Still Caesarism

It took a dead man to put the 22nd Communist Party Congress into perspective.

To outsiders, Andrzej Stawar was virtually unknown, but dedicated Communists--and anti-Communists--knew him for decades as Poland's leading Marxist theoretician who turned against Stalin in the 1930s, spent years in hiding, and finally came into his own in 1956, when Poland's Gomulka--with Stawar's help--managed to gain a measure of independence from Moscow.

Last spring Stawar suddenly left Poland for Paris, ostensibly for medical treatment, but actually, as a friend later put it, "to publish the truth as he saw it." For five months, while dying of cancer, he wrote and rewrote the manuscript that embodied this truth. Before he died, he turned his work over to Kultura, a magazine issued by Polish exiles in Paris. By last week, Stawar's Last Writings had been published by Kultura in a special issue--and smuggled into Poland.* It proved to be the most devastating indictment of the Communist system since Milovan Djilas' The New Class.

Wrote Stawar: "It is a myth that Khrushchev has put an end to Stalinism. The fatal flaw in the Soviet government is its principle of Caesarism. Only the Party is capable of remedying these defects and effecting reform, which is necessary for its survival. Because such reforms would limit the absolute monopoly of power necessary for the Party, it dares not make them. This concept of Caesarism, created and perfected by Stalin, is unchanged despite personal attacks against Stalin made by Khrushchev.

"Even the most timid criticism made today in the Soviet Union is smothered. Thus, the Soviet Union is condemned to live under the belief in the myth of a chief [Khrushchev] who maintains himself by an endless series of relentless propaganda actions and [scientific] success. Only the successes are admitted; it is necessary to lie about the failures.

"There is no doubt that Bolshevism contains the seeds of insanity. Even minor differences of program breed treasonous denunciations. Those who have witnessed such internal feuds and purges say that they take place in a mental state of hate-filled asphyxiation, followed by a slow return to consciousness."

*At his death last August, the Polish regime flew Stawar's ashes to Warsaw. Newspapers extolled him; a literary prize was named in his honor. But with the clandestine appearance of his Last Writings, Stawar's name and memory all but disappeared. Even the flowers that were to have decorated his grave until the first frost were hastily removed.

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