completely understandable suppositions that Khrushchev’s allegedly spontaneous reaction had been planned.
Just before that, in October, Khrushchev had had to back down in a confrontation with John F. Kennedy, removing the Soviet missiles in Cuba that were aimed at the Unites States. He was concerned that his reputation as a strong leader had suffered, and he wanted to show that he had the reins of power firmly in hand. The attack at the Manege was to be one of the proofs of his strength.
It became the stage for his famous discussion with Ernst Neizvestny, whose expressionistic sculpture of a woman prompted the Soviet leader to shout that if Neizvestny depicted women this way, he was a “fag,” and “we give ten years for that.” In response the stocky thirty-seven-year-old sculptor, a brave former soldier, demanded that they bring him a girl so he could prove otherwise. Khrushchev burst out laughing, but the KGB person who accompanied him threatened Neizvestny that rude talk with the boss could land him in a uranium mine.
Neizvestny tried arguing with Khrushchev, mentioning that Pablo Picasso was Communist, but the premier interrupted him: “I am Communist number one in the world, and I don’t like your works,” adding, “Don’t you understand that all foreigners are enemies?”33
Neizvestny seemed like such a convenient target that Khrushchev continued mocking him two weeks later, on December 17, at a meeting of the Soviet leadership with the cultural elite at the House of Receptions in Lenin Hills, where he said publicly to the sculptor: “Here’s what your art looks like: now if a man got into a toilet, got inside the bowl, and then looked up at what was above him if someone sat down on the seat, that would be your work!”34
It might be considered an irony of fate that when Khrushchev died in 1971, his headstone at the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery was made by none other than Neizvestny. Even though the sculptor maintained that the commission had been in Khrushchev’s will, in fact it was not: the decision was made by the Khrushchev family, and it hesitated between Neizvestny and Zurab Tsereteli, another rising star of the period in monumental sculpture. But Tsereteli got cold feet over the politically hazardous project.35
Now Neizvestny’s most famous work, the headstone—a bronze head of Khrushchev on a background of intersecting chunks of white marble and black granite—symbolized in the sculptor’s mind the struggle between the progressive and the reactionary in the Soviet leader’s personality and work. It is possible that later generations will see one or the other as dominant.
Khrushchev’s effectiveness was severely undermined in his last years in the Kremlin, and that was due in great part to his conflicts with the cultural elite: it set the tone, gradually inculcating the idea that Khrushchev was too unstable and unpredictable—in short, dangerous. This is clear from the reminiscences of filmmaker Mikhail Romm, in many ways a typical figure in Soviet culture. Romm was among the first laureates of the Stalin Prize for two of his quality films about Lenin, and then Stalin gave him three more awards for his anti-American propaganda films, also not badly done. In 1962, Romm made the classic Thaw film about a young scientist,
Romm started out as an ardent Khrushchevian. Even the young avant-garde poet Voznesensky admitted that then he considered Khrushchev “our hope.”36 The faith of Romm, Voznesensky, and many other cultural liberals was finally shattered on March 7, 1963, at another meeting of the Soviet leader with cultural figures, this time at the Kremlin. The irate premier created a scene that stunned everyone there. Khrushchev swore, yelled that for the enemy “we don’t have a thaw but a fierce frost,” “I’m for war in art,” and “Mister Voznesensky, get out of our country, get out!”37
Voznesensky recalled that when Khrushchev screamed at him: “Agent! Agent!” he thought, “Well, he’s calling in the agents, they’ll take me away.” Ilya Ehrenburg, who was in the audience and had been yelled at by Khrushchev, too, later asked the young poet, “How did you bear it? Anyone in your place could have had a heart attack…. You could have begged for mercy, fallen to your knees, and that would have been understandable.”38
Yevtushenko, whose anti-Stalinist poem “The Heirs of Stalin” had appeared in
According to Romm, “After that surrealistic shouting, everything was topsy-turvy” for the guests at the Kremlin; many members of the elite who had previously been loyal to Khrushchev began to wonder whether this man could lead such an enormous country: “At some point his brakes failed, he went off the rails…. You could easily destroy all of Russia that way.”40
Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964 by his former acolytes inside the Party and replaced as leader of the country by Leonid Brezhnev, heavy-browed, tall, and friendly. He had a reputation as an experienced and reliable apparatchik, unlikely to improvise or heat up passions, and the news was greeted with relief and hope by many intellectuals. Even people who owed Khrushchev a lot personally, like Tvardovsky, Yevtushenko, and Solzhenitsyn, had grown weary of his policy zigzags.
In that sense Yuri Lyubimov’s position was typical. A famous actor who was in the signal film of the Stalin era,
Lyubimov went on: “Someone snitched that we were making fun of the leader. I was called in. That was my first explanation before the authorities, by the way. I was just starting out, and so I was very arrogant. So I said, ‘Do you know who talks like that? Pretty illiterate people, that’s who…. Let him learn to speak Russian properly!’”2 Lyubimov, with his amazing sensitivity to political currents and flair for publicity (he liked to say that “If there’s no scandal around the theater, it’s no theater”), staked everything and won: while the authorities mulled over the proper punishment for the suddenly obstinate director, Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev, who remained well disposed toward the Taganka.
Lyubimov was always balancing on the edge between allowed and forbidden, often crossing the line. Using the long-suppressed and almost forgotten devices of the Russian avant-garde theater, Lyubimov created a politically charged theater with wide appeal. His enemies kept saying that he was merely an imitator of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Tairov, and Meyerhold: “We’ve been through that.” Lyubimov’s ready reply was: “Been through! You mean, you walked past it! You’re stuck in the swamp of realism!”
Lyubimov was always something of an enigma, his jovial mask of a “wastrel” hiding a will of iron and endless ambition. For many years, he was considered an orthodox Communist (he even worked for a while as master of ceremonies in the dance ensemble of the NKVD, whose patron was the chief of secret police Lavrenti Beria) and a
