There was high historical drama and some political risk in Nikita Khrushchev's decision to carry his war with the ghost of Josef Stalin to the point of removing the embalmed corpse of the deceased dictator from what was, until recently, the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum, the great secular shrine of the Soviet Union. Even more challenging was the decision to erect a memorial to the innocent victims of Stalin's tyranny.

Eloquent proof of the powerful spell Stalin cast upon the country he ruled with a rod of iron for twenty-four years is the fact that only now, more than eight years after his death, are the Russian people being told the truth about his grim record of brutal criminality. It is true that about three years after Stalin's death, at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, in February, 1956, Khrushchev took the first step toward destroying the image of Stalin as the all-benevolent, all-wise, all-powerful "father of peoples" and "sun of the universe," to recall two phrases of Byzantine flattery which were frequently used about Stalin in his lifetime.

At that time Khrushchev's indictment of Stalin's crimes was selective. He said nothing about those acts of mass cruelty which might be regarded as enhancing the power and interests of the Soviet state, the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," the man-made famine of 1932-33, the deportations from Poland and the Baltic States, the massacre of some 15,000 Polish officer war prisoners in the Katyn Forest and elsewhere in 1940. What he emphasized was Stalin's habit of torturing and killing devoted Communists, his miscalculations in the planning and conduct of the war.

However, this speech was not officially published in Russia. It remained in the category of Lenin's famous Political Testament, something known to sophisticated Communist Party members, but a matter of rumor and hearsay to the majority of the Soviet people. Khrushchev even tried to soften the impact of his own indictment, delivered behind closed doors, by publicly referring to Stalin as "a great fighter against imperialism," leaving the impression that he had rendered great services to the Soviet Union, even if he had been led astray by what was euphemistically referred to as "the cult of personality."

But now the declaration of war on Stalin's ghost is uncompromising and implacable. What was authorized by the Twenty-Second Congress is comparable with the practice of the impotent Roman Senate, in the time of the absolute power of the Emperors, in decreeing the throwing down of the statues of those Emperors who had behaved as tyrants—once they were safely dead. The most remote collective farm, the loneliest mountain village in the Caucasus will hear that the body of Stalin, once adored as a mortal god, has been excluded with infamy from its place next to Lenin in the Soviet pantheon.

The motivation for this spectacular denigration is not altogether clear, although three factors seem to have played a part.

First, the Twenty-Second Party Congress, hailed as a demonstration of unity of the triumphant "builders of Communism" in the Soviet Union with the fraternal Communist parties of some eighty countries, may be remembered as an occasion which emphasized the rift between Moscow and Peiping, for which the ostensible issue of tiny backward Albania is scarcely the most important explanation. Peiping and its sympathizers in the world Communist movement have always refused to accept the downgrading of Stalin. For Khrushchev to emphasize this downgrading is a natural reaction to strained relations with Peiping.

Second, it has apparently seemed expedient to stigmatize as "Stalinists" the "anti-Party" group of Khrushchev's open and secret opponents in the Communist Party. To associate Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov and other individuals who have opposed Khrushchev as closely as possible with Stalin's acts of arbitrary cruelty is a normal maneuver in inner-Party in-fighting.

Third, Khrushchev, in trying to exorcise the ghost of Stalin, may be hoping to win popular support by creating the impression that he is completely dissociating himself from Stalin's policies. As against the risk of administering a traumatic shock to those Soviet citizens who are still indoctrinated with the cult of Stalin's unique virtue and wisdom, there is the possibility of rallying the allegiance of those who remember with bitterness the undeserved suffering Stalin brought to the uncounted thousands whom he slaughtered, to the millions whom he banished to slave labor concentration camps.

To be sure, Khrushchev cannot assume the role of Stalin's accuser with clean hands. Like every prominent political figure in the Soviet Union, he survived the purges of the Stalin era only by obsequious sycophancy and by zealously carrying out any purging assignments which the dictator entrusted to him. Here is the voice of Khrushchev, greeting Stalin on his seventieth birthday in December, 1949:

Comrade Stalin, the genius leader of our party, rallied the peoples of our country and led them to the triumph of socialism. . . . Stalin stood at the cradle of each Soviet Republic, protected it and paternally helped it to grow and flourish. . . . This is why all the peoples of our country, with extraordinary warmth and filial love, call the great Stalin their dear father and genius teacher.

To-day the peoples of the great Soviet Union and all advanced progressive mankind wholeheartedly greet our dear Comrade Stalin, inspirer of the indissoluble friendship of peoples.

Glory to our dear father .. . the genius leading the Party, the Soviet people and the working people of the whole world, Comrade Stalin.

The following passage in the most authoritative biography of Khrushchev¹ brings out the present Soviet dictator's full identification with Stalin's method of rule by unlimited terror, directed against the ruling Communist Party, as well as against the Soviet peoples as a whole:

In 1937 Khrushchev became a member of a "purge troika," sent to liquidate "the enemies of the people" in the Ukraine. The other members were Molotov and the dreaded NKVD chief, Ezhov. The purge-team worked effectively. Most members of the Ukrainian Cabinet, of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet and of the Ukrainian Central Committee were summarily executed. According to conservative estimates, sixty percent of the Ukrainian CP apparatus was liquidated, not to speak of the thousands of ordinary Party members, and their accomplices, the "class-hostile" elements among non-Party people.

According to the official Soviet "History of the Ukraine":

"With the arrival in the Ukraine of the close comrade-in-arms of Stalin, N. S. Khrushchev, the eradication of the remnants of the enemy and the liquidation of the wrecking activities proceeded particularly successfully."

Stalin was a most vivid living illustration of the eternal truth of Lord Acton's dictum: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He was a figure of blood and horror in Russian history unmatched since the paranoid Tsar Ivan the Terrible, whom in many ways he resembled. In the violent twentieth century the only man who might rival him in the number of human lives he blighted and destroyed was Adolf Hitler. Stalin also represented the most emphatic refutation of Lenin's Utopian dream that, after a period of absolute dictatorship, the very need for the existence of the state would disappear and men would live in perfect freedom. This theory presupposes a measure of selfless dedication on the part of the wielders of the dictatorship which is contrary to all historical experience of human nature. When entrusted with unlimited power, Stalin's proved record of criminal super-gangsterism, now at last revealed to the Russian people, warrants every word of George F. Kennan's eloquent indictment:²

This was a man of incredible criminality, of a criminality effectively without limits; a man apparently foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy; a man in whose entourage no one was ever safe; a man whose hand was set against all that could not be useful to him at the moment; a man who was most dangerous of all to those who were his closest collaborators in crime. . . .

By way of response, apparently, to what seems to have been some opposition to his purposes on the part of the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Stalin killed, in the ensuing purges of 1936 to 1938, 1108 out of a total of 1966 of the members of the Congress. Of the Central Committee elected at that Congress and still officially in office, he killed 98 out of 139—a clear majority, that is, of the body from which ostensibly he drew his authority. These deaths were only a fraction, numerically, of those which resulted from the purges of those years. . . .

All this is apart from the stupendous brutalities which Stalin perpetrated against the common people: notably in the process of collectivization, and also in some of his wartime measures. The number of victims here—the number, that is, of those who actually lost their lives—runs into the millions. But this is not to mention the broken homes, the twisted childhoods and the millions of people who were half killed, who survived these ordeals only to linger on in misery, with broken health and broken hearts.

It might also be noted that Stalin killed all his six colleagues in the Politburo at the time of Lenin's death (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky), thereby giving rise to the grim joke that, having killed all his friends, he was beginning on his acquaintances. After the end of the war, enraged by the cordial reception which Moscow Jews gave to the Ambassador of Israel, Mrs. Golda Meir, he let loose a wave of anti-Semitic terror and persecution, in which some of the best known Russian Jewish writers and intellectuals perished.

It is perhaps understandable that a cunning tyrant, possessed of the two mighty weapons of the totalitarian state, unlimited terror and unlimited propaganda, could have fooled a considerable number of his own people. But one of the most depressing aspects of the Stalin story is the way in which he fooled considerable numbers of people in the West. The United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mr. Joseph E. Davies, described Stalin as a man so kindly that a child would sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. Although the list of Stalin's broken treaties and promises is endless, this same Ambassador Davies, in a speech in Chicago in February 1942, offered the following endorsement:

By the testimony of performance and in my opinion, the word of honor of the Soviet Government is as safe as the Bible.

There is nothing in the memoirs or in the available historical material to show that either Roosevelt or Churchill realized that, in Stalin, they were dealing with a monster, with one of the greatest mass murderers of all time. Had this been realized, even when military expediency dictated co-operation against Hitler, Western policy in the concluding phase of the war and in the immediate postwar period might have been shaped along more realistic lines.

Stalin's career is another historical illustration of the point that revolutions are usually made against weak, rather than strong governments, that the most terrible tyrants are likely to die peacefully in their beds. (Whether Stalin's own death was due to natural causes is a mystery that may never be cleared up with certainty. His personal secretary Poskrebyshev mysteriously disappeared at the time of his death and was never heard of again. As Stalin's paranoid mind was apparently tending in the direction of another big purge, with the arrest of a number of prominent Russian physicians on poisoning charges as a macabre curtain-raiser, his death was distinctly convenient to his lieutenants, none of whom could be sure of not being one of the victims of the new purge.)

It is by no means certain that Khrushchev has finally banished Stalin's ghost, even though he felt politically strong enough to evict the deceased dictator from the shrine which his body had occupied since his death. Stalin has become such a gigantic myth in Soviet history that its elimination seems bound to leave a big spiritual and psychological vacuum. His belated condemnation poses distinctly awkward questions.

What, for instance, was Khrushchev doing in the Stalin era to thwart Stalin's crimes? What about the Communist Party, which is supposed to be the highest source of authority and the supreme repository of political wisdom? What went wrong with its functioning when a bloody tyrant could place himself above all restraint and put to death large numbers of veteran Party members who were innocent of any crime? If so many of Stalin's judgments were nothing but a despot's whims, what about the trials of an earlier period which sent to their deaths Lenin's old comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Bukharin and Rykov? What about Trotsky? Once Stalin's method of extorting false confessions by torture is officially established, who can be sure of the genuineness of any political trial that took place under his rule?

It is sometimes reported from Germany that parents avoid talking about the Nazi period, because of fear that their children will reproach them for not having done something to prevent the monstrous crimes that took place in the concentration camps. This moral and psychological problem is compounded in the Soviet Union, because there has been no break in continuity, because Khrushchev and his associates are the direct political heirs of Stalin.

"The truth shall make ye free" is a famous Biblical phrase. It would probably be too much to hope that the final moment of truth about Stalin and his crimes will immediately free the Soviet people from the effects of forty-four years of totalitarian indoctrination and regimentation. But this moment of truth will probably make it more difficult for a new Stalin to arise. It will almost certainly sow seeds of doubt among the more intelligent young Soviet citizens about the infallibility of their system. And the exposure of Stalin for what he was, not a "father of the peoples," not a "genius leader of progressive humanity," but an amoral monstrous tyrant, seems calculated to shake the cocky self-confidence of the most indoctrinated Young Communist.

Nor will the dual role of Stalin's faithful henchman and Stalin's belated accuser be altogether easy to play, even for a politician of Khrushchev's audacity, bounce, and ingenuity.

NOTES

¹ George Paloczi-Horvath, Khrushchev, p. 92.

²Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, pp. 256-258.