My Crazy Russians
I am a rather harmless guy in comparison to Khrushchev. At least I have not been involved in the killing of millions of perceived enemies.
by David Arthur Walters
I like Russians because of my childhood impressions of Nikita Khrushchev’s temper tantrums. Russians are, as everyone knows, crazy by definition. I suppose that appeals to me because I am somewhat crazy myself, although I think I am saner than everyone else because I think that I am basically everyone.
I am a rather harmless guy in comparison to Khrushchev. At least I have not been involved in the killing of millions of perceived enemies. Yet I give him credit for the release of many thousands of Stalin’s Enemies of the People. Please recall that he took advantage of the vacuum after Stalin died and used his populist organizational skills to head up a collective instead of killing his competitors for power. He was eventually retired himself to a nice villa where he wrote his memoirs, and of course he did not tell all.
I just received an email denouncing a popular Fox TV journalist for being a “fake populist.” I paid no attention to him because he is an obvious liar, but he is a very popular liar at that. Go figure how a popular person can fake popularity. Perhaps President Biden should try that. A populist may play to the lowest common denominator of the crowd. Think of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Khrushchev, Trump, and Putin, lately, and several others. The crowd loves Power, is fascinated by criminals and secretly love the greatest ones who legalize crime so murder can be called killing and get away with the mass murder of Enemies of the People.
Khrushchev was not as popular as Donald Trump is today, yet he was definitely bombastic, profane, clownish, histrionic, charming, seductive, unpredictable, pragmatic, intelligent, willful, brutal, and unpolished, although, unlike Trump, who does not touch the stuff, he was a drunk, a habit he used skillfully to achieve his political ends. Richard Nixon, a president I liked for his hypocrisy when I was a weekend hippie protesting in Washington against the Police Action in Vietnam was far more dignified than Khrushchev. In fact, he was personally revolted by Khrushchev’s vulgar behavior yet admired his dogged determination. He said. “He had never in his life told the truth when a lie would serve his purpose,” which gives us cause to wonder if Donald Trump, given his love of things Russian, especially women, understudied him, or a lot of other politicians for that matter.
Anyway, I cannot help liking Russians, crazy or not. Many years after I identified with Khrushchev, I wound up rooming with Mark B., a Russian Jew, in his Queens apartment. He was a composer and music teacher who had bribed his way out of the Soviet Union. I met him when he accompanied the ballet classes I was taking. I had been burned out of my Manhattan room and robbed of my cash savings, so he took me in for a couple of months, until I recouped and got a new crib on the Upper West Side.
When he was in town, I slept on the couch near the grand piano in the living room, on the wall of which was his very large painting of the crucified Christ, the only painting he done. He treated me quite well. He confined his smoking to the kitchen, where he liked to cook up his compositions, and kept the door tightly closed because I had quit smoking the Russian cigarettes I loved. He liked to have sex with girlfriends from Julliard while playing the electric organ in his bedroom. He played at bar mitzvahs in Brighton Beach and drove a cab to supplement his income. I got him a contract to compose a piece for a traveling Russian company. A car crashed into his cab going into Central Park and he was seriously injured. He went to East Europe to rehabilitate, where he contracted a lung disease that ruined his lungs. He won his freedom but lost his career. He was a successful loser, if you know what I mean.
Mark tolerated my fascination with all things Khrushchevian. He was not so sure that the name “Khrushchev” refers to a beetle or its excrement, or maybe the sacred scarab of Egypt, symbolic of renewal. Russians can be indelicate when handing out names. “Nikita,” he said, “means victory.”
Like Khrushchev, I worked on a farm and in machine shops. I got office jobs by lying about my age and education. I liked to read. Although I only knew my father for only four years, he inspired me with a love of literature. He had reenlisted during the war and graduated from law school after it ended, yet he became an electrician because he said it paid better at the time. When he came home from the missile base jobs, we had to shut up after dinner when he sat in that old chair and read and read and read or drafted his lawsuit against the union.
Khrushchev had a second grade education, so I got far ahead of him, to the eighth grade, before I left home for good, just after my 13th birthday. Who really needs a formal education to qualify for a president’s or premier’s job? Maybe he read a lot like I did. He got into an industrial school later on, got really lucky and met Stalin’s wife. As for me, I read Dumas when I was eight. When I was twelve, I hid my favorite capitalist book, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, under my bed with a Playboy magazine. The book but not the magazine was confiscated by my father, a unionist who carried around Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in his glove compartment. My rebellious tendency was cultivated by stories about Khrushchev, movies such as Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause.
After The Untouchables series was released, I had ran away to Chicago and tried to join the Outfit, but Sam Giancana said I talked too much and sent me to an employment agency in the Loop. Melville’s Moby Dick was my favorite after I absconded with my freedom. I am afraid I was a classic juvenile delinquent or Enemy of the People in need of being repressed. I sure liked the Russian authors, from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn, one of Khrushchev's favorite authors. My manifesto was literally Also Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche in my early youth. I took up acting in New York City much later on, when Perestroika was all the rage, studying under Madame Katherine Sergava, who got her start in Moscow. She was much amused by my improvisation on the fall of the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, the Berlin Wall. I pulled a silly poem entitled ‘Fall Wall’ from my pocket and pretended to be a kid bouncing a ball against the wall in hopes it would collapse with the repeated impact. There were two sides to that wall, and they were not either Right or Wrong, but both. I remember that Khrushchev’s original scheme for a “free city” was practically identical to Eisenhower’s scheme for a “guaranteed city.”
Unlike Khrushchev, I eventually ran away from action, retreated to the tombs and read whatever was deemed the world’s greatest literature, and, since my father, whom I had known personally for four years, loved lawyering, I also read the law and its history. The best literature including law holds out the possibility of freedom from oppression although absolute freedom is an impossibility until death. I aspired to be a thinker rather than a doer. Of course I hoped I would eventually become wise enough to do something really great for humankind rather than selfishly uniting my soul with a godhead. I lost my miserable self in abstractions. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that by the time one becomes wise in that manner to what is really going on, it is too late to save the world because it has passed him by as he sat lost in the library stacks. I learned that I had nothing really new to say but could only say the same old things in a different way. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, after all.
Alas, I have done nothing of great moment to render me popular. Khrushchev, on the other hand, thawed things out a bit in Russia, released prisoners, rehabilitated folks convicted by Stalin, allowed people to read Solzhenitsyn and so on. He read the Bible as a kid and wound up having an abiding faith in Socialism. He was a pragmatist, hence willing to change means to achieve that end. I am not qualified for dictatorship because I have faith in Nothing, yet I am not a nihilist inasmuch as I would not destroy everything so only nothing remains.
After all, one usually has extraordinary faith in something or the other to participate in or lead the killing and murder of millions of people. It takes time to realize that nothing is black or white forever, that there are many shades of gray.
No, it is not either/or, either socialism or capitalism; that is, public capitalism or private capitalism. It is neither altogether, a dialectic with a moving compromise between both. The continuing argument for positive progress, in my opinion, and Khrushchev would probably agree, can be made nonviolently with good effects, although there has been a great deal of violence along the way to total democracy. Consider that private capitalism evolved from the ownership of the means of production by a few savers, capitalists so-called, or call them predators or pirates or gangsters if you please; that is, from a comparatively small society of elite owners, to broader and broader ownership of the means of production as slaves became servants and employees demanding a greater share of the gross margin for consumption.
Sad to say that people get bored even with material abundance, and, anyway, they may be born to kill for the hell of it to remind them why peace is preferable to war. Perchance we are on the brink of nuclear war now. People are dying to live. Are Russians crazy enough to bring half the world to eternal peace? Ask Nikita.
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