Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (13 page)

Gilels made his debut at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s favorite conductor. As he played the inevitable Piano Concerto no. 1 by Tchaikovsky, the audience’s mood transformed from uneasy to ecstatic. With the
help of a Juilliard classmate who was doing some ushering, Van managed to snag one of the seats crammed onto the stage for a later performance. He had a direct view of the keyboard as Gilels played Stravinsky’s piano arrangement of
Petrushka
, his 1911 burlesque score for the Ballets Russes. By coincidence, Van was studying the music and had left it sitting open on his piano; afterward he went home and, certain he could never play it so well, put it away for good.

Within weeks the Soviet violinist David Oistrakh followed, and
astonished Americans with his virtuosic intensity. Culture mavens began to fret aloud that America was leaving the field to the Soviets, and they found an unlikely ally in President Eisenhower. Covert operations such as
floating excerpts from Scripture across the Iron Curtain on balloons or air-dropping T. S. Eliot’s fiendishly difficult
Four Quartets
on Russia were having limited success, and Ike was beginning to suspect that a direct appeal to the emotions might better counteract Soviet propaganda that caricatured America as a nation of jive-dancing, gum-chewing rubes and goons. The old soldier even went so far as to urge his hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to include
“the singing of a beautiful hymn” within his definition of psychological warfare, and Congress authorized an
emergency presidential fund to support “Cold War cultural exchange.” It then voted to slash the budget in half on the basis that “soft power” was hooey dreamed up by namby-pamby liberals, but in 1956 it reversed course and
made Ike’s fund a permanent body.

The Cold War had achieved what no amount of advocacy ever did: it had persuaded the U.S. government publicly to support the arts. The International Exchange Program expanded fast, supporting
twelve orchestras in its first three years and, over five years, more than one hundred performers and groups who visited more than ninety countries. The State Department was in overall charge, but unlike the CIA, whose pipe-smoking Ivy Leaguers clandestinely funneled huge sums into atonal music and abstract art, it left the choice of performers mostly to panels of practicing artists, in an attempt to promote diversity. That policy backfired when the artists turned out to be more conservative than the government. The Music Panel, which met every two or three weeks in New York, repeatedly spurned foreign-born musicians and had to be lectured that America benefited from being seen as culturally diverse. It was so prejudiced against jazz that a separate jazz panel had to be spun off. It rejected Leonard Bernstein’s hit musical
West Side Story
on the grounds that
“showing the gang warfare in New York will not help our cultural relations.” Frustrated officials could have been forgiven for envying
the Soviet system, which regarded artists as the property of the state and systematically selected, trained, and sent abroad its best. Still, in its messy way, the American effort notched up successes. African American performers were particularly admired abroad, an important consideration in light of
Brown v. Board of Education
and Soviet denunciations of America’s Jim Crow laws and decaying inner cities.

At first the Soviet Bloc was excluded from the exchanges.
“We are not planning to send performers behind the iron curtain because they have controlled audiences who can hiss the players off the boards,” a State Department official informed an early Music Panel meeting, though the real reason may have been a lack of confidence in American artists. Juilliard’s president, Bill Schuman, a vocal member of the group, vigorously protested but was warned that he was exceeding his remit by straying into policy.

The issue was still being hotly debated when Nikita Khrushchev delivered the most explosive speech in the history of the Soviet Union.

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5
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The Secret Speech

THE TWENTIETH
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was officially over. For ten days, fifteen hundred comrades from fifty-six countries had applauded through speech after speech endorsing the ideology and policies of the new regime. They had gone back to their hotels and were preparing to carry the torch home when the Soviet contingent was hastily summoned back. The session was not on the timetable, and the foreign delegates were not invited. There was no notice of what was to be discussed, and no preparation for what was about to happen. Shortly after midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev got to his feet and buried Stalin a second time.

Gesticulating wildly, Khrushchev revealed that a dreadful perversion had infected Marxism-Leninism. A cult of personality had elevated a criminal to the status of a god. Stalin, he said, had twisted the government into a vehicle of repression and a machine of lies. He had imprisoned, tortured, and murdered innocent people and deported entire nations on a paranoid whim. Having killed four-fifths of the army command before World War II, Stalin, like a boy with his toys, had planned military operations using a globe. Dashing from accusation to denunciation, Khrushchev suddenly paused and spoke intimately.
“Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious,” he recalled. “We know this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: ‘Why are your eyes so shifty today?’ or ‘Why are you
turning so much today and avoiding looking at me directly in the eyes?’” Possessing unlimited power, Khrushchev added, the
vozhd
had “indulged in great willfulness and choked a person morally and physically.”

The speech was not elegant or even very coherent, but its simplicity made it devastating. Like the miner he had once been, Khrushchev shone his lamp into the cells and tunnels of Stalinist Russia and ruggedly set the charges that would dynamite them into the earth. The shock was so great that several delegates collapsed and had to be carried out. The rest sat in stunned silence. Of course there was no denying the scale of the purges that had happened on Stalin’s watch. They had touched them all. Of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 had been declared enemies of the people and 848 had been executed. Of 139 full and candidate members of the Central Committee, 98 had been accused of treason. Still, to blame Stalin himself? They had not come to hear this savage demolition of everything they had worked and fought for. They had never expected to hear it. Marxism-Leninism was a secular religion that demanded blind faith, and Stalin had been its presiding deity. How could the great leader have been a deluded murderer?

Only one group looked on with burning vindication. To put a human face on moral outrage, Khrushchev had invited along a hundred former party members who had recently been released from the Gulag camps. They were a tiny fraction of the victims he was talking about, survivors of the convulsions in the body politic that had consumed perhaps twenty million lives and stunted many more in less than a quarter century, and they were there to bear witness.

After four hours, Khrushchev sat down. The customary storm of applause never came. The audience filed out quietly, their world upside down.

THEY WERE
coming back in droves, those nonpeople with no value to whose victimhood Khrushchev’s speech referred, stripped of humanity in the bare struggle to survive. They walked along haltingly,
“with
horrifyingly empty eyes,” unable to cross the street without orders, trying to readjust to life, if they were lucky, with the families from whom they’d been torn. Some compulsively recounted their sufferings and those of their dead comrades, driven to document the unspeakable even as it drove them mad. Others had forgotten their family members’ names, or even their own. Sleepless from fear and plagued by envy, they struggled to rediscover love and feeling itself. Their accusers crossed the road to avoid them or looked straight through them; a few gentler souls were consumed by delayed guilt. The novelist Alexander Fadeyev, who as secretary of the Writers’ Union had authorized writers’ arrest warrants, lurched drunkenly at his victims, trying to befriend them. One day he sobered up, wrote a note to the Central Committee—“I thought I was
guarding a temple, and it turned out to be a latrine”—and shot himself.

Stalin had worked the mincer, but many had provided the meat. Khrushchev later admitted that he himself was up to his elbows in blood.
“Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs,” he had screamed to 200,000 people gathered in Red Square during the 1936 show trials: “That word is execution!” The following year, as the Moscow Party boss, he handily
exceeded his quota of 30,000 enemies of the people to be arrested and 5,000 executed, boasting to Stalin that he had rounded up 41,305, of whom 8,500 deserved to die. As party leader of Ukraine, he had sped up the arrests there until there were scarcely any politicians, officials, or army commanders left to run the country.

It had been an act of fear to keep silent, an act of fanaticism or callous self-advancement to lend support. Yet Khrushchev’s speech was an act of courage—he was haunted by guilt, and his humanity had risen to demand it. The risk was huge, but it was also more calculated than it seemed. By blaming everything on Stalin, he deflected guilt both from himself and the Communist Party, which after a painful reckoning could once again become the conduit for the people’s enthusiasm and energy. Khrushchev was never very clear
about Marxist-Leninist theory—to his mind, it boiled down to giving everyone goulash—but he believed with all his heart that it would bring unprecedented happiness. The glorious Soviet system, the most progressive and democratic developed by mankind, the perpetual engine of history—in his account, it and the party itself were also Stalin’s victims, not the facilitators, encouragers, perpetrators, and justifiers of judicially approved genocide.

The Stalinists were aghast, but with peasant cunning, Khrushchev had weakened them. The previous year, he had accused Malenkov of ganging up with Beria, demoted him to minister of electric power stations, and replaced him in the chair of the Presidium. He had attacked Iron Butt Molotov for conducting a bellicose foreign policy, and though the old revolutionary clung to his job, he was greatly diminished. So far so good, but Stalin’s ghost was hard to exorcise, and threats lay all around. Khrushchev would need all his native wit and guile to attempt the monumental task he had set for himself: that of building communism without terror.

BECAUSE OF
its restricted audience, Khrushchev’s denunciation became known as the Secret Speech, but he never intended it to be anything of the sort. The following night, it was read to the foreign delegates, very slowly, so they could take notes. The Polish leader Boleslaw Bierut had a heart attack and died. Transcripts crisscrossed the Soviet Union, to be read aloud to millions of party members. Some outdid Khrushchev in decrying the former regime, some saw no point in raking through old muck, and others angrily defended Stalin. In Georgia, his birthplace, four days of riots broke out.

The speech leaked out of the Soviet Union via Israeli intelligence, and on June 5 it was published in the
New York Times.
Over the years the trickle of Gulag survivors who made it to the West had tried to raise awareness of Stalin’s atrocities, but without the images that seared the Nazi concentration camps into humanity’s conscience, it was easy to dismiss their talk as hysteria. Most people had no stomach for another monstrous crime of civilization, especially one
perpetrated by a wartime ally against the Nazi evil. Meanwhile, to Communists and fellow travelers, it was inconceivable that a society built on equality and fraternity could be guilty of crimes whose enormity approached that of Hitler’s. Now the Soviet leader himself had confirmed the worst, and as many of Stalin’s apologists recoiled, a distinct strand of Eurocommunism was born.