Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (65 page)

77
  
listed the salaries:
“The Economic Situation of the Performer,” quoted in Andrea Olmstead,
Juilliard: A History
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 164.

77
  
$1,000 per performance:
VCL
, 68.

77
  
his parents’ help:
VC-2159 (Reel no. 33), Van Cliburn interviewed by Peter Rosen, TCU.

78
  
set about decorating:
SH;
VCL
, 68–69.

78
  
pot roast sandwich:
VCL
, 83.

78
  
spent his lunch money on bouquets:
SH.

78
  
“Would you call Van for me, please”:
Gary and Naomi Graffman, interview with the author;
I Really Should Be Practicing
, 312–13; James Barron, “Old Acquaintances Remember Cliburn,”
NYT
, February 27, 2013.

78
  
Naomi was feeling flush:
After Moscow, Van wrote her a check for one million dollars in repayment with interest for all the burgers. She did not cash it.

79
  
went berserk:
Mary Russell Rogers, “A Midnight Conversation with Van Cliburn,”
FWS-T
, May 18, 1997.

79
  
Naomi Graffman . . . tailed him:
Interview with the author.

79
  
help of a Juilliard classmate:
VCG.

80
  
floating excerpts from Scripture:
By the end of 1954, the Bible Balloon Project had floated 30,000 balloons carrying 163,000 Bible texts into Russia, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia from secret fields in West Germany.

80
  
“the singing of a beautiful hymn”:
Dwight D. Eisenhower to Secretary of State, memorandum, October 24, 1953; Eisenhower, Dwight D., Correspondence, 1953(1); Box 50, C. D. Jackson Papers, 1931–67; DDEPL.

80
  
emergency presidential fund:
The President’s Emergency Fund for Participation in International Affairs.

80
  
made Ike’s fund a permanent body:
The International Cultural Exchange and Trade Fair Participation Act of 1956. The previous year, the State Department asked for twenty-two million dollars, but the House Appropriations Committee reduced the figure by half.

80
  
twelve orchestras:
Including NBC’s Symphony of the Air, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. Ten were approved but not used; thirty-eight were turned down.

80
  
“showing the gang warfare”:
MMP, February 19, 1958, Folder 5, Box 2, WSP.

81
  
“We are not planning”:
MMP, December 8, 1954, Folder 1, Box 2, WSP.

5: THE SECRET SPEECH

82
  
“Stalin was a very distrustful man”:
Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 102.

84
  
“horrifyingly empty eyes”:
Richard Lourie,
Russia Speaks: An Oral History from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: E. Burlingame, 1991), 188.

84
  
“guarding a temple”:
Tzouliadis,
Forsaken
, 320.

84
  
“Everyone who rejoices”:
William Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
(New York: Norton, 2003), 96.

84
  
exceeded his quota:
Ibid., 100.

86
  
“the most destructive war in history”:
J. P. D. Dunbabin,
International Relations Since 1945
, vol. 2,
The Cold War: The Great Powers and Their Allies
(London: Longman, 1994), 233.

86
  
“the most dangerous person”:
John Lewis Gaddis,
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 239.

86
  
“The usually decorous elite”:
Welles Hangen, “Boston Symphony Gets Standing Ovation at First Concert in Moscow Conservatory,”
NYT
, September 9, 1956. That year the Metropolitan Opera also toured Europe with CIA money.

86
  
“‘Culture’ is no longer a sissy word”:
Saunders,
Who Paid the Piper?
225.

86
  
“reserved for criminals”:
Elie Abel, “U.S. Twits Soviet on Its Own Fingerprinting Rules,”
NYT
, June 2, 1956. The Moiseyev Dance Company finally made it to America while Van was competing in Moscow, thrilling audiences nationwide.

87
  
“might be ready”:
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956–1961
(New York: Doubleday, 1965), 90.

88
  
“not cucumbers”:
“The New Line,”
Time
, June 6, 1960.

89
  
The showdown:
My reconstruction draws on
NKCS
, 228–47; Chuev,
Molotov Remembers
, 346–60; Avis Bohlen, “Khrushchev and the ‘Anti-Party Group,’” working paper CAESAR XV, April 27, 1962, Office of Current Intelligence, CIA, foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/14/caesar-30.pdf.

89
  
“rightist deviation . . . Trotskyist and opportunist”:
Bohlen, “Khrushchev and the ‘Anti-Party Group,’” 18.

90
  
“Only you are completely pure” . . . “Stalin’s shit”:
Montefiore,
Stalin
, 667–68.

90
  
“You are young”:
Bohlen, “Khrushchev and the ‘Anti-Party Group,’” 23.

91
  
World Festival of Youth and Students:
For its politics, see Pia Koivunen, “The World Youth Festival as an Arena of the ‘Cultural Olympics’: Meanings of Competition in Soviet Culture in the 1940s and 1950s,” in Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic, eds.,
Competition in Socialist Society
(Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2014), 125–41.

91
  
CIA plants:
TOML
, 175; John Prados,
Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 92–93. For the American contingent’s experiences, see Max Frankel, “Voices of America in Moscow,”
NYT
, August 11, 1957; Frankel, “Moscow Reality Cools U.S. Youth,”
NYT
, July 30, 1957.

91
  
Three million Muscovites:
William J. Jorden, “Gala Parade Opens Moscow Youth Fete,”
NYT
, July 29, 1957.

92
  
“Brodvay”:
Harrison Salisbury, “‘Lost Generation’ Baffles Soviet; Nihilistic Youths Shun Ideology,”
NYT
, February 9, 1962. In 1990 the street reverted to its original name, Ulitsa Tverskaya.

92
  
“Why should anyone”:
Harrison E. Salisbury, “Russia Reviewed: Life of Soviet Common Man Is a Constant Struggle,”
NYT
, September 24, 1954.

92
  
“like parrots”:
“Soviet Youth Gets Lecture on Sloth,”
NYT
, March 21, 1954.

92
  
educated hooligans:
Harry Schwartz, “Hooligans Plague Schools in Soviet,”
NYT
, April 16, 1954.

92
  
“aristocrats and other loafers and hooligans”:
Ibid. The speaker was Komsomol national secretary A. N. Shelepin; Malenkov and other top officials attended.

93
  
“Today you’re playing jazz”:
As recalled by Lyuba Vinogradova.

93
  
efforts to jam it:
By the late 1950s the Kremlin was spending more on jamming Western broadcasts than on domestic and international broadcasting combined.

93
  
“told wild tales”:
TOML
, 164.

93
  
one young Russian:
Alexander Osipovich, “Fifty Years Since Sax Hit the Soviet Union,”
Moscow Times
, July 25, 2007.

93
  
“Moscow Nights”:
Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi and Mikhail Matusovsky wrote the song as “Leningradskie Vechera” (Leningrad Nights) in 1955; at the Ministry of Culture’s behest, they rewrote it as “Podmoskovnye Vechera” (Evenings in Moscow Oblast).

94
  
originated with the Union of Soviet Composers:
The sequence of events is unclear, but the idea seems to have been raised at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers held between March 28 and April 5, 1957; the Congress was delayed for a year to digest the upheaval of the Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret Speech, giving its doctrinaire leaders time to perform an about-face.

94
  
made him feel sick:
Maya Plisetskaya,
I, Maya Plisetskaya
, trans. Antonia W. Bouis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 181.

94
  
arts spending:
The following figures are from Howard Taubman, “Challenge for U.S. Seen in Soviet Culture,”
NYT
, July 4, 1958.

6: THE RED MOON

97
  
“We are bringing you”:
The Sputnik Moment
, documentary film dir. David Hoffman, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhJnt3xW2Fc.

98
  
“REDS WIN SPACE RACE WITH MAN-MADE MOON”:
New York World-Telegram
, October 5, 1957.

98
  
“SIGHT RED BABY MOON OVER US”:
Daily News
(New York), October 5, 1957.