Research Catalog

Title

The year I was Peter the Great / Marvin Kalb.

Author

Kalb, Marvin L.

Publication

Washington, D.C. : The Brookings Institution, [2017]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiv, 290 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

The year 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 attaché 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.

Alternative Title

• 1956 Khrushchev, Stalin's ghost, and a young American in Russia
• 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's ghost, and a young American in Russia

Subject

• Kalb, Marvin L
• Kalb, Marvin L. > Travel > Soviet Union
• Television journalists > United States > Biography
• Television journalists
• Travel
• Soviet Union > Description and travel
• Soviet Union
• United States

Genre/Form

• Autobiographies
• Autobiographies.
• Biographies

Note

• Includes index.
• Maps used as endpapers.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Roots -- War, college, and basketball -- Joyce, Teddy, and journalism -- From Cambridge to Moscow -- Govorit Moskva--Moscow calling -- De-Stalinization = Destabilization -- The thaw -- From Zhukov to Poznan -- Into the heartland -- A summertime break in Central Asia -- Where Stalin is still worshipped -- Back to a familiar chill -- "Dark, frightening, and tragic days" -- Uvarov, Sasha, and Stalin's ghost -- At the end of the arc -- Postscript : five months later.

ISBN

• 0815731612
• 9780815731610

LCCN

^^2017020201

OCLC

• 1003854773
• SCSB-10427901

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library