The Necessity of Tyranny

Nikita Khrushchev last week presented himself to the world as first in war, first in peace and first in smacking down his countrymen. His propagandists boasted that Russia had fired the world's first successful intercontinental ballistic missile. His diplomats rejected President Eisenhower's disarmament plan on the ground that peace-loving Russia had already called for a ban on nuclear war. And in Moscow his press printed three stern private speeches delivered about the time of Khrushchev's recent power grab, all showing the Soviet boss talking and acting more and more like the Stalin he affects to deplore.

In these speeches, rounded up in one long article that filled half of Pravda and was broadcast lengthily over Radio Moscow, the corn-belt commissar cockily sounded off on art, literature, ideology --and Georgy Malenkov. Khrushchev charged that the man he ordered off to central Asian exile last July had "fallen under the complete influence of the sworn enemy of the people and the party, the provocateur Beria," and become the late secret-police boss's "shadow and tool." Said Khrushchev: "Holding a high position in the party and state, Comrade Malenkov not only did not hold Stalin back, but with great skill made use of the weaknesses and habits of Stalin during the last years of his life. On many occasions, he prompted him to actions which deserve the strongest condemnation." One such occasion: the 1949 "Leningrad affair," in which hundreds of ranking Communists were purged on manufactured evidence.

In his graveyard attack on Malenkov, Khrushchev seemed to be setting the stage for a Stalin-style treason "trial" of his fallen rival. But Soviet specialists in the West do not think that Khrushchev wants a show trial at this point: they suspect that he may simply have concluded that Malenkov's reputation needs further blackening. Malenkov is still identified in the Russian public mind with the promise of more goods and fewer cops--a program which Khrushchev opposed but now wants to identify as his own.

Worms in the Classics. For the first time, Stalin's successor shed the pretense of "collective leadership" to dish out his own ideological pronouncements. They were earthy and anything but liberal. Khrushchev sneered at "hardheads," "Talmudists" and "parrots" who "learned by heart" old theoretical phrases "not worth a kopeck" now.

"If Marx, Engels and Lenin could rise now from their graves," he said, "they would ridicule these bookworms and quoters who, instead of studying modern society and creatively developing theory, are attempting to find among the classics a quotation on what to do with a machine-tractor station."

But he also warned against authors "who attempt to use mistakes of the past in coming out against leadership of literature and art by party and state." Too many of those who denounced loyal artists of Stalinist times as "varnishers" had since "scavenged in garbage pails and passed this off as life." He was all for "freedom of creative work," Khrushchev protested, despite the "lesson of Hungary, where the counterrevolution used some of these writers for its filthy aims and reminds us to what this can lead." (Original reports of the speech quote Khrushchev as saying that the Hungarians ought to have shot a few writers, and that if a like situation arose in Moscow, "our hands would not tremble." But this was not to be found in Pravda's abridged version last week.)

Crying at the Bier. Throughout the three speeches, Khrushchev revealed himself as a man still trying to squeeze free from his own complicity in Stalin's crimes, while well aware that he had gone too far in his sensational, weepy indictment of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. What is needed now, said Khrushchev, is a balanced view on Stalin, "the positive side which we support and highly value and the negative side which we criticize and condemn." Stalin, he said, had to act in "an atmosphere of fierce struggle against class enemies and their agents in the party . . . Stalin did what was necessary. We were sincere in the respect we expressed for Stalin when we stood crying at his bier." However, "we have lost many honest and devoted people . . . who were defamed and who suffered innocently. How can it happen that Stalin committed such gross and grave mistakes? This is a complicated question, comrades." But for so complicated a question, Khrushchev suggested a simple answer : "Stalin's personal shortcomings were taken advantage of" by the wicked Beria and his pal Comrade Malenkov.

Khrushchev's tone left no doubt that if he himself finds it desirable, he would, as he remarked approvingly of Stalin, "do what, is necessary"--whether the hand falls on the restless writer or the intriguing Politburocrat.

In a week when Russian science sounded very sure of itself, Khrushchev's speeches showed that a Communist society may be able to put together a missile, but it still has a long way to go in running a nation.

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