Nikita rolled onto his right side, and the bedsprings seemed to cry in agony.
Rage gave birth to frustration. The problem with this arms race was that all these missiles cost money… money that was necessary for seed to feed the Russian people. And the people needed to be working the farms, not making rockets, or out fighting wars. When farmers traded wheat fields for battlefields, where were the crops?
Why, in this modern world, must men still harvest death?
The Soviet Union was not like the affluent, decadent United States, where waging war turned a profit, benefitting big business; even Eisenhower had warned of the power of the U.S. military industrial complex, had he not?
But for Russia, another war would only bring starvation and further suffering… and the Russian people had suffered enough! And so, when the Americans challenged him, he blustered and threatened. They might think him a bully or a thug, but what else could he do? He had to show America his… his country’s… might.
After all, if they ever came to his country, and had a good look around… they would see just how poor Russia really was.
Nikita rolled onto his back again and the bedsprings whined and he put his hands behind his head, elbows splayed out on the pillow, his eyes searching unsuccessfully for the ceiling. His insomniac’s mind leapt to another indignity, one that seemed especially galling to him.
Why couldn’t he go to Disneyland?
The State Department had promised he could! He had made so few specific requests that by denying him, the Americans had served up yet another insult. And he had so been looking forward to it. After his journalist son-in-law had visited America several years ago, Mikhail had enthusiastically described the park’s magnificent “rides” and “attractions,” as the Americans called them.
But whenever he’d brought up the subject to his hosts, Nikita had been treated like a child denied his fun, when he knew full and well the Americans were protecting the park from prying eyes, treating it like another state secret.
And they were right: if he could have even the most cursory tour of the site, he could copy the idea for his country. After all, he built the Moscow subway by patterning it upon the New York one; he could certainly make the plans for a similar amusement park.
Russia’s amusement park would not be named after one man — the California park was named for this “Walt Disney,” in a debauched deification of a capitalist entertainer — and he would resist any effort to have it called Khrushchevland. After the abuses of Stalin, who had changed the name of Leningrad to Stalingrad, Nikita had forbidden anything — city, building, or otherwise — to be named after a politician… even himself… because it might elevate that person to a “cult personality,” a concept that flew in the face of true Lenin doctrine.
And if he did build this “amusement” park, there would certainly not be anything as insignificant as a tiny field mouse appointed as its chief emissary! Anyway, Nikita failed to see what was so funny about this Mickey Mouse, a cartoon that talked and sang in a squeaky little voice… No, Russia would have something big as its envoy — what else but a bear!… a dancing, growling bear that could, if it so desired, step on and squash such a squeaky little mouse.
Now that would be amusing!
Smiling, Nikita rolled onto his left side, then sighed. Just about the only bright spot in the otherwise bleak day had been his encounter with the lovely actress, this Marilyn Monroe. She was even more beautiful in person than in the glamorous photos he’d seen of her on display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. That’s where he got the idea of meeting her during his trip to the United States.
In the privacy of his mind, he allowed himself to wonder if the heavy, garish make-up the woman had worn had added to, or detracted from, her beauty. Had his own conception of beauty been corrupted by Hollywood customs? He wished he could see her stripped of that paint, those pretty features free of Western decadence, that wonderful smile shining bright without the crimson frame…
He frowned. But why hadn’t she been at the show at Fox Studios? She just disappeared after the meal — which had been yet another American insult. Red potatoes and corn! He well understood the disparaging symbolism of that menu — that he was an unsophisticated “red” (and Mikhail had explained the slang term “corny” to him). Did they think the premier of Russia would be so unworldly as think it appropriate that a “French cafe” would serve such a farmhand’s meal?
Shifting to his right side, Nikita sighed again, chest deep. The goddess Marilyn Monroe, he thought, had probably been too repulsed by him, by his many chins and warts and his corpulence, to sit at his side during the filming of that bawdy picture, what was it called? Can-Can! More pseudo-Parisian tripe.
Ha! What stupid, silly trash! Russia, East Germany, even Romania, all made much better musicals than this gaudy Hollywood nonsense. What could Twentieth Century Fox come up with to compete with the likes of The Bright Path, or My Wife Wants to Sing, or Volga Volga?
The latter film, admittedly, had worn its welcome out with Nikita — an epic agricultural operetta, Volga Volga had been shown so many times by Stalin at his private dinners that Khrushchev had for a time hoped to never hear another song or, for that matter, see another tractor.
Even so, the musicals the Soviets made had real meaning, designed to stir the masses and give them hope and inspire them to become better communists. The Eastern Bloc films weren’t about a bunch of trollops twirling around and flashing their undergarments and showing off their legs and exhibiting their backsides — although, he had to admit, in the secrecy of his insomnia, that those were shapely backsides, and in fact were preferable to the face of Mayor Poulson. Still, what idiocy, those girls prancing in front of a camera that clearly didn’t have any film in it.
That might have been what had wounded Nikita the most, the worst of all the insults: the Americans considered him nothing more than a country bumpkin they could fool and trick. Did they suppose he’d never been in a movie studio before?
Well, they could go to this hell they claimed to believe in.
Back on his back, he stared up at the blackness, his chin crinkling, lips trembling. Could a country bumpkin have outwitted Stalin, the most evil, treacherous man in the world? A world that had included Adolph Hitler — who had been a piker in the genocide business, compared to old Joe. And could a country bumpkin have been the only man in Stalin’s inner circle to survive his perfidious purges?
And yet some uneducated fool from the American press could have the gall to ask Nikita where he was when Stalin was murdering innocent people…
The Ukraine — that was where Nikita Khrushchev was!… Saving thousands of people from starvation… unaware of Stalin’s atrocities!
Afterward, his translator Troyanovsky had asked him, respectfully, why Nikita had not responded with the truth of it.
“Because,” Nikita had snapped, “there is no good answer to a stupid question!”
Of course Nikita had supported Stalin, even worked for him — as the saying went, “If you ride in another man’s cart, you must join in his song!” To oppose Stalin would have meant certain death. And the dead cannot help the living.