Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff Page A

in December 1953, a secret court convicted him of treason, terrorism, and counterrevolutionary conspiracy, he“flung himself about the courtroom weeping and begging for mercy.” Stripped to his underpants, his hands in irons, he was hung mewling from a hook on the wall. A general shoved a cloth in his mouth, wrapped a bandage round his eyes, and fired point-blank into his forehead. Several officers followed suit. Libraries and schools across the Soviet Union closed so that staff could rip Beria’s face out of their books. His long entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was pasted over with one about the Bering Sea.
    On street corners, newly emboldened Russiansgot drunk and beat up the local militiaman. In the Gulag camps, riots broke out among political prisoners, who had largely been excluded from the amnesty. But the hopes of change stirring in Soviet breasts werenot to be realized yet. Ukrainian women in national dress linked arms and were crushed by tanks. Automatic weapons mowed down camp strikers.
    That September, Khrushchev had been named first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the single most powerful position in the Soviet Union. Now, with Beria dead, only Malenkov and Molotov stood in the way of his assuming total control. Spherical, loudmouthed, and jovial, he had always had the advantage of being underestimated. The U.S. ambassador dismissed him as boozy and“not especially bright.” The British ambassador, the resplendently named Sir William Goodenough Hayter, described him as“rumbustious, impetuous, loquacious, free-wheeling, and alarmingly ignorant of foreign affairs.” He was incapable of following complex reasoning, Hayter added, and the far more educated, intelligent, and agreeable Malenkov had to explain things to Khrushchev in “words of one syllable.” The celebrated Russian writer Boris Pasternak was unimpressed by both men and said so more bluntly:“For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer, and now by a fool and a pig.”
    To the West, the fool and the pig were not necessarily an improvement. That August, the Soviets had exploded their first hydrogen bomb—and unlike the American prototype tested earlier, it was ready for immediate use. Stalin had been a known if feared quantity, but there was no telling what these thermonuclear-armed nonentities might try.

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    Van Cliburn Days
    NOT TWO years had passed since Van fastened a small orchid on the gown of a pretty blonde namedRosemary Butts and escorted her to the junior-senior prom at Kilgore College. Nowfifteen hundred East Texans were waiting for him in the same hall, which was less known for piano recitals than for the ice-white smiles and mountain-high legs of the Rangerettes, the world’s first precision drill team. By mayoral proclamation, April 9, 1953, was Van Cliburn Day in Kilgore.
    Yet the young hero was nowhere to be seen. As far as he was concerned, the Rangerettes’ motto, “Beauty Knows No Pain,” applied equally well to concert pianists, who were expected to play exquisitely whatever their state of mind. His usual solution was to arrive at the last minute, or well after, and then pray, walk onstage, and play.
    After half an hour the crowd began to squirm. Rumors spread that Van was still at home, talking long-distance to a girl in New York. Tempers were starting to fray when he finally traipsed out, sat down at the piano, and dashed off a florid rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The audience clambered to its feet, stirred by the unexpected pageantry, and with lumps in their throats cheered loudly before the concert began. When it did, they tipped to the edge of their seats, feeling each note as if they were the strings the hammer had hit. The nervous energy that shook Van’s frame, electrifying audiences as if each person were receiving his vital spark, was his burden and his blessing.
    During intermission the president of Kilgore Music Club, a Mrs. Raymond