Murder Will Out
The ghost of Joseph Stalin rose out of his granite tomb in Red Square last week and stalked the crenelated walls of the Kremlin with an awesome message for Communists everywhere. Like Hamlet's father, the old dictator gave notice that he was doomed to walk the night and "to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away." The man who raised the ghost was Nikita Khrushchev, no Prince Hamlet, but now Stalin's clearest heir.
Out of Moscow last week leaked news of a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. After the regular congress sessions had ended (Feb. 25) the 1355 Soviet delegates were summoned to a secret, 6 p.m. meeting at the Great Kremlin Palace. Foreign Communists (even leaders like Italy's Togliatti, France's Thorez) were barred. Last week the secret of what happened at the secret meeting was leaked to foreign diplomats and newsmen. TIME Correspondent Jim Bell, taking a plane from Moscow to Bonn, was able to file a detailed, authenticated report.
Tale with Tears. Mounting the podium with extreme solemnity, Khrushchev spoke for three hours with great care and feeling--and sometimes in tears. His first words were to praise Stalin: in the early days, said Khrushchev, Stalin was a devoted and truly great servant of the party, and in the decade after Lenin's death (1924) his leadership was indispensable. But in the last 19 years of his life Stalin had done enormous harm to the party, the Soviet Union and the Soviet people,
Khrushchev said. The crucial event had been the murder (1934) of Leningrad Party Boss Sergei Kirov. A drastic change had then come over Stalin--a "phobia" about treachery--and he had never been the same afterward. Khrushchev went on to deliver a devastating indictment of what the congress in open session had heard described as Stalin's "20 years of dictatorship and lies." At the 18th Congress, Khrushchev had shouted, "Long live the towering genius of all humanity . . . our beloved Comrade Stalin!" But now he charged:.
<| Stalin had contrived and falsified evidence, against party members whom he (in most cases wrongly) conceived to be his enemies. He "murdered" (Khrushchev's word) hundreds of old Bolsheviks, including 70 out of 133 members of the Central Committee in 1937. He had tortured people in order to wring confessions out of them. Even little children had been tortured, said Khrushchev, as tears streamed down his face. To get confessions, Stalin had promised some victims a dacha (country cottage), but "the only dacha they saw was underground."
Cripps, that Hitler was about to attack Russia in June 1941. Contrary to popular myth, he had not remained in Moscow when the Germans did attack, but fled the capital, leaving its defense in the hands of Zhukov, Rokossovsky, and Konev (whom he later created marshals).
P: Stalin had taken no one into his confidence, not even members of the Polit buro. Suffering delusions of grandeur, he had erected memorials to himself all over Russia, including a Stalin statue at the entrance of the Volga-Don Canal, on which 35 tons of precious copper had been expended.
P: In his last days his phobia had reached paranoic proportions. Officials summoned to his presence said goodbye to their families. Said Khrushchev: "We never knew, when we entered Stalin's presence, whether we would come out alive." Stalin had also, added Khrushchev, developed a consuming antiSemitism.
Taking the Risk. When Khrushchev finished speaking, a profound hush fell over the hall. In one stroke he had destroyed a vast edifice of fictions masking Stalin's long reign of terror. After so much careful cultivation of the Stalin myth, this was a dangerous thing to do. Why was it done? Evidently Khrushchev had taken the risk (possibly with some prompting from the Red marshals whose prestige as Russia's World War II saviors, as a result, stands higher than ever) because he felt it necessary to absolve himself and the present top. Communist leadership, all old associates of Stalin, from the charge of complicity in Stalin's guilt. That charge could and probably was being made by friends and relatives of several million people, many of them party members and professionals, whom Stalin is believed to have liquidated. Stalin's heirs had already gone a long way to meet this charge: they had executed Beria and a score or more of MVD interrogators, chief instruments of the terror; they had declared amnesties for thousands of prisoners; they had reorganized the dreaded slave labor camps; and reformed the trial law. Evidently this had not been enough.
A secret letter circulated among delegates directed how the Stalin myth was to be further broken down. The delegates took the word home, and the crash of falling busts was heard all over the land. In the entrance to Moscow's Red Army Theater, the customary portrait of Stalin was replaced by a mirror. In the Museum of the Revolution, cases that had recently contained the gifts of admirers of the "Great Stalin" were now empty and the inscriptions on other gift objects were obscured. At the Tretyakov Gallery, once largely devoted to portraits of Stalin, only two small pictures of the former leader remained. In Pravda the Stalin Auto Works became the Moscow Auto Works. A schoolteacher, overheard explaining the Lenin-Stalin tomb to her pupils, avoided mentioning the word Stalin.
Myth & Reality. But a myth does not die easily. Among those millions of Soviet citizens who had never played any part in the intrigues of the ruling hierarchy or shared their terrors, there was evident confusion. In Moscow the large number of people seeking to file through the Lenin-Stalin tomb (possibly out of curiosity, to check whether his body was still there) caused a reinforcement of security guards. In Georgia, birthplace of Stalin, the official disregard of the third anniversary of his death (March 5) aroused wide resentment. Next day, following a number of unofficial party meetings, thousands of young Georgians demonstrated in the streets of Tiflis, carrying portraits of Stalin and shouting his praises. Three days later, to appease this outburst, the official Georgian Communist paper, Dawn of the East, devoted a whole page to glorifying Stalin. But having made this concession, Dawn of the East next day carried a demand that "provocateurs and enemy elements" in Georgia be crushed. Then orders came to "crush" the revolt. Some 15,000 party aides went to work "re-educating" the Georgians.
Shilly-Shally. Outside the Soviet Union foreign Communist Party leaders, after 20 years of Stalin worship, had their troubles adjusting to the new line. In satellite Poland, Communist newspapers published pictures and laudatory biographies of Polish Communist leaders executed by Stalin. Hungary's Communist Party Boss Rakosi, East Germany's Walter Ulbricht (who likened Stalin worship to the Fuehrer cult) and Italy's Togliatti each made statements downgrading Stalin's position. In Manhattan Daily Worker Editor Alan Max asked himself aloud some surprisingly pertinent questions: "Many things bother a person like myself: Where were the present [Soviet] leaders during the period when they say that collective leadership was lacking? What about their own mistakes in that period?" At this sign of shilly-shallying, U.S. Communist Boss William Z. Foster replied by asking for a study of Stalin's "serious errors . . . incorrect methods," and urged the faithful not "to rush indignantly to the defense of Stalin or to tear him to political shreds, as some in our ranks are inclined to do."
The world's Communist leaders were obviously way behind Moscow. During Khrushchev's tearful description of the intrigues, plots and counterplots that had marked the last days of Stalin, a voice had called from the body of the hall: "Why didn't you kill him?" Answered Khrushchev: "What could we do? There was a reign of terror." It is conceivable that Russia's top leadership, seeking further claim to public esteem among Stalin's innumerable victims and their relatives, might yet admit having quietly "removed" the mad dictator. It would explain many things (e.g., the fantastic Doctors' Plot), but it still would not purge the shared guilt in old crimes.
Stalin's ghost has many haunting years ahead.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.