SOURCE: "Anatomy of Tyranny: Khrushchev's Attack on Stalin," in The World Today, Vol. 12, No. 6, June, 1956, pp. 265-71.

Rarely has a document aroused more interest and speculation than the paper issued by the State Department purporting to be the text of the speech delivered on 25 February 1956 by Mr Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to its twentieth Congress. The United States Government does not vouch for its authenticity; nevertheless it has been received everywhere as plausible; it is in keeping with the tenor of statements made by responsible officials of non-Soviet Communist parties, and Communist newspapers in the West have made no attempt to denounce it as a forgery. On the contrary, they have treated it as genuine.

To read this paper is to recall a dozen highlights of Soviet history between the assassination of Kirov in 1934 and Stalin's death in 1953. Of these two events the first is presented in a highly equivocal light, suggesting a plot by the secret police in collusion with Stalin, the second as a release from unparalleled tyranny. Overshadowing all the rest is the sombre horror of the great purge of the later 1930s.

The ostensible purpose of the speech was to destroy Stalin's reputation, or, in its own terms, to destroy the 'cult of the individual'. Mr Khrushchev's picture of the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1953, as given here, bears a startling resemblance to the more lurid efforts of the extreme anti-Communist school. They, too, spoke of Stalin's dictatorship by terror, of mass injustice, of the execution of thousands of innocents, of cringing judges and confessions, extorted by torture, to crimes that were never committed, of the distortion of history, of the paralysing rule of fear—all of it smothered under choking clouds of servile adulation.

In contrast to Lenin, Mr Khrushchev is alleged to have said, Stalin 'abandoned the method of ideological struggle for that of administrative violence, mass repressions, and terror.' Whoever opposed him was 'doomed to moral and physical annihilation'. But not only those who opposed him. Stalin used terror against 'many honest Communists, against those party cadres who had borne the heavy load of the civil war and the first and most difficult years of industrialization and collectivization'. It was enough to be 'suspected of hostile intent'. Mass arrests and executions without trial 'created conditions of insecurity, fear, and even desperation'; in his 'intolerance and brutality' Stalin condemned to summary death many thousands who had committed no crimes at all, but who were forced to confess to the most 'unlikely crimes' by the use of 'cruel and inhuman tortures'. The military collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court is now reviewing these cases. Since 1954 it has 'rehabilitated 7,679 persons, many of whom were rehabilitated posthumously'.

Stalin is also declared to have been responsible for 'the mass deportation from their native places of whole nations'. These actions were 'not dictated by any military considerations'; others, by implication, were, and it is therefore not surprising that Mr Khrushchev did not include in his list of the uprooted the Volga Germans, the Poles, and the Baits. For these, apparently, the Stalin regime is not yet at an end.

To attribute to Stalin alone the responsibility for these and innumerable other acts is to carry the cult of the individual far indeed. It imposes too great a strain on credulity to believe that for twenty years one man could terrorize 200 million, while his colleagues in the Party, the Government, and the Army remained utterly helpless. Mr Khrushchev deplored the tendency to 'elevate one person, transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god'; in his own fashion this is precisely what he himself has done.

Mr Khrushchev's was a curious contention for a Marxist. No revolutionary of Tsarist days would have accepted as a reason for inactivity the plea that the tyrant 'treated all others in such a way that they could only listen and praise him', or that 'a situation was created where one could not express one's own will'. It is tantamount to an admission that the revolutionary terror had succeeded—where Tsarist persecution had failed—in destroying the spirit and traditions of the party which elevates revolution against oppressors to the highest level of social obligation.

The alternative plea of ignorance, of Stalin's failure to convene the Central Committee, or to inform his colleagues of action about to be taken, cannot even have been intended seriously; it might have some validity for a few months, but not for twenty years. The present rulers of the U.S.S.R. saw their colleagues, their superiors, and their subordinates fall by the thousand. It is difficult to believe that they had to wait for Stalin's death to learn that the victims were innocent. In any case, the plea of ignorance cannot be advanced to excuse inactivity when, on Mr Khrushchev's own showing, Stalin's policies threatened the country, in the opinion of the Army chiefs, with immense losses and dangers during the war. (Neither ignorance nor obedience to orders was accepted as a valid plea at Nuremberg; in his final speech there the Chief Soviet Prosecutor, General Rudenko, said that the Nazi leaders 'were necessary to Hitler just as much as he was necessary to them. Göring, Frick, Rosenberg .. . are inconceivable without Hitler, just as Hitler is inconceivable without them'.¹)

In fact neither plea was meant to be taken at face value. Mr Khrushchev was not talking to a gathering of school-children but to his country's outstanding political figures. What he was in effect saying was that they were all equally responsible. As witnesses and accomplices, none had the right to claim a preeminence on moral or historical grounds. If there was collective leadership, there was also collective guilt.

There were two interesting exceptions. Mr Khrushchev appeared to go out of his way to suggest that Mr Malenkov's guilt was greater than average by recalling two occasions during the war when he acted as Stalin's spokesman, and to display in a favourable light Marshal Zhukov, whom Stalin denigrated. (Mr Malenkov, it may be remembered, was highly critical of Khrushchev's agricultural policies at the nineteenth Congress in 1952.)

Why was the risk taken of bringing the details of this nightmare of tyranny out into the open? Why not have continued the policy of silence which was pursued up to the twentieth Congress, while eradicating the worst abuses of the earlier years? For three years the Party leaders had been cautiously refashioning many facets of Soviet society, executing or getting rid of leading officials of the secret police, encouraging local initiative, loosening the stranglehold that had virtually killed the arts, and generally reducing the extreme tensions and fears of the Stalin era. It might have been thought that this was a settled policy, and would be followed until the present itself denied the past and the dead tyrant's name sank unremarked into oblivion without explicit disavowal.

There is no convincing answer to be found in the 'objective situation', for reasons that were valid in the spring of 1956 were equally valid three years earlier. The answer can lie only in the situation within the Communist Party itself, and here there are only slender indications to support speculation.

In the published records of the 20th Congress there is only one speech which departed from the practice of silent repudiation. That is the speech of Mikoyan which contained the first explicit attack on Stalin. It seems reasonable to assume either that this section of Mikoyan's speech came as a surprise to his colleagues, or that it had been inserted by agreement 'to test audience reaction'—the first being the more likely. It was presumably a step in the manoeuvring for position within the leadership. The popularity of the measures taken after Stalin's death to mitigate the harshness of the regime suggested that support could be won by the open denunciation of its chief architect, and if prestige was to be enhanced by these means, Mr Khrushchev was unlikely to allow it to be won by a colleague. The response to Mikoyan's attack probably convinced the Party presidium that the risks were smaller than they had supposed. (There is in fact a strong suggestion, implicit in the parentheses indicating the mood of the audience which occur in the report of the speech, that the Party cadres welcomed this opportunity to purge themselves of feelings of guilt, to find a more telling and significant scapegoat than Beria.)

There was no suggestion, in Mr Khrushchev's opening speech at the Congress, of any crisis of authority. The forces making for change, embodied in the technical and administrative personnel of the country, received full recognition. But it must be assumed, post facto, that the air of confidence was in part fictitious, that the Communist leaders still felt the need to create fresh bonds between themselves and the members generally, to build relations of confidence and understanding between the rulers and the mass of the ruled. No better way could have been found—given the political narrowness of the regime—than to denounce the man who had destroyed all earlier bonds and made a virtue of mistrust.

In any case, once the conspiracy of silence was broken, it would have been difficult to stop at the point to which Mr Mikoyan ventured. Whether a landslide has been set in motion by this drastic action it is too early to say. But the subterranean forces were already there, imprisoned within the petrified Stalinist mould. They would in any case have sought an outlet, and it is more likely that they can be kept under control and guided if the initiative in their release comes from above.

What cannot be in doubt is that the dual process—of establishing a hierarchy within the leadership, and reaching a new social equilibrium—will take time to work itself out. The Soviet rulers must hope that the revelations—or rather admissions—will prove no more than a nine days' wonder, that their own part in the twenty years of tyranny and misrule will be overlooked in thankfulness that it has ended, and that they will be able to go ahead untrammelled by the discarded garments of their past.

It is difficult, unless one has lived in a totalitarian country, to understand the pressures to which its inhabitants are subjected. But what of the Communist leaders in the decadent democracies, over whom no secret police kept watch? They found no difficulty in approving the purge, and apparently as little in approving there habilitation of its victims. They were prepared to subscribe to the belief in Stalin's infallibility and now appear equally prepared to tread his reputation into the mud. Was none of them capable of distinguishing between theory and dogma, between dissent and treason? What of their historians, for whom the records were available, their scientists, technicians, writers, and artists, who were in a position to compare the Soviet output with that in other countries? It is not Stalin's writings, or genetics, or the quality of Madame Pankratova's history, or the technical standing of Western industry that have changed, but the Party line, and in following it Communist leaders outside the Soviet bloc show themselves as subservient, with backbones as flexible and pens as docile, as in the past.

This is not to suggest that the leaders of Communist Parties in the West will have as little freedom in the future as they have had hitherto. On the contrary, it seems probable that they will have a far wider scope for initiative thrust on them. The Soviet leaders have emancipated themselves from the cramping obsession that there is only one pattern of revolution; it will now be up to the leaders of other parties to seek, under licence, their own road.

Mr Khrushchev dates Stalin's degeneration from the seventeenth Congress of the C.P.S.U., that is from 1934. The choice of the date is significant, not because more than half the delegates who attended the Congress, and 70 per cent of the members of the Central Committee it elected, fell victims to the purge, but because it implies endorsement of the policy with which Stalin's name will always be associated, the policy of 'revolution from above', of forced collectivization and industrialization—whose victims were probably no fewer than those of the great purge. To have denounced him wholly, as Beria is denounced, would have destroyed too much. To deny him altogether would be to deny the present leaders' own legitimacy and the very essence of the system they are operating. For if it would be foolish not to admit that Stalin's insanely suspicious and envious character, his megalomania, ignorance, and vanity account for some of the worst abuses of his rule, it is equally incontestable that a policy which imposed such burdens, pains, and punishments could not have been applied except in a society where there are no alternative parties, alternative policies, and alternative rulers. How indeed, except in a totalitarian system, could Stalin have concentrated such power in his own hands?

This is the cardinal feature of the Soviet system which Mr Khrushchev could not attack. And it is to preserve this that Stalin's crimes were said to have been committed from a mistaken view of the interests of the Party and the masses. 'In this lies the whole tragedy.'

The more striking excrescences of the dictatorship, the paralyzing rigidity and conformity of Stalin's last years, can be condemned and abandoned now that the painful and costly stage of 'primitive accumulation' is past. There is no risk that relaxation will start the whole system sliding backwards. (In the same way the forced labour camps have largely fulfilled their economic function and can be in part dissolved: the roads and railways and houses have been built, the mines have been mechanized. Inducements can now be combined with pressure in varying degrees to get labour to the uninviting wastes of the Arctic region.) Industry now has a broad enough basis and sufficient momentum to expand without subjecting the population to conditions which only brutal terrorism could persuade them to endure in silence. The endorsement of Stalin's earlier policies implies that criticism of the Communist Party, of its position in the country, and of its monopoly of power, will still not be tolerated.

The resignation of Molotov and Kaganovich from their ministerial posts (while remaining deputy premiers) continues the programme of disavowing the past, leaving, of Stalin's old guard, only Mr Mikoyan and the figurehead President, Marshal Voroshilov. The balance of power within the presidium has shifted, and Mr Malenkov now seems to hold a fairly isolated position. While the newlyreleased forces find channels of expression, and eventually settle down into a pattern that reflects the Soviet Union's changed position, internally and externally, the machinery of political power remains unchanged and the new élite appear to have full control of its operations. They are aware of the need for experiment and adaptation, and are prepared to initiate it themselves. Stalin is said not to have visited the rural areas after 1928, whereas Mr Khrushchev spends a good deal of his time travelling round his own as well as other countries.

The men who now rule were the beneficiaries of the policy they have discarded. They are operating a new policy. For the inhabitants of the Soviet Union and its East European bloc, the change is most welcome. The extent to which 'controlled relaxation' may be permitted can perhaps be gauged from the way in which this policy has operated in Yugoslavia; there nothing has been allowed to encroach on the unique position of the Communist Party, and the reduction in the size of maximum landholdings testifies to the belief that an independent peasantry is potentially an enemy of the Communist regime.

Externally, the change in policy antedates the twentieth Congress. The rapprochment with Yugoslavia—the quarrel was singled out by Khrushchev as a glaring example of 'Stalin's shameful role' for which the Soviet Union 'paid dearly'—and the rapid development of friendly relations with the countries of Asia were all set in motion before the Congress. Broadly, Soviet foreign policy continues to aim at the neutralization of Europe, the isolation of America, and advance through the under-developed countries. But these aims are pursued with far greater flexibility and in more conventional terms than before; 'during Stalin's leadership our peaceful relations with other nations were often threatened'. There is basically no difference between competitive coexistence and cold war, but the current term emphasizes that the struggle will be waged by other than military means. For its part, the U.S.S.R. cannot begin to compete successfully until it approximates to the level of productivity achieved in the United States, and to do this it requires, not the sullen acquiescence of an intimidated working class, but voluntary co-operation, and the belief that initiative and independence will not have fatal consequences. The largest obstacle of all—the stagnation of agriculture—remains, and there is no sign that in this respect the essentials of Stalin's policy have been abandoned. Twenty-five years of collectivized agriculture have failed to attract the peasants, who, after all, represent nearly half the working population.

NOTES

¹Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. xxii, p. 358 (Nuremberg, 1948).