Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [35]
Local officials dispatched frantic messages to Moscow. They had no experience with civil disobedience and wanted instructions from the Kremlin. This, in itself, was not unusual. In a vertical hierarchy like the USSR, no official who valued his perks—or position—made independent decisions without consulting higher authority. The members of the Presidium were so bogged down with the minutiae of running this vast nation that they were currently reading the manuscript of a young writer named Boris Pasternak to decide whether his novel Doctor Zhivago should be banned. (It was.) The Ministry of the Interior told the Georgian officials to publicly read Khrushchev’s proclamation on Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality. That should silence the crowd. But it didn’t.
As Molotov and Kaganovich had feared, Khrushchev’s precedent of openly criticizing a Communist icon served only to whip Georgians into their own frenzy. It was as if Khrushchev, by his own example, had given citizens license to criticize the regime as well. And now that they had tasted a little freedom to protest, they couldn’t stop themselves.
The following day, March 8, some eighteen thousand demonstrators filled Lenin Square in Tbilisi, their grievances having grown more wide-ranging. “Provocative speeches of inflammatory, chauvinistic and anti-Soviet nature were read,” Stanikov reported indignantly to his editors, who relayed the breathless dispatches to KGB headquarters. (Stanikov, like other Russian correspondents in Tbilisi, understood that his field reports were not for publication, and the Soviet media made no official mention of the brewing unrest. Journalists simply acted as an extra set of eyes and ears on the ground for the security organs.) “A huge young man with a Tarzan hairdo,” Stanikov continued, “waved his fist in the air, and after a series of accusations against the Party and the government, went on to recall the struggle of the Georgians against foreigners.”
Stanikov was shocked, and for the first time since the marches began he was also frightened. The demonstration had shifted to dangerously seditious grounds, because the “foreigners” in question were Russians. What had started as indignation over Khrushchev’s denunciation of a hometown hero was rapidly devolving into an independence rally, a cry for autonomy from the Kremlin itself. Stalin, after all, had been the central linchpin to Georgia’s tenuous allegiance to Moscow. Without the reflected glory of the Great Leader, it did not take long for Georgians to remember that they had been forced at bayonet point to join the empire.
Poets and writers stoked the nationalist flames with fiery readings of Georgian folklore. People waved purple prerevolutionary Georgian flags and sang odes to kings from centuries past. Every vehicle in the city honked its horn in solidarity. Even Stanikov unwittingly caught the liberty bug, feeling free to criticize Soviet authorities in one dispatch. “In my opinion, the public reading of [Khrushchev’s] letter on the cult of personality should have been avoided,” he complained to his bosses, expressing a contrarian view to the party line that, in Stalin’s day, only a fool would have put in writing.
The situation was spiraling out of control. In Moscow, on the evening of March 8, the Presidium debated what to do. Khrushchev urged restraint; Molotov and Kaganovich wanted order restored immediately. The unrest had started to spread to other Georgian cities. Left unchecked, the madness could infect neighboring regions in the volatile Caucasus and possibly contaminate the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, inflaming the nationalist aspirations of Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars, Baits, Moldovans, and western Ukrainians—to say nothing of the Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, and East Germans living unhappily under Moscow’s yoke. The Presidium argued late into the night. And by morning the reports from Tbilisi were increasingly alarmist. “On