The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956_Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

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Description

A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russia―and molded the future path of one of The usa’s pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents

1956 was once an abnormal year in brand new Russian history. It was once referred to as “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, , this once unassailable god was once 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 atypical 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, taking note of Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rise up 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 an enchanting eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship.


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