Marvin Kalb

The Year I Was Peter the Great (eBook, PDF)

1956-Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

A chronicle of the year that changed Soviet Russiäand molded the future path of one of America's pre-eminent diplomatic correspondents 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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Oktober 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780815745648
• Artikelnr.: 74834150

Autorenporträt

Marvin Kalb is a former senior adviser to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Harvard Professor emeritus, former network news correspondent at NBC and CBS, senior fellow nonresident at the Brookings Institution, and author of 17 other books, the most recent of which is the first two volumes of his memoirs covering his years as a foreign correspondent in Russia, The Year I Was Peter the Great (Brookings, 2017) and Assignment Russia.