Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (50 page)

On September 11, 1971,
Nikita Sergeyevich suffered a heart attack and died in a suburban hospital. He was denied a state funeral or burial in the Kremlin Wall. There was no orchestra to play him on his way; instead, Chopin’s “Funeral March” hissed from the speakers of the brick morgue, where he was laid out with his twenty-six military and state medals, including three stars denoting a Hero of the Soviet Union, incongruously pinned to velvet cushions at his feet. In place of a solemn funeral procession, there was a bus painted with a black border that bore the coffin and the family members sitting around it on the bumpy thirty-minute ride to the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow’s second best.

The news had been embargoed until the day of burial, the silence a measure of the current leaders’ lack of confidence in their own popularity, and there was no announcement of the place or time of interment. Even so, dissidents had been rounded up on suspicion of intent to commit an
“antisocial act,” and hundreds of soldiers and policemen surrounded the cemetery, the officers shouting into radios, while more waited in reserve in covered trucks. The gates were firmly shut, and stuck next to them was a scrap of paper announcing in red pencil:
CEMETERY CLOSED FOR CLEANING
. They opened to let in the bus and a group of mourners with passes, then closed again. The bus continued to the farthest and least prestigious corner of the cemetery, passing through a final cordon of plainclothes guards and KGB officers until it was within sight and earshot of the elevated railway that ran outside the walls.

A fine mist fell as the coffin was placed on a bier. Red-eyed women in black shawls pressed close, weeping and kissing Khrushchev’s bald head. As well as family and close friends, there was a large group of Western journalists and a small crowd of artists and writers who had
lately missed Khrushchev’s noisy leniency. Nina Khrushchev stood with her three daughters in a black lace mantilla and dark gray coat, fighting back tears. Sergei, without coat or umbrella, strode to the mound of earth beside the grave and spoke the eulogy.

“There were those who loved him, there were those who hated him,” he said in distinct, measured tones, “but few could pass him by without noticing him.” The reporters held their whirring cine cameras above their heads as the rain fell harder. “We have lost someone who had every right to be called a man,” Sergei added. The reproach did not need to be said. A few more speeches followed, one from an old revolutionary from Khrushchev’s former hometown, Donetsk.
“We remember Nikita Sergeyevich as an unbending proletarian,” she testified, “one who was to us, the younger people, an example of fortitude, of heroism, of unbending will, of unbending passion in defense of the party line.” A young man whose father and grandfather had been executed under Stalin thanked the deceased premier for ending the Terror.

An official hurried the mourners along as they filed past the coffin. When the final moment came, Nina caressed her husband’s forehead and burst into heaving sobs. A worker in blue coveralls banged nails into the lid as a small brass band struck up a dirge. The black-suited players blared out the Soviet anthem while the coffin was lowered with ropes, and the gravediggers moved in with spades.

“You must disperse now and go on your way, comrades,” the official shouted. No one moved. A few onlookers who had managed to bluff their way through the security talked in low voices.

“All the rulers of Russia have been killers,” said one. “Through all our history only two have given us freedom—Alexander II and Khrushchev. And Russia took it out on them for that.”

“So what do you expect?” someone else asked, “that’s just our traditional way of behaving. But the important thing is that those two acted as they did.”

“Nikita Sergeyevich wouldn’t have wanted it to end this way,” said an old man. “He’d have invited all Russia to his funeral.”

Pravda
announced the death of
“merit pensioner Nikita Sergeyevich” in a one-sentence, seven-line notice. The rest of the world’s media properly commemorated the peasant’s son whose natural wit had taken him to the peak of power; the bluff, bumptious premier who tried to atone for his heinous deeds, who clung to his strong, simple convictions, and who worked in his own magnificently cockeyed way for peace.
“Mr. Khrushchev opened the doors and windows of a petrified structure,” veteran Moscow correspondent Harry Schwartz wrote in the
New York Times.
“He let in fresh air and fresh ideas, producing changes which time already has shown are irreversible and fundamental.” The headline, impossible to imagine just years before:
WE KNOW NOW THAT HE WAS A GIANT AMONG MEN.

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Great Expectations

RICHARD NIXON
had made his name as a foe of communism and had sealed his reputation in the Kitchen Debate. As president, he had begun by escalating the Vietnam War. So it was a startling turnabout when, three years into his first term, he announced plans to visit China.

The trip was a bold wager in the great game of geopolitical power. Nixon had set himself the perilous task of building a relationship with a nuclear-armed Communist country with ambitions to be a global player, in the hope of playing it off against another nuclear-armed Communist country that was already a global player. He arrived in February 1972, shook hands with Mao Zedong and premier Zhou Enlai, met with both men, and banqueted in the outsize Great Hall of the People. In the most secret session of the trip, so secret that not even the CIA knew what took place, national security adviser
Henry Kissinger sat down opposite Liu Shikun’s father-in-law, Ye Jianying, and briefed him on American intelligence of massive Soviet troop deployments along the Chinese border. Unbeknownst to the pianist, who was still in solitary confinement, the general had regained favor and was now defense minister in all but title; he and three other Chinese marshals had boldly advised Mao to play the “American card” against the Soviet Union, believing that the Soviets were a greater threat to China than the Americans.

Nixon’s visit was in large measure designed to pressure the Soviet
Union into restarting détente. The gamble paid off, and negotiations for a presidential visit to the Soviet Union, which had been broken off twelve years before, were soon concluded. Alarmed at the Sino-American alliance, the Kremlin also noted that Vietnam, economic competition, and social unrest had shaken America’s standing, and the Soviets considered that the United States would be a realistic negotiating partner in trade and arms control. Among reformers, there were even hopes that in finding themselves both outsiders in large parts of the world, the two superpowers might find themselves allies.

For this first visit of a U.S. president to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt’s wartime trip to Yalta—the first ever to Russia—
Sol Hurok planned a near repeat of the Eisenhower program. The impresario booked Van to appear in eight cities and Roberta Peters to perform in four operas, and then waited for a presidential blessing. For Van it was an opportunity to renew his ties and reassert his influence after seven long years. He arrived in Moscow early and found himself quartered in the monstrous Hotel Rossiya, an unloved Khrushchev legacy built to house deputies to his Palace of Congresses. Also staying in what was then the world’s biggest hotel was
Nixon’s aide Ron Walker, a Texan code-named Roadrunner who coordinated the president’s trips. “Staying” was putting it nicely: KGB agents guarded the hallways and elevator, guns in hand, keeping Walker and his party under house arrest in retaliation for Nixon’s mining of Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor. The hotel set up a small top-floor dining room for the captives, and Van joined them for meals. When he complained to his fellow Texan about that perennial bugbear of Westerners in Moscow, the telephone system—he didn’t like to let a day go without talking to his mother, he said, and couldn’t get through to her—Walker had a word with the White House Communications Agency, and Van soon had a White House Signal phone that he could use day and night. Walker also passed on
Nixon’s personal request that Van perform at a Spaso House banquet for the leaders, and he happily accepted.

On May 22 the president and the First Lady arrived in Moscow and settled into a large but not overly comfortable suite in the Kremlin
Palace annex. The following evening, Van opened his first Soviet tour in seven years in the Great Hall of the conservatory. To his astonishment the years had not dimmed his fans’ ardor. Hundreds of women waited outside the hotel, applauding and shouting, “Vanya!” and “Vanyusha!” At the concert they swooned and threw flowers and went wild, and the line to see him backstage snaked round the building as he found the right words for each fan. Afterward the Mikoyans welcomed him back to the House on the Embankment.
“What happened to you?” he said when Aschen Mikoyan opened the door. The last time he had seen her she was a teenager; now she was twenty-two, gamine, and pretty, with dark wavy hair, and she had a son. She also still had a crush on Van and, since he always called her “darling,” reason to believe it was requited.

Roberta Peters was amazed all over again by the power Van held over regular Russians. He was an even more imposing presence now, with an otherworldly aura of grace that drew people in and put them at their ease. When she complained that she couldn’t get hold of the best caviar, he called over the maître d’ at the National (where he had managed to move) with the natural authority of a returning Romanov. “Anything for you, my dear maestro,” the waiter said, and produced a giant can of beluga. Still, the atmosphere was even tenser than before. The guests at the National were ordered to keep their shades down, and when an official car was due to pass by, KGB officers knocked on doors to ensure they had complied. One morning Van was woken well before nine o’clock by a secret policeman, who insisted on watching from Van’s fourth-floor window as Nixon laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, across the way.
“Why did he have to do it so early?” Van said with a moan.

There were even signs that subtle differences over Van’s musicianship had hardened into something stronger.
“It’s hard to recall any major performer whose tour received such varying reviews, such sharp conflicts of opinion, as Van Cliburn’s recent concerts,” noted
Sovetskaya Muzyka.
“‘The pianist of the century,’ ‘the great conquering skill,’ and, right next to it, ‘boring declamation’ and ‘provincial
sentimentality.’” Nor did Van’s welcome cause the old stir back home.
“Cultural exchanges have settled into a decade-old pattern,” noted Max Frankel, now chief Washington correspondent for the
New York Times
but back for Nixon’s trip:

Van Cliburn is here playing the piano and Roberta Peters is singing in recital, and they are impressing the same old audiences and embracing the same old friends.

Moreover, the Soviet leaders seem to have found the formula by which to protect their political system from alien ideological viruses. They are yielding on pants for women and rock music for the young, but they intend to tolerate nothing that Mr. Nixon has in mind when he speaks of a free exchange of ideas. The warmth above does not seem to reach the permafrost below. Moscow is not Peking, but it remains farther still from Washington.

And Washington remained a world away from Moscow: Western ways might have infiltrated the Soviet Union, but fourteen years after the Kitchen Debate, Nixon was still unable to comprehend the Soviets’ worldview. It was as if cultural exchange had become an end in itself, rather than part of a broader meeting of minds.

This was détente without the excitement or the fun, but there was plenty of business to do. If Nixon in China had been like Marco Polo reveling in the wonder of discovery, in Moscow he was a traveling salesman working well-trodden turf, selling grain and conferences, linkups in space and arms control agreements. There were endless plenums and signing ceremonies in the Grand Kremlin Palace and meetings in Brezhnev’s office or at his dacha, where in time-honored fashion he took Nixon boating. The food, service, and accommodation suffered in comparison with those in Beijing, and there were the usual bureaucratic challenges, such as telephones and telex machines that were mysteriously misplaced at inopportune moments. But by
way of compensation the Soviets had
Swan Lake
to offer instead of the revolutionary Chinese ballet
Red Detachment of Women.

After exhaustive negotiations the two parties sealed the terms of SALT 1, the first comprehensive strategic arms limitation agreement, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which halted work on systems to intercept incoming missiles. Peaceful coexistence, even meaningful collaboration, was once again on the leaders’ lips on May 26 as they arrived at Spaso House prior to the late-night signing ceremony. After dinner, Van sat at the piano in the main hall, with its ionic columns and Montgolfier chandelier, and struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Soviet national anthem. The guests stood up, but General Secretary Brezhnev and his wife were not among them. Neither were the other top Soviet officials, Premier Alexei Kosygin and head of state Nikolai Podgorny.
All four, and only those four, had gone home after dinner. Perhaps they needed to rest, but it looked suspiciously like a deliberate snub on account of Van’s closeness to Khrushchev, or a refusal to accredit, as Khrushchev had, the American’s expertise in their musical heritage. To Van, with his romantic attachment to Russia and deep pride in his historic role, it was the cruelest cut.

Nixon addressed the people of the United States and USSR simultaneously on TV and radio, signed a final agreement outlining the principles of future relations, visited the Baptist church that had benefited from Van’s largesse, and met a group of cosmonauts. On the twenty-ninth the presidential party headed for Vnukovo Airport and, after a farewell ceremony, boarded a Soviet Ilyushin Il-62 jetliner to fly to Ukraine for the last leg of their nine-day Soviet tour. Mechanical failure kept the big plane firmly earthbound, and Premier Kosygin and President Podgorny red-facedly joined the Nixons on board while they waited for a replacement aircraft.