Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  273On board was Barbara Powers: “People,” Time, September 5, 1960.

  17: SOLE DIPLOMACY

  274Khrushchev set out for New York: My reconstruction draws substantially on the eyewitness account given by Viktor Sukhodrev (YM), together with Khrushchev’s own recollections in his Memoirs, vol. 3, 264–91. Also used were NKCS, 410–16; Taubman, Khrushchev, 474–77; Khrushchev in New York (New York: Crosscurrents, 1960); and contemporary newspaper reports.

  275Federal-style town house: The former Percy Rivington Pyne House at 680 Park Avenue, now the headquarters of the Americas Society.

  275“Okay, let’s go get some fresh air”: YM.

  276“Dammit, I’ve even broken my watch”: YM. This was the explanation, related by Sukhodrev, that Khrushchev gave that day to socialist leaders who were riding with him in his car to the Soviet mission. There are several versions of the story, some of which Khrushchev spun to account for his actions. In his memoirs, Khrushchev claimed he had promised a member of the Spanish international workers’ movement that he would expose Franco’s men as criminals and that he deliberately banged his shoe to emphasize his point. Sergei Khrushchev says that a journalist stepped on his shoe on the way into the hall, and rather than struggle to bend down in front of the cameras, he had a staffer bring it to his desk wrapped in a napkin.

  277“So you, chairman” . . .“closing the session”: YM.

  277“God bless him”: Ibid.

  277advanced spacecraft: Robert Reeves, The Superpower Space Race: An Explosive Rivalry Through the Solar System (New York: Plenum, 1994), 315–16.

  278Richter arrived in Chicago: Rasmussen, Sviatoslav Richter, 156, 159.

  278“the shopkeeper”: NKCS, 391.

  279“military-industrial-congressional complex”: Eisenhower used the term in his farewell address on January 17, 1961.

  279“How old are you, Mr. President . . . even older”: YM.

  279“He beat the hell out of me . . . He savaged me”: Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (New York: Putman, 2011), 255–56.

  280“Yeah, well”: YM.

  280no mercy in politics: Kempe, Berlin 1961, 253.

  280“a meeting of a giant and a pygmy”: YM.

  280televised address: On July 25, 1961.

  280Life ran a feature: May, Homeward Bound, 1.

  280Sunday sermons: TOML, 238.

  281Khrushchev’s aides joked: Vladislav Zubok, “Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis (1958–1962),” CWIHP Working Paper no. 6 (May 1993), 24.

  281new spy satellites: The Corona project, launched August 1960, was a by-product of Sputnik, which set a precedent for the free exploration of space.

  281“second strike capability”: Roswell Gilpatric, October 21, 1961, reprinted in Documents on Disarmament, 1961 (Washington, DC: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1962), 545.

  282“at least three busts of Van Cliburn”: “Moscow Glitters for Party Rally with Special Effort in Culture,” NYT, October 29, 1961.

  282“monstrous crimes . . . historical justice”: Stephen F. Cohen, “The Victims Return: Gulag Survivors Under Khrushchev,” in Hollander, Political Violence, 63.

  283“not just as part of our arsenal”: Hope for America: Performers, Politics, and Pop Culture, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/hope-for-america/gov ernment-support-for-the-arts.html.

  283Van played for him twice: At the fund-raiser for the National Cultural Center, renamed the Kennedy Center after JFK’s assassination, which Van closed on November 29, 1962; and at a Congressional Club breakfast on May 2, 1963, following which he and Rildia Bee visited with the president in the Blue Room of the White House.

  283relying on Jackie: “President Obama Opens White House Evening of Classical Music,” November 6, 2010, https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/president-obama-opens-white-house-evening-classical-music.

  283“VAN CLIBURN PLAYS FOR FREE BERLIN”: DMN (UPI), August 31, 1961.

  283Ed Sullivan Show: The episode aired on CBS on October 8, 1961.

  283“I recognize the divine spark”: Bruno Walter to Van Cliburn, draft of letter, Series I, Folder 99, Bruno Walter Papers, Music Division, New York Public Library. Van played for Walter’s last live concert appearance, on December 4, 1960, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Walter died in 1962.

  284invited Van to conduct: Van made his conducting debut on March 5, 1961, in a memorial concert for Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had died after falling off the podium at La Scala, Milan. Leopold Stokowski was supposed to conduct but had broken his hip.

  284all the great orchestras: Van also had a close relationship with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra; see their correspondence in Eugene Ormandy Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

  284“first time that a long-hair artist”: VCL, 162.

  284“Thank you for sending us Van Cliburn”: Lyde and Charles Devall, “Cliburn Acclaimed on Anniversary of N.Y. Debut: Music World, Friends Join to Honor Van,” KNH, November 22, 1964.

  284she wrote complaining: See their correspondence in Folders 21 and 22, Box 2, RLP. By contrast, the collection contains four folders of letters from John Browning.

  284Van’s old friend: Dowis, “Rosina: A Memoir,” 374.

  285Winifred Hamilton: TM1.

  285office and living room: G. Kuznetsov, “Van Cliburn: Music Is Not a Collection of Sounds,” SK, April 25, 1963.

  285rented out his apartment: Campbell, “Not This Time.” “I’m in transient status in New York,” Van explained. “I couldn’t afford to keep a flat in a hotel.”

  285back to Shreveport: In 1960 the Cliburns moved to 455 Wilder Place, a smart two-story redbrick Colonial revival.

  285“Oh, Daddy” . . . “buy something else”: Van Cliburn, interview by Paul Holdengräber.

  285“crappiest hotel in history”: Howard Camner, Turbulence at 67 Inches: The Autobiography (Xlibris, 2009), 261–63.

  286“Well he’s a nice boy”: VC, 218.

  18: ENDGAME

  287thirty-nine international competitions: Over the five years to 1961. Culture Minister Furtseva reported the figures in a speech to the Twenty-Second Party Congress. Rasmussen, Sviatoslav Richter, 153.

  287Vladimir Ashkenazy: Interview with the author.

  288American intermediaries: Special Agent Leonard A. Butt of the FBI recorded four such requests—including one from Pravda and one from TASS—between June 1961 and March 1962 in the course of surveillance of one stringer for the Moscow press; see FBI files 62–12802–2/3/4/5.

  288Van’s salutation: SAC, New York, to SAC, Albany, memorandum, April 9, 1963; FBI file 62–12802–8.

  288“addressed to his friends”: SA [ . . . ] to SAC, New York, memorandum, November 5, 1963, FBI file 62–12802–11.

  288FBI logged the conversations: Van’s declassified FBI files include fourteen reports of calls originating in Moscow between December 31, 1962, and January 3, 1968, on both business and personal matters; in several, Van thanks the caller for gifts.

  288told the Bureau: “Olga Baquero, Also Known as Mrs. Alfonso Baquero, Internal Security—Russia,” July 13, 1964, FBI File SI 105–1612.

  288“Some politicians maintain . . . friendship”: SA Leonard A. Butt to SAC New York, June 19, 1961, FBI file 62–12802–2.

  288park on the Black Sea: NKCS, 483.

  289tracked Van down in Helsinki: N. Agayants, “Art Brings the Nations Closer,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 19, 1962.

  289festival of modern music: The first Modern Music festival was held in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) June 9–13, 1962.

  289Rildia Bee . . . urged him to accept: Drannikov (APN Novosti), interview with Van Cliburn, Pravda Ukrainy, June 16, 1962.

  289“I saw the faces . . . I wanted to play for them”: “Part of My Heart Is in Moscow,” Moskva 11 (1962): 173.

  289set off for Moscow: For evocative footage of Van and Rildia Bee in Moscow,
including Rildia Bee at the piano, see “Van Cliburn Is Playing,” film dir. Z. Tulubeva, CSCF (RCSDF), 1962, http://www.net-film.ru/en/film-5656/.

  289lost himself on the cobbles: “Part of My Heart Is in Moscow.”

  290Lenin Hills: Now Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University in southwest Moscow.

  290Sukhodrev received an urgent call: Sukhodrev recounts the episode in YM.

  290Janis was already booked: Janis, Chopin and Beyond, 113–14.

  291“Kleeburn! Kleeburn!”: Ibid., 106.

  291welcomed Van as its own: “He was received here as a son that had come home,” wrote A. Zolotov in a piece headed “See You Again Soon” in a July 1962 edition of Izvestiya.

  291“not to my humble person”: “Part of My Heart Is in Moscow.”

  291falling-out with Kondrashin: Tassie, Kirill Kondrashin, 155, 162.

  292dacha outside Moscow: Van’s day at the dacha is captured in video recording RR185 [June 17, 1962], Sergei Khrushchev home movies, JH. See also NKCS, 504–5; YM; “First Photo of USSR’s No. 1 Family,” Life, September 21, 1959, 38–41; “Red’s Dacha Is Luxurious” (AP), Milwaukee Journal, July 27, 1959.

  292“We’ve been watching you . . . you love classical music”: Madigan, “Mementos of the Musician.” In the same interview, Van is quoted as saying that Khrushchev took him “on his boat from his dacha and we motored into the middle of Moscow so we could look up at the palace of the Kremlin.” As Sergei Khrushchev pointed out to me, it was and still is impossible to ride by boat from the Gorki-9 dacha to Moscow through the Rublevskaya Dam, which has no locks.

  293“Because you are too skinny, Vanya”: “‘Vanya’ Cliburn: Popular Does Not Mean Good.”

  293“Wouldn’t you like” . . . “Kvass, never”: NKCS, 504–5. Apparently Van quickly developed a taste for okroshka, or at least he claimed to love it when Viktor Sukhodrev’s mother cooked it for him and Rildia Bee (apparently on this same visit), even asking for seconds.

  294useful political cover: Khrushchev’s show of charm to Van appears to have been part of a pattern. On May 30, Khrushchev and his family had also attended a Benny Goodman concert in Moscow, part of the first officially sanctioned jazz tour of the USSR, despite his well-known dislike of jazz. As the first ships carrying weapons for Cuba were setting sail, Jane and Tommy Thompson were dining with Khrushchev at Dacha no. 9 for the last time before leaving Moscow at the end of their diplomatic posting.

  294“insolent American imperialism”: NKCS, 493.

  294royal audience: Agayants, “Art Brings the Nations Closer.”

  295“Da da, ochen khorosho . . . Ya lyublyu Moskvu”: “Yes yes, very good. I love Moscow.”

  295“I think the cultural exchange . . . enough for that”: Drannikov, interview with Van Cliburn.

  295“Whenever he appeared . . . boyish naiveté”: Albert Goldberg, “Israelis Acclaim Pianist Van Cliburn,” LA Times, September 6, 1962.

  296Operation Mongoose: Many documents are reprinted in FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 10, Cuba.

  296photographs and gifts: Lelchuk, “Chudo po imeni Van Klaybern.”

  297filled up a large file: FBI files 105–1451–1 to 105–1451–31.

  297“Willy, Waylon or Garth . . . achy breaky hearts”: Mike Cochran, “Van Cliburn Competition Turns Cowtown into Classical Mecca,” Scranton Times (PA), May 16, 1993.

  297disassociating himself from it: Mark Schubart to Van Cliburn, December 14, 1961, Folder 3, Box 28, JAD. Schubart recalls Van several times expressing “serious misgivings about the Competition and the manner in which it was launched and was to be conducted. You remember, I am sure, how concerned you were; and if I am not mistaken, at one point you were seriously considering the possibility of withdrawing from it altogether.”

  297Juilliard fund-raiser: See the lengthy correspondence on the matter in Folder 10, Box 22, JAP.

  298“For three hours”: Irving Spiegel, “West Meets East as Bolshoi Opens,” NYT, September 7, 1962.

  298New York City Ballet: For the tour, see Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 81–87; Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 35–65; Rachel Marcy, “Dancers and Diplomats: New York City Ballet in Moscow, October 1962,” The Appendix 2, no. 3 (July 2014), http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/dancers-and-diplomats-new-york-city-ballet-in-moscow-october-1962.

  298Khrushchev leading the applause: Marjorie Hunter, “President Cheers the Bolshoi Ballet; He Goes Backstage,” NYT, November 14, 1962.

  299“It shall be the policy of this nation”: “Text of Kennedy’s Address on Moves to Meet the Soviet Build-Up in Cuba,” NYT, October 23, 1962.

  300played Rachmaninoff: Paul Hume, “Symphony Does Ives Second, Van Cliburn Rachmaninoff,” WP, October 25, 1962.

  300Alexander Feklisov: The spy went under the alias Alexander Fomin.

  300“If there is no intention . . . ready for this”: The full text is available at John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, at http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html.

  301attacked the sub: The episode was not revealed until 2002; see William Burr and Thomas S. Blanton, eds., “The Submarines of October,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 75 (October 31, 2002), http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/.

  301U-2 pilot accidentally trespassed: Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 254–64.

  302“stinking double cross”: Ibid., 189.

  302ready to die: The so-called Armageddon Letter, written on October 26, whose contents were first disclosed in the portion of Khrushchev’s memoirs first published in 1990. See NKCS, 628–30; “Fidel Castro, Nuclear War, and the Missile Crisis: Three Missing Soviet Cables,” CWIHP Bulletin 17/18 (Fall 2012): 325–30.

  302“Can you imagine . . . global catastrophe”: Mikoyan, Autobiography, 277.

  302dispatched their ever-reliable father: “The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Documents on Anastas Mikoyan’s November 1962 Trip to Cuba,” trans. Svetlana Savranskaya, CWIHP Bulletin 17/18, 331–48.

  303“applauded louder and longer”: Hunter, “President Cheers the Bolshoi Ballet; He Goes Backstage.”

  303commenced an affair: Pia Catton, “A Life in the Lively Arts,” New York Sun, August 8, 2005. The conduit was Maxim Gershunoff, in Sol Hurok’s office; see Gershunoff and Leon Van Dyke, It’s Not All Song and Dance: A Life Behind the Scenes in the Performing Arts (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2005).

  304“dog shit . . . asshole art”: Vadislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), 193.

  304strangled: The advice came from party ideologue Mikhail Suslov.

  304“The thaw is over . . . smash the Hungarians”: Robert Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 275.

  304“Society has a right . . . tool for their ideology”: Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, 418–19.

  306“cunning yet insecure . . . rule a superpower”: TOML, 277. The two men had met in September 1959, when Johnson was Senate majority leader: Khrushchev said he hated LBJ’s speeches, and Johnson told Khrushchev he would make an outstanding senator.

  306“dogs peeing against curbstones”: Gaddis, Cold War, 114. Khrushchev was referring to Central Committee members, a third of whom he ordered to resign at each election. He also split regional party committees into parallel bodies for industry and agriculture; both acts cost him much of the support that saved him in 1957.

  306insulting Khrushchev: Starting in September 1963, Mao published nine polemical letters that tore into every aspect of Khrushchev’s leadership. One was titled “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Historical Lessons for the World” and accused the Soviet leader of revisionism and risking the return of capitalism.


  307“I’m old and tired . . . I won’t put up a fight”: Taubman, Khrushchev, 13.

  307“You smeared me all over with shit”: Gaddis, Cold War, 113.

  307“In order to be victorious”: Rasmussen, Sviatoslav Richter, 168.

  19: AMERICA’S PIANIST

  311“Liz . . . at a barbeque”: Hal Rothman, LBJ’s Texas White House: “Our Heart’s Home” (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 175.

  312“President Johnson . . . a great many are”: John Edgar Hoover to Tolson, Belmont, De Loach, Sullivan, December 20, 1963; FBI file 105–70035–10. Despite Hoover’s equanimity, in 1963 it was still dangerous to be gay in America. That year, the FBI had to correct a rumor that Van had “picked up a young man in the mens [sic] room” at a hotel; in fact, a memo explained, it was a different pianist who picked up “an informant of the Washington Field Office, who is an active, aggressive homosexual” and told him to come to his room, where they “engaged in a homosexual act.” The report added that the informant identified a photograph of the pianist in question, whom he cattily said he “considered as a more talented pianist than Van Cliburn.” A. Rosen to Belmont, “Van Cliburn Information Concerning,” December 21, 1963, FBI file 105–70035–9.

  312“It’s more . . . entertainment purposes”: Recording of Telephone Conversation Between Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, December 20, 1963, 3:35 p.m., Tape K6312.11, PNO 2, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings, LBJL. Johnson signaled to his secretary to press a switch and activate the recorder, and the first part of the conversation summarized in Hoover’s memo is missing.

  312“Edgar Hoover says . . . invite him”: Recording of Telephone Conversation Between Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, December 20, 1963, 3:36 p.m., Tape K6312.11, PNO 3, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings, LBJL.

  312Ludwig Erhard . . . landed: The White House Motion Film Unit filmed the visit, including Van’s performance. Video Recording MP801, December 28/29 1963, Materials Relating to “Visit of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of West Germany” Project, 12/28/1963–12/29/1963, White House Naval Photographic Center Films, LBJL.