Dead Men Tell a Tale

The ordinary Russian people, who are not privy to Communist secrets (even when they are deliberately leaked to the world), are just beginning to learn the truth about Stalin and their new rulers' turn against the old Dictator. Last week some among them got a dramatic reinterpretation of the events leading to World War II and an explanation of the ignominious and costly defeats of the Red army in 1941-42.

Communist leaders at the 20th Party Congress had already heard First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev bluntly charge that Stalin "murdered" Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and some 5,000 other Red army officers in 1937 (TIME. March 26). Khrushchev implied that the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939 was a desperate effort by Stalin to escape the consequences of this action. He ridiculed Stalin's vaunted "military" genius and accused him of fleeing the Kremlin during the defense of Moscow. Evidently it was not possible for the party leaders to speak so directly to the Russian people without risking a public convulsion. Thus they chose the indirect approach, but the ugly story in all its sordid detail was there to be read by every Russian who could remember back to 1937.

Rehabilitation. The journal Voprosi Istorii (official framer of Soviet history) announced that nine outstanding Red army leaders condemned by Stalin in that period had been fully rehabilitated to the honored though posthumous status of "comrades." Included among them were three marshals of the Soviet Union and a number of top commissars, most of them heroes of the civil war whose exploits were once on every lip. No nine names could have been better chosen to evoke the black tale of intrigue and assassination in the years before World War II.

The most famous was probably Marshal Vasily Bluecher, a Civil War hero who fought the White Cossacks and White General Wrangel's forces (1920). later drove the Japanese out of the Maritime Province and captured Vladivostok. Chiang Kai-shek drafted Bluecher as military adviser to China, where he helped organize the famed Whampoa Academy. Shortly thereafter Chiang broke with the Communists and took over Whampoa; Bluecher became Russia's top general in the Far East. "If war bursts like thunder in the Far East," he once said, "we will answer the attack with such a blow that the foundations of capitalism will quiver and crumble." Bluecher's voice was too loud for Stalin. Recalled to Moscow, he was named one of eight judges in the court-martial of Tukhachevsky, duly joined in the death sentence. The following year he himself disappeared, leaving the Japanese attack he had forecast to be belatedly met in the Lake Baikal region in 1939 by Georgy Zhukov.

Hardly less famous was Marshal Alexander I. Yegorov, who commanded one of

Tukhachevsky's armies during the Civil War, rose to be chief of staff of the Red army, a candidate member of the Central Committee and, after Tukhachevsky's arrest, vice commissar of defense. One of Stalin's drinking companions, he too disappeared without trace in 1938.

Huge, rugged Marshal Yan Gamarnik, political commissar of the Red army and a full member of the Central Committee, aid not wait to be arrested, but committed suicide.

Civil War Hero V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko (he led the Bolshevik attack on the Winter Palace in the 1917 uprising in Leningrad) was recalled from Barcelona where he was a Soviet military adviser during the Spanish civil war, hauled out of his train by the NKVD. so the story went, and shot beside the tracks.

Joseph Unschlicht, one of the top military Chekists in the civil war, later chief of the Red air force, had opposed Stalin's violent farm collectivization policy. He disappeared. And there were others: Andrei Bubnov, onetime education commissar (TIME. April 2); Sergei Kamenev, chief of chemical defense; Moisei Rukhimovich, commissar of defense industry; and M. S. Kedrov, chief of the defense section of the State Planning Commission. The point about all these liquidated Old Bolsheviks was that they were all connected with Russian defense. Said Voprosi Istorii drily: "There were many other comrades who did much to strengthen the Red army whose names have not been mentioned in historical literature in recent years."

Transfer of Treason. For mature Russians the message delivered in this oblique way could not but be momentous: according to the Stalin version of history, Marshal Tukhachevsky had headed a plot, inspired by the exiled Trotsky, to take the

Red army over to Hitler. Now the party leaders are saying in effect that Stalin, not Tukhachevsky, was the traitor. The stigma of betrayal has been transferred from the army to the party. The army is now formally absolved from blame for the loss of millions of lives and countless treasures in the first phase of the war. The party is maneuvering to avoid blame by holding the mad Stalin responsible, but there is still no certainty that it will be successful in doing so.

The reversal argues much for the conjecture that the Red army is exerting a major influence on the new party line. But, despite Marshal Zhukov's apparently enlarging role in Central Committee affairs, it must also be remembered that (according to Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky), 86.4% of all Red army officers are also party members. Although most of the nine men mentioned by Voprosi Istorii were associated with Trotsky when he was War Commissar, their rehabilitation has been carried out without any mention of Trotsky, or of the charges of Trotskyite collaboration made against them by Stalin.

Evidently neither the party nor the army (or both together) is yet prepared to face the logical rehabilitation of former political deviationists from the Stalin line. But, said the magazine Party Life last week: "The great work ... is still continuing."

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