival,
one young Russian sneaked backstage past the KGB guards and recited like a mantra the names of American jazz legends; in return he got his first professional lesson on the saxophone, which Stalin had banned as an enemy instrument, and for the duration of their stay he posed as the sixth member of the quintet. Naturally, Western music did not win the festival song contest: that honor went to a sentimental ditty called
“Moscow Nights.” To the surprise of its authors, who had originally written it as “Leningrad Nights” and who thought it was a bit of nonsense, it also won the overall first prize and was on everyone’s lips.

As events reached a climax, the streets filled with Muscovites and foreigners dancing the jitterbug and holding hands in front of banners of Lenin. Brief, torrid affairs broke out between Russian girls and foreign men, especially black men. The dark fields and woods near the visitors’ hotels on the edge of the city filled with furiously copulating couples. Trucks equipped with searchlights and manned by surly Komsomol marshals in identical rough boiler suits revved up to catch them in the act and arrest the women, but in regimented Moscow, a city of hierarchies and lonely people, the lure of exotic foreigners was too strong, and the festival was followed nine months later by what was awkwardly called the “inter-baby boom.”

Ignoring the U.S. government’s dire warnings, forty-one Americans boarded a train, as a brass band played and a thousand Muscovites held out flowers, and set off on a three-week, all-expenses-paid tour of Communist China. That handy bit of propaganda could
not disguise the fact that the festival was an unmitigated disaster for Khrushchev. Young people coupling in the undergrowth were not what he had meant by peaceful coexistence. Worse, many Soviet youths appeared drawn to the West by disaffection as much as by positive attraction. Their apathy toward Communist ideals and their cynicism about the achievements of socialism were profoundly shocking to men and women schooled in the revolutionary class struggle.

KHRUSHCHEV WAS
determined not to put up the shutters, but he could ill afford to court ridicule again. Luckily the Ministry of Culture had a suggestion that was both reassuringly decorous and virtually guaranteed to impress Soviet genius on citizens and foreigners alike. The idea, which probably
originated with the Union of Soviet Composers, was to hold a high-profile music competition in Moscow.

With musicians such as Emil Gilels wowing the West, classical music had become prime evidence in the Soviets’ triumphalist case that their political system was the perfected culmination of everything that had gone before. Khrushchev was no aesthete—he complained of seeing
Swan Lake
so often that the mere prospect
made him feel sick—but nor had it crossed his mind to cut
arts spending. The Soviet republics supported 503 permanent year-round theater companies, 314 middle schools of the arts, 48 higher schools, and 43 advanced conservatories and theatrical and art institutes, while the Ministry of Culture had direct charge of 900,000 arts workers. Many were employed in the famously tough system of music training that funneled children as young as seven to specialist music schools, where the best were prepared for eight years’ further study at a conservatory. These incubators of excellence were famous for producing fast, brilliant pianists, who were considered unbeatable. Violinists were equally strong, and the two instruments were natural choices for the upcoming contest. The shackles of socialist realism had finally fallen from Soviet composers after the Secret Speech, and many Russian and Soviet masterpieces were chosen for the
program—including some that were seldom if ever heard abroad, which, intentionally or not, made life harder for foreign participants.

The proposal was taken to the Central Committee, which was persuaded not so much by the cultural benefits as by the propaganda prospects both at home and abroad, and raised no objections. As for the competition’s namesake, in a country that was still deeply wedded to its heritage, it could only be Tchaikovsky, whose name now adorned the Moscow Conservatory where the composer had so unhappily taught.

The first international competition to be held on Soviet soil was always going to be newsworthy. The catalyst that would make it potentially explosive was about to take off from a top-secret site thirteen hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

•
6
•

The Red Moon

AT
10:27 p.m. Moscow time on October 4, 1957, the desert of Kazakhstan was cold, silent, and dark.

At 10:28 there was a loud hiss and a dull roar, as if tectonic plates were shifting deep underfoot. A fiery glow flickered across the flat scrub and dunes, unmasking a hundred-foot-high monster held by four restraining arms. Flames spilled out of a pit in the sand, and smoke plumed into the air. There was a bright flash, and the roar grew deeper and more deafening than a thousand bass drums. The glow dipped and then intensified to a dazzling white as incandescent gases jetted up in columns. The roar and the drumming mixed with a hellish crackling that seemed to come from the center of an incinerating forest, and a blinding point of light rose above the ground. From the heart of the inferno, the behemoth sprang free and shuddered into the night sky riding a column of fire. Two hundred eighty tons of Russian metal, kerosene, and liquid oxygen were heading for space.

The bulbous missile with its four flanking boosters soared aloft at nearly four miles a second. One hundred sixteen seconds after launch the boosters jettisoned, drawing a fiery cross thirty miles high as they fell aside. The central core flexed and barely slowed its journey toward the heavens. At four minutes and fifty-five seconds it shuddered again as the liquid propellant ran out and the engine shut down. It was a second early and five miles lower than intended, but momentum
carried the craft another hundred miles through the atmosphere and into the blackness of space.

Twenty seconds later, pneumatic pistons nudged the nose cone away from the spent rocket. It sprang off to reveal the payload: a metal sphere the size of a beach ball, polished to shine like a star. Four spidery antennae whipped into position, and
Sputnik 1
, the rocket casing, and the cone began their maiden orbit around Earth.

It had taken just over five minutes for the Space Age to begin, and it began in the Soviet Union.

As the little orb headed to the East Coast of the United States, Americans were settling in to watch the premiere of a winsome suburban sitcom called
Leave It to Beaver.
On the news the big story was Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort nine black children to an all-white high school.

“We are bringing you the most important story of this century: mankind’s breakthrough into space,” the NBC radio announcer cut in. As word spread, families and neighbors drifted outside and stared at the evening sky. Astronomers peered through telescopes. The telemetry signal from the 184-pound ball was designed to be picked up by anyone with a shortwave receiver, and a ham radio station at Columbia University was first to broadcast the eerie sound: a chirpy
whoo-whoo-whee-whee
, gratingly repeated over and over again.

Visionaries had foretold the day when man would defeat gravity and leap above the earth’s atmosphere. Now the dream was a reality, and a new epoch had dawned for humankind. Yet, to Americans’ utter incomprehension, it had not dawned in the United States. It was as if the eeriest episode of
Science Fiction Theatre
had come to life, and the next day panic set in. Time and again America’s leaders had boasted that theirs was the Number One Nation, light-years ahead of the Reds in technology. There was no chance of the Russians smuggling a suitcase bomb across U.S. borders, went one joke, because they were still working on the suitcase. Now Americans were laughing out of the other side of their mouths, and the headlines were bold, tall, and brutal:

REDS WIN SPACE RACE WITH MAN-MADE MOON
SIGHT RED BABY MOON OVER U.S.
ORB SPANS U.S. 7 TIMES A DAY

Pundits compared the moment to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas or the splitting of the atom. Politicians thundered that
Sputnik
was a devastating blow to national prestige and security and proved that America was fast becoming a second-rate power.
“What went wrong?” puzzled one television intellectual. “How did a nation of backward peasants forge so dramatically ahead of us in the race to space?” The unspoken fear: if central planning could achieve such wondrous feats, perhaps communism really was the wave of the future.

In an age of civil defense and air-raid sirens, when schoolchildren practiced crouching under desks or in dark basements while clasping their heads to keep their skulls from flying apart, people needed no help to be afraid. Men and women interviewed on the news asked the same question: if the Russians had
Sputnik
, what else did they have up there? The answer came four days after the satellite launch, when the USSR detonated an enormous twenty-megaton thermonuclear bomb.
“This is a weight that our current rocket can carry anywhere,” Soviet radio declared. “Our
Sputnik
proves to the world that we have the first ICBM, the ultimate weapon.”

The moat of oceans that had kept Americans safe from mass destruction through two world wars had been leapt over in a single fiery burst. Bombers and submarines, they heard, were useless against missiles that could turn New York into a
“slag heap” within half an hour of the enemy’s pressing a button.
“If Russia wins dominance of this completely new area,” an air force general told a congressional committee, “well, I think the consequences are fairly clear: probable Soviet world domination.” A poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans believed a nuclear war would happen and that, when it did, at least half the population would be killed.

The news was about to get worse.
“In a masterpiece of propaganda
timing,” NBC reported thirty days after the first launch, “the Soviet Union announced it had launched a
Sputnik
number two, carrying a live dog. This is reportedly history’s first space traveler.” Moscow was talking about going all the way to the moon. From there, Communists could control the planet. How long before soldiers were sent up to attack America from outer space? Soon the airwaves filled with reports of strange objects sighted above Los Angeles and other cities.

For all the paranoia, the fear was real. The Soviet triumph was one of the greatest shocks in American history—as great in its way as Pearl Harbor. Until
Sputnik
beeped into their consciousness, Americans had owned the future. For many, the Nifty Fifties, with its drive-in restaurants, movie theaters, and churches (honk for amen), its Hula-Hoops and food blenders and beers and ball games on Saturday afternoons, was a decade of ease and prosperity and glitzy excess. Detroit was in the midst of its big tail-fin mania, grafting ever more outrageous protrusions onto the rear fenders of Cadillacs and their imitators, from the delta-winged Buick to the everyday Chevy and compact Rambler. “Suddenly, it’s 1960!” cheered the advertising slogan for the 1957 Plymouth. Now automobiles took on the flowing shape of the R-7 and sprouted radio antennae modeled on
Sputnik 1.
The Soviet satellite was a wake-up call that everything was not as it appeared, that the nation had been partying toward a precipice. Politicians more used to telling voters what they wanted to hear admonished their fellow Americans to renounce their love affair with material goods and shore up their preeminence in global affairs.
“The time has clearly come,” declared Republican senator Styles Bridges, “to be less concerned with the depth of pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin on the car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears if this country and the Free World are to survive.”