I gulped. “Can I have a minute when you’re finished?”
“Sure,” was his quick response. Schorr then submitted his copy for clearance and turned to a few other reporters waiting for clearance of their copy and engaged in the Moscow equivalent of office gossip—generally who’s leaving, who’s arriving, the Bolshoi’s latest ballet, the current Soviet screw-up, the weather. After a few minutes Schorr retired to a relatively quiet corner of the office, and I followed him.
“What have you decided?” he asked.
“I cannot accept your offer,” I replied, looking at everyone except at Schorr. “I promised my mother I would finish my dissertation, and I have to do that before I do anything else.”
For the next minute or so, Schorr said nothing. “Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yes. I made a promise to my mother, and I feel I must keep it.”
Schorr looked at me, a somewhat baffled look, and again asked, “Are you sure?” He was trying to give me more time.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Schorr then hugged me. He might not have agreed with my decision, but he respected it. He retrieved his cleared scripts from the censor and did his broadcasts. I stood listening outside his broadcast booth, tears running down my cheeks.
A Russian driver told me this story, giggling all the way. Three Hungarian officials meet in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka Prison. “What are you here for?” one Hungarian asks his former colleagues. “I supported Nagy,” one of them replies. “And what are you here for?” he asks the other. “I was against Nagy.” Then both prisoners turn to the third Hungarian. “And you, why are you here?” His answer: “I am Nagy.”
After the Soviet crackdown of the Hungarian Revolution I spent a lot of my free time in Moscow libraries, assuming that if Khrushchev intended to restrict Soviet access to the West, and Western access to Russia, my own limited access to the Uvarov archives would almost certainly be curtailed. I thought it was only a matter of time before the Russians decided to cut off my access completely. But until then I was determined to study and absorb as much as I could about Uvarov. And so, as often as possible, I would return to the Lenin Library. Uvarov was always my stated reason, but I also had another reason, a secret yearning that I shared only with Ambassador Bohlen: to listen in on the clearly discernible dissatisfaction of Soviet youth with communism as their governing ideology. How deep did the dissatisfaction really run? Might it in time represent a threat to the Khrushchev regime? I was curious. Among the students at the library were the future rulers of Russia. What were they thinking? I had had some good luck months earlier stumbling upon library gatherings where students had raised questions about the limits of de-Stalinization, about the continuing relevance of communism, about their own sense of self. I listened to them then, and sympathized greatly, and I thought it was time for me to listen to them again, if and when the occasion arose.
One evening it arose, and then mysteriously vanished. I saw an announcement on the main bulletin board of the Lenin Library that a communist official would deliver a speech, and then take questions, on “The Vigilance of the Soviet Man.” He would speak on November 20. The use of the word “vigilance” was meant to suggest, in the Moscow mind of the day, that the “Soviet Man” lacked “vigilance” at a time when the Soviet Union, his motherland, was being tested by “capitalist encirclement” and “aggression,” and this matter had to be addressed, and swiftly. “No time to lose!” was the between-the-lines alert. This was a lecture I did not want to miss.
But when I arrived for the lecture I noticed immediately that there was none of the hubbub that usually accompanied a major communist speaker. I checked with the information desk.
“Isn’t there a lecture tonight?”
“No,” the clerk replied, trying to appear nonchalant.
“But there was an announcement,” I said, a bit bewildered. “I saw it on the bulletin board a few nights ago.”
“No,” the clerk continued, with a straight face. “There was no announcement.”
“But I saw it,” I protested.
“No, there was no announcement.”
His insistence was not persuasive, and I decided to check with the librarian who handled my Uvarov file. We had become friends, sort of. “I saw an announcement a few nights ago about a lecture here tonight,” I said. “But now I’m told there was no announcement. So I’m puzzled. What happened?”
The librarian began shuffling papers on her desk and looking everywhere but at me. “No,” she said, “there was no announcement, and there is no lecture.”
“But,” I persisted, “there was an announcement. I saw it, several times. It was on the bulletin board.”
The librarian, cornered, snapped, “All I can tell you is that this lecture was never scheduled. Never.”
I quickly changed tactics. “When will the next lecture take place?”
“This I cannot tell you either.”
She looked uncomfortable and excused herself, picking up a few papers and leaving her desk. She was obviously under orders to say nothing about the “vigilance” lecture, which probably had been canceled because the Communist Party feared another eruption of student skepticism about the official reason for the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution.
A few days later Pravda published what amounted to an official explanation. The Communist Party newspaper lashed out at students who no longer “occupy themselves” with “socially useful labor.” A “great many” students did no work at all. Absorbed with “abstract reasoning,” they wasted their days. “Certain comrades,” especially those at universities, the newspaper continued, entertained ideas “like a bourgeois ideology.” The word “comrades” suggested that Pravda was fingering members of the Communist Party, who should know and act better. But in the aftermath of the Hungarian crisis, such “comrades” and students were demanding truthful answers to their questions, and they were not getting them.
In one case, a number of students at Moscow University in frustration took the unusual step of posting a daily wall newspaper, based not on reporting by TASS or Pravda about Hungary but on the BBC’s reporting. This ad hoc form of student journalism became an overnight sensation. Many university students depended on it for information about the uprising and its suppression. A communist official, hearing about the wall newspaper’s popularity, was outraged. He promptly scheduled a university-wide meeting at which he demanded that the student editor be dropped from the newspaper and expelled from the university. The students, defying the official, rallied behind the editor and continued reading the newspaper. The official reacted with rage, firing dire threats at the students, warning of mass expulsions, and insisting on the editor’s ouster. Remarkably, the students held fast, refusing to comply with the party official’s demands. The upshot: The editor retained his position and the wall newspaper continued to be published. Such student defiance would never have happened before de-Stalinization became the newly emerging principle of the Khrushchev regime.
Another example of exceptional defiance was not by student intellectuals at a university but by 450 workers at the Kaganovich ball bearing plant near Moscow. What they did was unprecedented. The embassy learned that on October 23 the workers arrived at their plant, checked in, as was required, and then sat down, refusing to work. In the West that would have been called a strike; in Russia there had not been a strike since the 1920s. The plant manager ranted and raved, threatening to fire anyone who did not return to work immediately. The workers refused to budge. They demanded a hearing to vent their grievances. The following morning, on October 24, the workers returned to the plant, checked in, but again refused to work. This time a communist official, no longer just the plant manager, insisted on behalf of the party that the workers return to their jobs. Immediately! They refused, again demanding a hearing. The party official, after many calls to more senior officials, agreed finally to listen to the workers.