Nabokov and Buckley: Khrushchev Not Welcome Here (Or Is He?)

By Nina L. Khrushcheva

In 1959 National Review, the magazine founded and edited by William F. Buckley Jr., offered a bumper sticker: “Khrushchev Not Welcome Here.” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was about to visit the United States, and Buckley, the godfather of modern American conservatism, saw it as his job to protect America’s ideological virginity. In his eyes, Khrushchev’s 1956 De-Stalinization campaign and slogan of peaceful co-existence with the West were just tricks to catch the U.S. napping before enslaving it. Confirmation for Buckley that Khrushchev was no different than Stalin had come, after all, during the so-called “Kitchen Debates” of 1959, an impromptu ideological argument between Vice President Richard Nixon and the Red Premier in an American model kitchen on display in Moscow. Khrushchev had claimed his grandchildren would live in a communist society; Nixon said they would live in a free one.

Eisenhower’s decision to invite Khrushchev to the U.S. rubbed the National Review’s founder raw. He and others on the far right saw it as a gross sign of weakness, and they were vocal in their dissent—hence the bumper stickers.

I discovered one of these Cold War relics in a Manhattan antique shop in the mid-’90s. By then, its amateurish design and anachronistic message should have seemed quaint; but it moved me. I took it home to put up in my West Side apartment, I suppose as one of those household ironies many of us keep around nowadays. The irony was compounded by the fact that I, a Khrushchev, now lived in the very country that had sought to inoculate itself against Khrushchev in 1959, but today considers him a key figure in the Soviet Union’s timid opening to the West.

Five years after acquiring his sticker, I met Bill Buckley in person at an event to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was another sweet post-Cold War irony that Buckley was on the panel with my uncle Sergey, Nikita Khrushchev’s son, a U.S. resident since 1991.

A few months later, I came to see Buckley at the National Review offices on Lexington Avenue to talk about the Cold War, my great-grandfather, and who won and lost the Kitchen Debates. Whereas 40 years ago these subjects had ignited his passion and outrage, now they were the stuff of civilized chitchat. Were it not for Buckley’s multisyllabic diction, we might have been discussing the weather.

We sat at a large wooden table in a rather dingy conference room with wall-to-wall shelves of old issues of the Review and Buckley’s hundreds of books. I was intimidated not only by his mythic stature but by his friendly demeanor, his canary yellow sweater—too unexpected, too bright—his twinkling eyes and that tongue flicking in and out like a lizard’s. Most Republicans I had met wore suits and seemed to look and talk the same.

I asked him why he had made the bumper sticker. “Somebody had to,” he said. “No hard feelings, I hope. Communism is no longer, which is good for all of us, isn’t it?”  

He didn’t gloat over Nixon’s prediction for Khrushchev’s grandchildren coming true; he was too sophisticated for that. “Let bygones be bygones,” he said. “The old animosities are over now, and frankly, I have nothing personal against your great-grandfather. It was the ideology that stirred the passions, but I always respected Khrushchev. He knew how to make an argument and put up a fight.”

Buckley had just given up his editorship of National Review, and was more interested in his spy novels and mysteries than his old politics, so the Khrushchev conversation seemed to be wearing thin fast on him. After only twenty minutes, I felt it was time to go. “What do you do in New York?” he asked, concluding the meeting with polite interest. 

I told him I was a fellow at the New School’s World Policy Institute. I caught his crooked smile—even after all these years, it figured that a Khrushchev would be nothing more than a welfare-supporting liberal—but he said nothing. Then, almost as an afterthought, I told him about the book I was writing.

“It’s about contemporary Russia,” I said. “After visiting Montreux, Switzerland, where author Vladimir Nabokov lived and was buried, I’ve chosen to use his ideas as a roadmap for the current transitional period: from a closed terrain of Russia’s communal culture to its Western alternative, open and competitive. Nabokov’s contribution to Russian life was that he created characters different from those in traditional Russian literature. Instead of exalting in a spirit of compassion, submission, rebellion or revolution, as the characters of Dostoevsky or Nikolai Chernyshevsky would, Nabokov’s characters are strong and positive in their outlook. They take responsibility for their lives, make individual decisions in their own interest, not for the sake of saving humanity or destroying the unjust state.”

I hadn’t known what to expect in response to all this, but Buckley’s face lit up. “What a wonderful idea,” he said. His post-Cold War indifference vanished. “Vlàdimir [typically for an American he stressed the first syllable] would have loved the thought that his works are bound to serve as a model for the new post-Communist Russia. Did you know he and I were friends, very good friends indeed? We were neighbors in Switzerland.”

For the next hour he showered me with stories of their friendship. “We saw each other around Gstaad every year. He moved there permanently in 1961 because of me. I suggested it was a great place to write fiction—an antechamber to heaven. Vladimir felt the same way.”

He did indeed. “No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets,” Nabokov once wrote of Montreux, where he lived until his death in 1977. Being there, he wrote, confirmed him in his “favorite habit—the habit of freedom.”

Buckley continued proudly, “Vladimir even once signed a book for me, Strong Opinions. He never put inscriptions in his books, you know. They were all dedicated to Vera and there was no room for anyone else. But this time, we shared those opinions.” No longer concerned with offending me politically, he was raving about how truly conservative Vladimir was (“For the most part,” Buckley added), how he never trusted the Soviets, how Nabokov had been an admirer of Nixon and his politics (“More than I was”), how all three of them despised communism (“Although Nixon wasn’t nearly conservative enough. He shouldn’t have talked to Mao”), and how unfortunate it was that Nabokov didn’t get a chance to see his thoughts vindicated after 1991. He was glad, however, that Nabokov’s artistic legacy was now appreciated in Russia, not only for its aesthetic quality, but for its anti-communist, anti-communal message. 

“After all, Vera always insisted that every book by VN was a blow against tyranny. Have you read any of my books?” Buckley asked. I hadn’t, so I started mumbling. “You should,” he interrupted me. “In Stained Glass, I have Vera and Vladimir as characters. Would be interesting to you. I told him a few months before he died. I don’t know if he was more flattered or apprehensive—what if he didn’t like the book? He was very honest about his tastes, distrusting the tastes of others, always readier to talk about his dislikes than his likes. 

That he was. In Strong Opinions, Nabokov wrote, “Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called ‘great books.’ That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered ‘masterpieces,’ or at least what journalists call ‘great books,’ is to me an absurd delusion.”

Buckley told me about Terry Quinn's 1979 play Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya. It was put on at Cornell to mark the 50th year since Nabokov taught there in 1948. Buckley played a progressive Edmund Wilson (“VN was such a good friend, I didn’t mind becoming a liberal for that occasion,” he remarked) opposite Nabokov’s son Dmitri as Vladimir. “Did you see it? ” I didn’t at the time, only later that year attending a production put on at the museum of Natural History with Wilson played by another New York intellectual, George Plimpton.

Leaving the National Review, I felt inspired; my idea of Nabokov as a road map for contemporary Russia had been confirmed by one of those Americans who always seemed to have his ear attuned to history. Never mind that Buckley was a Republican; despite my Communist roots and my great-grandfather’s convictions, I am of that post-Kitchen Debates grandchildren generation, which chooses to live in freedom—a preference for all people in a democracy, liberal or conservative. 

I had gone in intending to discuss old enemies but we ended up talking about great friends—one of those hopeful turnouts of the Cold War. But after eight years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, Nabokov’s message that individual freedoms can teach us to be responsible for our own actions, that no state ideology can provide our lives with form and meaning, is all but lost.

With the way Russia is going today—curtailing freedom of expression, imposing restrictions on nongovernmental organizations, threatening the opposition, intimidating economic partners by manipulating oil and gas supplies (this list can go on), all for the sake of state order—these friendly conversations may soon be a matter of the past. While “Khrushchev Not Welcome Here” is an amusing bit of kitsch, a “Medvedev Not Welcome Here” bumper sticker seems an increasingly real possibility, even if Bill Buckley is no longer around to make it. 

Nina Khrushcheva came to the United States in 1991 to attend graduate school at Princeton University. She now teaches international affairs at The New School in New York City, and is the author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics.