The Quick & the Dead

Nobody recognized the aging white-haired man who walked about Moscow, staring with rheumy eyes at the broad streets and tall buildings. He was Andrei Bubnov, one of the five top Bolsheviks to direct the October 1917 Revolution. As Lenin's Commissar of Education he had set out to create Homo sovieticus, the new Soviet man. But somewhere along the line, vodka-swilling Andrei Bubnov had tangled with a new type of Soviet man called Joseph Stalin, and in 1937 he disappeared. Unlike tens of thousands of other old Bolsheviks, Bubnov had survived 19 years of Soviet prison camps, to be raised for the living by Nikita Khrushchev.

Bubnov was luckier than Nikolai Voznesensky, a Politburo member who disappeared in 1949 after his book on economics was denounced by Mikhail Suslov, a member of today's Presidium. Last week Moscow learned that Stalin had personally written the end to the Voznesensky story. It was one word--"execution"--scribbled across Voznesensky's dossier (Khrushchev called it "murder").

Unable to bring back Voznesensky, the regime last week hung his portrait in a place of honor in the Red Army Museum. There were hints of other acquittals. In his secret address to the 20th Congress, Khrushchev attributed the Yugoslav Communist breakaway to the paranoic Stalin's attitude towards Tito, and in Czechoslovakia a Soviet commission was reported to be looking into the case of Rudolf Slansky and 13 Communist comrades, most of them executed in 1952 for "Tito-ism." This suggested that a whole series of "Titoist" purges in the satellite countries (e.g., Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka, Hungary's Laszlo Rajk, Rumania's Ana Pauker, Albania's Koci Xoxe) might be reopened. It was given out in Moscow that the last victims on the mad Stalin's liquidation list had been Molotov, Voroshilov and Khrushchev himself.

What to Believe. A petition for the removal of Stalin's body from its place beside Lenin in the red granite tomb in Red Square was reportedly being circulated among party members. But the number of simple nonparty Russians queueing up for a look at the embalmed "leader and teacher" of Communism was as long as it had ever been. Asked if he had heard about the new line, an old Russian mumbled: "Criticism? Criticism? I am waiting for the mausoleum doors to open."

While thousands of party workers (aided by a Khrushchev directive that took 2 1/2 hours to read) were out explaining why the doors should remain shut, millions of simple Russians worried about what to tell children brought up to believe in Stalin as a demigod. The party's most effective argument (e.g., in resentful Georgia) was proving to be Khrushchev's flat assertion that Stalin had murdered 5,000 Red army officers. Almost everybody remembered the costly military debacle of 1941. Khrushchev had acted for the swift downgrading of Stalin without much thought for foreign Communist Parties. At a Communist meeting in Rome, Italian Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti admitted that he and French Communist Leader Duclos had been overruled by Moscow when they protested that too sudden destruction of the Stalin myth was "inadvisable and dangerous." Togliatti had based the popular appeal of his party on frank adulation of Strongman Stalin, and activists had scrawled his nickname Il Baffone (the Mustache) or Ha da veni il Baffone (The Mustache is coming) on walls all over Italy. At Stalin's death, a weeping Togliatti had mourned: "My soul is overwhelmed with grief at the passing of a man more venerated and loved than anyone else, at the loss of a master, the comrade, the friend."

Shrieking Apes. Now as Rome's press jeered, Togliatti lost his temper, called his tormentors "a mob of streetwalker journalists who know only how to shout, shriek, fabricate, vomit lies, calumnies, coarseness ... a mob of shrieking apes." Asked why the Russian leaders had not previously made their feelings about Stalin known, he said lamely: "Any opposition would have damaged the prestige of the party. Besides, Stalin's enormous popularity would have made any objection to his decisions seem like an act of rebellion." Togliatti's discomfiture was increased by Socialist Pietro Nenni's air of having known about Stalin all along, and his deploring of Togliatti's anti-Stalin campaign.

Other Communist leaders were even more confused. In East Germany Communist Walter Ulbricht was telling German Communists that "it has become known that Stalin did not sufficiently prepare his country for war," while in Britain Communist Harry Pollitt was taking the opposite line: "Despite his mistakes about collective leadership and the agricultural situation, Stalin's contribution to the building of socialism and the defeat of Hitler will remain." In Red China, where for six years Chinese Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung has billed himself as "Stalin's younger brother," there was a complete blackout of news about the Russian attack on Stalin.

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