My experience on Soviet campuses was that, like the Pied Piper in the Robert Browning poem, I would be quickly surrounded by a crowd of students and pummeled with questions. I walked around the campus for a few minutes, to see and be seen, and then I sat down on a bench and waited for the inevitable to happen. Five, ten minutes passed; fifteen, twenty minutes passed, and nothing happened. I noticed groups of young men gathering nearby, looking at me, but no one approached me.
Finally, one young man, apparently betting I was not a Georgian, called out a question to me in his native language. I shrugged my shoulders. I did not understand him. The young man then shouted something to his friends that must have been the equivalent of “I told you so,” and a crowd quickly began forming around me, dozens of young men firing questions at me about Stalin and Marx, baseball and football, housing and clothing, Eisenhower and Stevenson. This extraordinary Q and A ended five hours later, and it ended then only because I had to catch a train to Sochi, my next stop. Otherwise, it could have continued through dinnertime.
Later, on the train, I reflected on the differences between Russian and Georgian students. First, the Georgians were so nationalistic they took offense at any criticism of their country. They defended Georgia as if it were heaven on earth, though they knew better. Most Russians, on the other hand, invited criticism of their country and its communist system. If they thought your criticism did not go far enough, they would rush to fill in the blanks. Second, for Georgians criticism of Stalin was unacceptable. He was sacred, untouchable, a god. For Russians Stalin was suddenly a juicy target for all forms of criticism. He was evil incarnate, a political and ideological curse to be expunged from Soviet society. Finally, Georgian students seemed cocky, self-confident, unafraid, much more so than Russian students. The Georgians conveyed the impression that they controlled their own destiny. Russian students seemed to know better.
One subject—the “Negro question,” as it was often framed at the time—was on the top of their minds that day. Pravda had run a disturbing story about riots in Clinton, Tennessee. These Georgian students were convinced that America was a racist country. Their questions were sharp, their attitude confrontational. In my responses, I tried to be honest. I acknowledged the problem and provided some historical context. I told them about the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools, which they knew nothing about. I told them about Lincoln, the Civil War, carpetbaggers, and Truman’s integration of the armed forces. Again they knew little about this history.
My candor seemed to disarm them. When our conversation shifted to their next big question—fingerprinting in the United States—their questions were less pointed.
“Why did the United States insist on fingerprinting Soviet exchange artists and students?” they asked.
“It’s the law,” I said. Just as Soviet law prescribed internal passports, American law insisted on fingerprinting foreign visitors. “That is the law,” I repeated, adding, “If a Russian really wanted to visit the United States to understand us better, he would not permit the fingerprinting issue to stand in his way.” I described Khrushchev’s blistering criticism of the American practice of fingerprinting Soviet visitors, which I had heard at the Queen’s birthday party at the British embassy a few months earlier. I thought they would like to hear that the Soviet leader agreed with them.
“Don’t mention that man’s name in this country,” a student snapped. Khrushchev, by attacking Stalin and his legacy, had become persona non grata in Georgia.
No matter what the subject, whether it be “the Negro question” or American fingerprinting, we always somehow returned to Stalin. “Tell me,” asked another student, standing in the rear of the crowd, “what do Americans really think of Stalin?”
I told him the truth. “Americans don’t think much of Stalin,” I replied, “and when they do, they disagree with his policy.”
“But certainly you consider him a great and noble person?”
“No, actually they consider him to be a cruel dictator.” The students gasped in disbelief. “When the history books on the twentieth century are written,” I continued, “Stalin will play a major role. But we do not think he was a noble person, nor that he was a good person.”
“Well, what do they think of Marx?”
“In truth, I must say we do not even think about Marx.” The students laughed, breaking the building tension. “Marx was a major political theoretician,” I went on, “but we believe that his system has been disproved time and again by the facts of history.”
Still another student interjected, “One must admit, whether you are a capitalist or not, that Stalin made many, many creative additions to Marxism and Leninism.”
I shook my head. “You may consider them creative,” I said, “but few others do.”
The student continued, “Well, but you must admit that reading Stalin on linguistics is a truly fascinating experience. He was so brilliant. He could write on anything. He knew everything.” I almost choked on the thought of having to read Stalin on linguistics. “He certainly was interesting,” I said, trying to soothe ruffled feathers. “Interesting, indeed.”
“Do you think Stalin was guilty of creating a personality cult?” another student asked. “Some people even say that pictures of Stalin are being removed throughout the Soviet Union.” He looked at me incredulously. “These things they cannot do. These things they must not do.”
When I told the students that I myself had seen pictures and paintings of Stalin being removed from museums, they angrily said no, they did not believe me. “That is not true,” one shouted. Another added, “You simply can’t remove Stalin without also removing Lenin. Both were inseparable in life, and Stalin was faithful to Lenin. In many ways, he was even better than Lenin. After all, he built the Soviet Union, not Lenin. A Georgian did this, not a Russian. No, this is quite impossible.”
The students stood united behind Stalin, leaning on his close association with Lenin as backup support. I thought I saw an opening. “Russians are once again the rulers of the Soviet Union, and they are returning to Lenin and Leninism. Even here in your own Zarya Vostoka [a Georgian newspaper], they write about the harm done by the personality cult.”
The student responded, “Those who write about the harm of the personality cult are toadies, who keep thinking that our fate is tied in with Russia. The Russians came here in 1801. Since then, nothing creative has taken place here. Now it is my opinion that we are starting to think again. Even in the arts.” He mentioned that Georgians are again studying their history and trying to rekindle the flames of their renaissance. With a mournful air, he concluded, “But yes, we have a lot of catching up to do.”
I made a point of shaking hands with every student in the small crowd around me, expressing the hope that one day they would all be free, and then I raced to the hotel for my bag and then to the train for Sochi.
Why Sochi? Because, from the moment I started planning this trip, I put Sochi in the must-see category. My reasoning was simple: it was close to Tbilisi; it was on my way back to Moscow; and, most important, it was Stalin’s favorite resort. He rarely missed a chance to vacation in Sochi during the brutal Moscow winters. He pumped hundreds of millions of rubles into this stretch of beachfront on the edge of Russia closest to Georgia, his birthplace. More than anyone else, Stalin turned Sochi, once an unimportant beach town, into one of the best resorts in the Soviet Union, a place on Russia’s riviera where the new true blue bloods of communism could spend their holidays. Foreign diplomats and businessmen would also want to vacation there, partly to rub shoulders with Soviet bigwigs and partly to enjoy Sochi’s incomparable beauty. Temperatures in the summertime rarely rose higher than the mid-eighties, and in the wintertime they were always in the moderate range. It was Russia’s Camelot, and I wanted to see it.