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Brookings Institution Press The Year I Was Peter the Great by Marvin Kalb
A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia-and molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents.1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called "the year of the thaw"-a time when Stalin's dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a "genius," a wizard of communism-Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a "madman" whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state.This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year's end.Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great.In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship. Preface1. Roots2. War, College, and Basketball3. Teddy, Joyce, and Journalism4. From Cambridge to Moscow5. Govorit Moskva-"Moscow Calling"6. De-Stalinization = Destabilization7. The Thaw8. From Zhukov to Poznan9. Into the Heartland10. A Summertime Break in Central Asia11. Where Stalin Is Still Worshipped12. Back to a Familiar Chill13. "Dark, Frightening, and Tragic Days"14. Uvarov, Sasha, and Stalin's Ghost15. At the End of the ArcPostscript: Five Months Later . . .AcknowledgmentsIndex