I was to have one more exhilarating experience that day, when I was mistaken for a suave French singer. I hailed a cab, and the cabdriver launched into a rhapsodic report on Yves Montand’s astoundingly successful swing through the Soviet Union. Like me, Montand was staying at the Astoria Hotel. As we approached I saw a huge crowd of Russian bobbysoxers. They swarmed toward my cab as it slowed to a stop in front of the main entrance. When I got out of the cab, they broke into a loud, sustained cheer.
“Montand,” they shouted, screaming and swooning. “Montand,” they cried. They thought I was Yves Montand! They mobbed me. They demanded my autograph. They kissed the hem of my coat. Young stilyagi grabbed my hands; others ripped away my scarf. I tried telling them I was not Montand, but they did not believe me. “Montand,” they kept shouting. “He’s so modest. Just like him. He says he is not Montand.” Militiamen rushed to my rescue and escorted me into the lobby of the hotel. For a fleeting moment I thought of myself as the “False Dmitri,” who 350 years earlier had raised a terrible ruckus in Russia by pretending that he was the czar.
But I could not resist the temptation to play the Montand role. At the last minute, just before I actually entered the hotel, I turned toward the crowd, still uncertain about whether I was the real Montand or a tall foreigner pretending to be Montand, and waved and blew them all a kiss. If asked—who knows?—I might have delivered an address on the hardships of singing in Parisian nightclubs. But then, rather unceremoniously, I thought, the militiamen pushed me into the lobby, and my moment of fame ended.
That evening, when I stepped into the busy restaurant, not waiting for the maitre d’ to seat me, I spotted a man sitting alone at a small table to the left of a four-piece orchestra that seemed bent on butchering popular American songs. “May I join you?” I asked. The man seemed hesitant at first but then gestured toward the empty chair. For a half hour neither of us spoke, although I did order my dinner. Perhaps because he could hear an accent in my Russian, he finally broke the ice and asked whether I was an American. When I said yes, his face broke into a broad smile.
“I knew it,” he said. “I just knew it.” But then as quickly as he smiled, he suddenly looked sad. “How long it has been since I last spoke to an American.” He filled first my glass with wine, and then his. We clicked glasses and toasted Khrushchev’s mantra of “peace and friendship.” Moments later he erupted with questions about America and me—about New York City, where I was born; Washington, where I worked; Cambridge, where I studied; about baseball (he too was a Yankee fan), basketball, and classical music as well as jazz; about Averell Harriman and Dwight Eisenhower; and, finally, about poetry and poets. He loved Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. He thought Conrad Aiken was brilliant, and he worshipped T. S. Eliot. “My greatest delight is to read American poets,” he declared. “Many evenings when I come home from work, I pick up an old 1927 anthology I have, with an introduction by Aiken, and read the poems over and over again.” He smiled softly. “They pick me up and transport me to a dream world.”
I had stumbled upon an English-language teacher who taught in a small technical school in Leningrad. In my diary I called him Sasha, although that was not his real name. He was forty-five years old, born in Ukraine, and raised in Moscow. In 1928 his father got a better job in Leningrad, and the family moved there. “This was the closest I could get to the West,” he explained. “It is the most Western city in Russia, I would say.”
We exchanged biographical information for more than an hour, and then I told Sasha about my interest in Russian history, especially the Soviet period. I told him about Uvarov, which produced a look of disapproval. “You are not serious,” he frowned. And I told him about the Voshchenkov lecture, stressing that I had not heard anything as savagely anti-American in my time in the Soviet Union.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Sasha, looking uncomfortable, answered, “To be completely truthful with you, I pay very little attention to politics.” He searched in my eyes for understanding. “Maybe that’s why I love your American poetry so much. Much of it is so light, so tender, so individual, so loving, that it lifts me from this world and carries me to a sweet and fragrant paradise.”
I asked, “Is ‘this world’ Russia and the ‘fragrant paradise’ America?”
Sasha apparently felt he could not be precise. But his English was so poetic that I often got lost in its beauty and missed a carefully nuanced political hint. He spoke often in flowing metaphors, quoting Sandburg and Frost by heart, and to strengthen his message, political or poetic, he would add a phrase from Aiken, always with a mysterious, faraway smile of satisfaction.
Hungary, though, was special. It brought Sasha back to politics, however reluctantly. “In recent time the only issue that made me raise my eyebrows,” he admitted, “was Hungary. The effects have reverberated not only through Russia but also throughout the world. It has made many of us think, think really hard, for the first time in many years. I think it has had as great an effect on the Russian intelligentsia”—Sasha smiled as he used this phrase—“as the death of Stalin.”
“Big words, Sasha, big words,” I said. “As big as the death of Stalin?”
Sasha nodded, adding, “The information we have of course is limited, but I think the government probably did the right thing.”
“The right thing?” His judgment left me momentarily speechless. How could a lover of American poetry condone his government’s brutality in Hungary?
“Sasha, forgive me, but you are very, very wrong.” I didn’t want to elaborate but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to “prove” to Sasha that he was wrong. “The facts about the Hungarian revolution are clear,” I said. “A majority of the people rose up against communism and against Russia. They did not want either. This might be hard for you to accept, but the Hungarian people will never accept communism or the presence of Russian troops in their country. They hate both. Just remove the troops, and you will see how quickly the people will remove the last vestiges of communism.” I reached for a summary thought: “In Eastern Europe communism rests on the bayonets of Red Army troops, and nothing more.”
Sasha objected. He said I was exaggerating the crisis in Hungary, that in time the people would accept both communism and the Red Army, and be grateful for both. “But you know,” he continued, “I think that even in the ugliness of the situation, there is still beauty. It is like Macaulay’s essay on revolution when he writes that the ugliness of revolution can yield beauty in the long run, and we must not be blinded by temporary darkness to the possibility of a bright future.”
“Sasha,” I said, “you are a romantic. Your quotes sound nice, but the facts demand another conclusion. The Hungarians do not want the Russians there—it is as simple as that. You cannot export revolution on a Red Army tank. Surely that is not orthodox communism.”