"The Truth of Today"

The Communist mythmakers labored hard to destroy the myth they had once so laboriously mouthed of Joseph Stalin, "the greatest human being on this planet."

At 6,000 meetings in Moscow alone, the new Soviet masters set about the awesome task of re-educating Russia to the new party line against the "cult of the individual." Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov and other top figures were detailed off to explain to crowds of Moscow factory workers that the leader whom the speakers themselves had slavishly praised and served had really been a murderous megalomaniac. Some 15,000 agitators fanned out through Stalin's homeland of Georgia, where, as First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan admitted last week, "some people" had "taken it hard" (TIME, March 26). In a cautious, 7,000-word article, Pravda last week broke the news of Stalin's disgrace to its readers.

Obviously, the bosses were going about their tremendous job gingerly. Russians were not yet getting all the lurid revelations of Comrade Khrushchev's weeping and wailing performance at a secret session of last February's 20th Party Congress. But the sensational details are leaking out bit by bit. The British Foreign Office got word that one of the bosses' assertions was that Stalin shot and killed his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932.*

Moscow diplomats circulated another (probably apocryphal) footnote to Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech. As Khrushchev told sobbingly how the peerless leader had actually been a killer, coward and sadist all along, a written question was handed up to him. He read out the note to the assembled Party Congress: "What were you doing when Stalin was alive?" Said Khrushchev: "There is no signature on this note. Will the author please stand up?" No one stood up, so Khrushchev said: "I will count to three. Then let the author rise." He counted to three, but no one stood up. "All right, comrades," said Khrushchev. "Now you know what I was doing when Stalin was alive. I didn't stand up either."

Switches & Splits. The confessions of truckling cowardice that were implicit in the new Khrushchev-Molotov-Bulganin line might do for the inner Kremlin gang. But it was not so easy for Communist leaders outside Russia to explain their own participation in the great deceit. The debunking of Stalin hit world Communists with a deeper shock than anything since Stalin's 1939 pact with Hitler. In what may be the first of many satellite reverberations, the boss of Hungary's Communist Party has admitted that his regime sent five top Reds wrongly to death in 1949 (see below).

In East Germany, Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht faced an unruly party convention. Young Communists heckled party leaders with interruptions such as: "If Stalin was so bad, then our party leadership must be bad too!"--an obvious conclusion that was certainly drawn by millions of people in Russia and the satellites. At the party conference called to agree on the new line, Premier Otto Grotewohl won the big cheers by criticizing Minister of Justice Hilde ("Hanging Hilde") Benjamin for failing to safeguard citizens' rights. Red China finally broke its silence about the disgrace of Stalin, and broadcast without comment Pravda's first cautious editorial.

Only the Beginning. Even more embarrassed were the parties outside the Iron Curtain. France's Maurice Thorez slipped into Rome incognito to work out a new via latina (Latin line) with Italy's Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti. Togliatti was having trouble of his own. "At one moment," growled Communist Senator Umberto Terracini, "Beria was accused of all kinds of atrocities. Now these same atrocities are attributed to Stalin. The result is that the truth of yesterday is not the truth of today."

Said a U.S. State Department observer: "This thing is just starting. It's going to have to go on for a long time yet."

*A story first published in TIME, July 17, 1950. From a trustworthy source, TIME learned that at a Kremlin party on Nov. 7, 1932, Nadezhda Stalin took a few drinks too many and began to prod her much older husband about a political amnesty he had been postponing. Stalin tried to shut her up. They quarreled, and in her anger she chucked a marble inkstand at him. It missed, but Stalin was splashed with ink. Next night Stalin called a doctor to his study. When the doctor got there, Mrs. Stalin was dead on the floor. A pistol lay on Stalin's desk. Stalin said that she had killed herself, out of worry over law-school examinations she was due to take.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.