(4 of 20)
In 1957, my job, as a third secretary, was to monitor the disarmament negotiations then taking place in London under the auspices of the U.N. I was convinced that the Soviet Union was more interested in disarmament than the U.S. was. So was the First Secretary of the party, Nikita Khrushchev. The head of our department, Tsarapkin, told me that Khrushchev was very bitter that at the London negotiations, there had been sudden changes in the American position, and the U.S. had withdrawn what our side considered a significant concession.
At that time, Khrushchev was facing opposition at home. The Stalinists who survived the purges of the '30s were the sternest guardians of Communist doctrine, and they often grumbled about Khrushchev. One of them was Tsarapkin's deputy and my superior, Kirill Novikov. Along with Tsarapkin, Novikov had sat behind Stalin during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He would reveal himself in the way he reminisced: "In Stalin's time we had real order. There were none of these rhetorical flourishes and vacillations." Moscow was rife with gossip about intrigues. A clique in the Presidium (Khrushchev's name for the Politburo), labeled the "anti-party group" and including Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov, nearly engineered a palace coup against Khrushchev. But he convened the Central Committee, stronghold of his support, and stripped his rivals of their positions. Around this time Andrei Gromyko became Foreign Minister.
Not long afterward, I joined the party for very practical reasons: without the right political credentials I would not get party and KGB approval for promotions or assignments abroad. I cannot count the hours I spent in party organization meetings in the ministry, listening to or delivering dull reports on doctrinal matters or on the foibles and failings of other "comrades." As a rule, the pettier the subject, the longer the discussion of it.
The most unpleasant aspect of party responsibility, and the party chore I found most demeaning, was the task of snooping into and supervising the personal lives of others. Communists are expected to set shining examples of behavior. When, instead, they engage in amoralka (misconduct)--the most common forms being heavy drinking, philandering and, among diplomats, smuggling Western consumer goods--their peers are supposed to recall them to righteousness. The party had a series of weapons for these situations, ranging from a slap on the wrist, vygovor (a reprimand), to expulsion. But the party prefers to redeem rather than punish. The higher a transgressor's rank, moreover, the greater the tendency to cover up his misdeeds.
In early February 1958, Novikov took me to a meeting with Gromyko. It was the first time I had seen him since joining the ministry. Gromyko opened the discussion with a propaganda tirade. He said that Khrushchev considered it necessary to develop a campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing: "He has decided that we must set an example and unilaterally discontinue the testing of nuclear weapons."