The Khrushchev Code

Traditionally, a Party Congress in Russia blends parliamentary trappings with jungle techniques. Beneath the solemn propaganda ritual, beneath the automatic votes on prefabricated resolutions by hand-picked delegates, there is a half-hidden reality: rivalries of men and cliques, hardheaded appraisal of how well the party leadership is doing. This week, as the elite of world Communism eyed each other at the 22nd Party Congress, the public mood was unusually harmonious. From jampacked bleachers in Mayakovsky Square, a pride of poets droned odes in honor of the event. To welcome 4,500 Soviet delegates and "observers" from Communist parties of some 80 foreign lands, Moscow's streets had been scoured, shop windows filled with enticements. Behind the Kremlin's red walls and golden domes, Khrushchev had rushed to completion a starkly modern new Congress hall, equipped with "stereophonic" sound and translation equipment in 29 languages--the better to spread boast and threat, praise and invective.

All types of Communists came to listen: comrades from small Russian villages, cafe-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia. Eager crowds awaited such stalwarts as Viet Minh's Ho Chi Minh and Red China's Chou Enlai, Astronaut Gherman Titov, Lieut. Colonel Mikhail Voronov (billed as "the man who shot down the U-2") was there, and so, imprisoned in a vast new bust that stared across Sverdlov Square, was the old Russian-hater who started it all, Karl Marx..

Record Reviewed. There was no expectation of the kind of drastic policy change or major party infighting that has marked many congresses in the past.* In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism's inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful. Since the previous congress in 1959, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev had routed the last implacable Stalinists from positions of power. In his major scheduled address about past accomplishments and future progress, he could point to Soviet industry and science riding a high curve of technological advance. Abroad, he could point to steady Communist erosion of the West's position from Laos to the U.N. By sending 28 divisions on far-flung battle exercises through Eastern Europe this week, Khrushchev would impress many delegates, even if he did not succeed in intimidating the West. Soviet experts predicted that he would cap the Congress with a spectacular space feat or a vast nuclear explosion.

And yet in the jungle world of the party, there was plenty of room for snarling and backbiting. Khrushchev is plagued by disastrous crop failures, particularly in his own pet "virgin lands." Internationally, it has been three years since he first started issuing ultimatums on Berlin, and though hard pressed, the West still stands firm; Africa is in the balance and Asia desperately menaced by Communism. But despite fulminations and victory claims, Khrushchev cannot really record a major recent cold war success except Cuba. That, at least, is the situation as it must seem to extremists--or '"maximalists"--including Red China.

Orthodoxy Revised. Ostensibly, the major business of the congress is to ratify a new party program drafted by Khrushchev, a revised, up-to-date version of Marxism-Leninism, that mystic creed of spurious orthodoxy by which the party still seeks to justify its every move--including transgressions against orthodoxy. Ever since the new "Khrushchev Code" was published last summer, Russia's ideological pundits have eulogized it as "the most important theoretical and political document of our time," and Western demonologists have studied it for possible clues to the future--a thankless task, since between Communist theory and practice there is only the most devious connection. It is above all a propaganda document, but it does give evidence of Communism's immense successes as well as its staggering problems.

The old party program that Khrushchev is replacing was hastily written in 1919 by Lenin in the midst of civil war; he thought he would be lucky if it--and Soviet rule in Russia--lasted for a couple of months. Four decades later, Lenin's heirs have conquered half the world and one-third of mankind. The revised program--under the slogan, "Everything in man's name, for man's benefit"--is still a paste-up of inspirational cliches that presents Communism as the source of all wisdom, justice and abundance. But by listing the ultimate goals of its Utopia, it shows unwittingly how repressive and restricted Russia really is.

After 40 years, during which socialism supposedly "triumphed in the Soviet Union completely and finally," clean and decent housing ("even for honeymooners") is still a solemnly promised but far-distant goal. Khrushchev ignores completely the most radical reforms proposed in Lenin's program: transformation of the army into a people's militia, abolition of money, liberation of women from household drudgery. Some of Lenin's old promises are simply postponed for another 20 years, among them such still-unfulfilled ideals as a six-hour working day, one-month paid vacations for all, state-supplied books, clothing, shoes and lunches for schoolchildren. Some of the rosiest goals of Khrushchev's Utopia, from highway networks to supermarkets, have long been commonplace in capitalist countries.

Party Revived. On the issue of war, Khrushchev's program reiterates the slogan that "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist nations is both possible and necessary. Khrushchev again falsely attributes this concept to Lenin, who actually called for and predicted an early, ferocious conflict with the capitalist enemy. While Khrushchev thus enshrines peaceful coexistence in the party program, it would be naive to draw solace from the fact; as with any Communist dogma, it can be circumvented. The program carefully allows for "all forms of struggle, peaceful and non-peaceful."

Khrushchev repeats Lenin's confident prediction, unfulfilled in 40 decades of imminent capitalist collapse. The program reports the "increasing proletarization in capitalist society," blandly and blindly ignoring the fact that since Lenin's day, the exact opposite has happened. Indeed, the document is so frequently divorced from reality and lurches so inconsistently from ethics to history, pedagogy to sociology, that Swiss Soviet Expert Ernst Kux concludes: "Khrushchev's program reveals the decline of Soviet ideology and its inability to come to grips with the problems of our time."

But Khrushchev's "romanticism," as some Western experts label his repeated rejection of fact, is not necessarily a source of comfort for the West. Abroad, should it lead Khrushchev to believe his own propaganda about capitalist weakness, it could lead to fatal miscalculation and war. And at home, so far, it has not noticeably weakened his grip. Though Khrushchev has dismantled much of Stalin's police state, he has shrewdly rebuilt the Communist Party--demoralized under Stalin--as Russia's dominant force. In fact, the Khrushchev Code almost lyrically extols the party and promises that even in that distant day when "the state will wither away," the party will remain. Through such devices as citizens' courts, voluntary "people's militia," and a reorganized political police whose new role is that of "friend and helper," Khrushchev has effectively replaced full-scale terror with the Orwellian technique of "mass discipline."

This is perhaps the most impressive and chilling achievement that Khrushchev can point out to any critics among the comrade delegates at the 22nd Congress who may not be moved by his vision of a "mighty unifying thunderstorm marking the springtime of mankind."

*One of the most far-reaching was the 8th (1919), which endorsed the Comintern as the export agency for worldwide Communist revolution, and adopted Lenin's creed that wars with capitalist states are "fatalistically inevitable." Even more dramatic was the 2Oth in 1956 at which Khrushchev 1) reversed Lenin by announcing that peaceful coexistence had become a fundamental principle of Soviet policy, and 2) in a six-hour, closed-session speech reviled Stalin as a "brutal, despotic" merchant of "moral and physical annihilation."

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