Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (77 page)

289
  
lost himself on the cobbles:
“Part of My Heart Is in Moscow.”

290
  
Lenin Hills:
Now Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University in southwest Moscow.

290
  
Sukhodrev received an urgent call:
Sukhodrev recounts the episode in
YM
.

290
  
Janis was already booked:
Janis,
Chopin and Beyond
, 113–14.

291
  
“Kleeburn! Kleeburn!”:
Ibid., 106.

291
  
welcomed Van as its own:
“He was received here as a son that had come home,” wrote A. Zolotov in a piece headed “See You Again Soon” in a July 1962 edition of
Izvestiya
.

291
  
“not to my humble person”:
“Part of My Heart Is in Moscow.”

291
  
falling-out with Kondrashin:
Tassie,
Kirill Kondrashin
, 155, 162.

292
  
dacha outside Moscow:
Van’s day at the dacha is captured in video recording RR185 [June 17, 1962], Sergei Khrushchev home movies, JH. See also
NKCS
, 504–5;
YM
; “First Photo of USSR’s No. 1 Family,”
Life
, September 21, 1959, 38–41; “Red’s Dacha Is Luxurious” (AP),
Milwaukee Journal
, July 27, 1959.

292
  
“We’ve been watching you . . . you love classical music”:
Madigan, “Mementos of the Musician.” In the same interview, Van is quoted as saying that Khrushchev took him “on his boat from his dacha and we motored into the middle of Moscow so we could look up at the palace of the Kremlin.” As Sergei Khrushchev pointed out to me, it was and still is impossible to ride by boat from the Gorki-9 dacha to Moscow through the Rublevskaya Dam, which has no locks.

293
  
“Because you are too skinny, Vanya”:
“‘Vanya’ Cliburn: Popular Does Not Mean Good.”

293
  
“Wouldn’t you like” . . . “
Kvass
, never”:
NKCS
, 504–5. Apparently Van quickly developed a taste for
okroshka
, or at least he claimed to love it when Viktor Sukhodrev’s mother cooked it for him and Rildia Bee (apparently on this same visit), even asking for seconds.

294
  
useful political cover:
Khrushchev’s show of charm to Van appears to have been part of a pattern. On May 30, Khrushchev and his family had also attended a Benny Goodman concert in Moscow, part of the first officially sanctioned jazz tour of the USSR, despite his well-known dislike of jazz. As the first ships carrying weapons for Cuba were setting sail, Jane and Tommy Thompson were dining with Khrushchev at Dacha no. 9 for the last time before leaving Moscow at the end of their diplomatic posting.

294
  
“insolent American imperialism”:
NKCS
, 493.

294
  
royal audience:
Agayants, “Art Brings the Nations Closer.”

295
  
“Da da, ochen khorosho . . . Ya lyublyu Moskvu”:
“Yes yes, very good. I love Moscow.”

295
  
“I think the cultural exchange . . . enough for that”:
Drannikov, interview with Van Cliburn.

295
  
“Whenever he appeared . . . boyish naiveté”:
Albert Goldberg, “Israelis Acclaim Pianist Van Cliburn,”
LA Times
, September 6, 1962.

296
  
Operation Mongoose:
Many documents are reprinted in
FRUS 1961–1963
, vol. 10,
Cuba
.

296
  
photographs and gifts:
Lelchuk, “Chudo po imeni Van Klaybern.”

297
  
filled up a large file:
FBI files 105–1451–1 to 105–1451–31.

297
  “
Willy, Waylon or Garth . . . achy breaky hearts”:
Mike Cochran, “Van Cliburn Competition Turns Cowtown into Classical Mecca,”
Scranton Times
(PA), May 16, 1993.

297
  
disassociating himself from it:
Mark Schubart to Van Cliburn, December 14, 1961, Folder 3, Box 28, JAD. Schubart recalls Van several times expressing “serious misgivings about the Competition and the manner in which it was launched and was to be conducted. You remember, I am sure, how concerned you were; and if I am not mistaken, at one point you were seriously considering the possibility of withdrawing from it altogether.”

297
  
Juilliard fund-raiser:
See the lengthy correspondence on the matter in Folder 10, Box 22, JAP.

298
  
“For three hours”:
Irving Spiegel, “West Meets East as Bolshoi Opens,”
NYT
, September 7, 1962.

298
  
New York City Ballet:
For the tour, see Naima Prevots,
Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 81–87; Clare Croft,
Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 35–65; Rachel Marcy, “Dancers and Diplomats: New York City Ballet in Moscow, October 1962,”
The Appendix
2, no. 3 (July 2014), http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/dancers-and-diplomats-new-york-city-ballet-in-moscow-october-1962.

298
  
Khrushchev leading the applause:
Marjorie Hunter, “President Cheers the Bolshoi Ballet; He Goes Backstage,”
NYT
, November 14, 1962.

299
  
“It shall be the policy of this nation”:
“Text of Kennedy’s Address on Moves to Meet the Soviet Build-Up in Cuba,”
NYT
, October 23, 1962.

300
  
played Rachmaninoff:
Paul Hume, “Symphony Does Ives Second, Van Cliburn Rachmaninoff,”
WP
, October 25, 1962.

300
  
Alexander Feklisov:
The spy went under the alias Alexander Fomin.

300
  
“If there is no intention . . . ready for this”:
The full text is available at John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, at http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html.

301
  
attacked the sub:
The episode was not revealed until 2002; see William Burr and Thomas S. Blanton, eds., “The Submarines of October,”
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book
no. 75 (October 31, 2002), http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/.

301
  
U-2 pilot accidentally trespassed:
Michael Dobbs,
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
(New York: Knopf, 2008), 254–64.

302
  
“stinking double cross”:
Ibid., 189.

302
  
ready to die:
The so-called Armageddon Letter, written on October 26, whose contents were first disclosed in the portion of Khrushchev’s memoirs first published in 1990. See
NKCS
, 628–30; “Fidel Castro, Nuclear War, and the Missile Crisis: Three Missing Soviet Cables,”
CWIHP Bulletin
17/18 (Fall 2012): 325–30.

302
  
“Can you imagine . . . global catastrophe”:
Mikoyan,
Autobiography
, 277.

302
  
dispatched their ever-reliable father:
“The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Documents on Anastas Mikoyan’s November 1962 Trip to Cuba,” trans. Svetlana Savranskaya,
CWIHP Bulletin
17/18, 331–48.

303
  
“applauded louder and longer”:
Hunter, “President Cheers the Bolshoi Ballet; He Goes Backstage.”

303
  
commenced an affair:
Pia Catton, “A Life in the Lively Arts,”
New York Sun
, August 8, 2005. The conduit was Maxim Gershunoff, in Sol Hurok’s office; see Gershunoff and Leon Van Dyke,
It’s Not All Song and Dance: A Life Behind the Scenes in the Performing
Arts (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2005).

304
  
“dog shit . . . asshole art”:
Vadislav Zubok,
Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 193.

304
  
strangled:
The advice came from party ideologue Mikhail Suslov.

304
  
“The thaw is over . . . smash the Hungarians”:
Robert Hornsby,
Protest, Reform, and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275.

304
  
“Society has a right . . . tool for their ideology”:
Schwarz,
Music and Musical Life
, 418–19.

306
  
“cunning yet insecure . . . rule a superpower”:
TOML
, 277. The two men had met in September 1959, when Johnson was Senate majority leader: Khrushchev said he hated LBJ’s speeches, and Johnson told Khrushchev he would make an outstanding senator.

306
  
“dogs peeing against curbstones”:
Gaddis,
Cold War
, 114. Khrushchev was referring to Central Committee members, a third of whom he ordered to resign at each election. He also split regional party committees into parallel bodies for industry and agriculture; both acts cost him much of the support that saved him in 1957.

306
  
insulting Khrushchev:
Starting in September 1963, Mao published nine polemical letters that tore into every aspect of Khrushchev’s leadership. One was titled “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Historical Lessons for the World” and accused the Soviet leader of revisionism and risking the return of capitalism.

307
  
“I’m old and tired . . . I won’t put up a fight”:
Taubman,
Khrushchev
, 13.

307
  
“You smeared me all over with shit”:
Gaddis,
Cold War
, 113.

307
  
“In order to be victorious”:
Rasmussen,
Sviatoslav Richter
, 168.

19: AMERICA’S PIANIST

311
  
“Liz . . . at a
barbeque
”:
Hal Rothman,
LBJ’s Texas White House: “Our Heart’s Home”
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 175.