Stalinism Resurgent

A) a leading member of Australia's Communist Party, Novelist Frank Hardy returned from his first trip to Russia in 1951 with a panegyric of Stalin and all his works. Hardy went back to the Soviet Union after the Czechoslovak crisis to report for the London Sunday Times on the country's postinvasion mood. This time, no longer an admirer of the late Soviet dictator, he returned with a chilling account of a resurgence of Stalinism. Wrote Hardy last week: "The old methods of administrative pressure, blanket censorship and even naked terror are on their way back."

Shortly after Hardy arrived in Moscow, Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, an old friend, came round to his hotel. "We meet at a moment of truth," Evtushenko told him. "I wrote to my government to oppose the action in Czechoslovakia.

Now they say I am the enemy of the state. To whom shall I write?" Hardy says that Evtushenko was forced to delete 80 previously published poems from his latest collection of verse and that he was scarcely alone among Soviet writers in his opposition to the invasion. The hard-lining officials of the Writers Union, he reports, were unable to gather enough signatures for a declaration supporting the Soviet action. A compromise letter was finally produced, much milder in tone and with only 34 signers -- out of a union membership of 6,600 writers.

In Moscow, as in other world capitals, the rumor was that the Soviet leaders in the Politburo disagreed over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. "The main Moscow gossip," writes Hardy, "concerns the division over the Czechoslovak invasion. Three out of eleven are said to have opposed it."

The three: Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Trade Union Head Aleksandr Shelepin, and Party Secretary Mikhail Suslov.

Hardy reports another intriguing rumor about Russia's deposed ruler: "Khrushchev himself, when told of the Soviet action in Czechoslovakia, said to friends, 'I believe that the 1956 intervention in Hungary was justified -- but I cried for three days after I made my decision. This intervention was not justified--these men did not cry.' "

Whatever the differences among the Soviet leaders may have been, Hardy is unequivocal about the outcome: "Stalin's heirs occupy all the positions of power. Like Stalin, they fear the people and the truth. They created the Czechoslovak crisis and used it to intimidate the positive forces which oppose them at home."

"I had liked to believe," says Hardy, "that the younger generation growing up would transform the situation until a Leningrad writer told me: That's where you are wrong. [The older neo-Stalinists] are dreadfully mistaken, but you can struggle against them because they believe in something. The younger ones coming up believe in nothing--except their own power and privilege.' It is a bleak thought, the older bureaucrats poisoned with Stalinism, the younger with cynicism."

Nonetheless, notes Hardy, "There are processes at work which can change the situation, even if slowly. The main one is that the Soviet economy will begin to lag behind the technological age unless it is decentralized, unless it loosens up and grants more freedom. The liberal intelligentsia has great influence on the people. The more liberal concepts of Khrushchev still have millions of supporters. The youth is being superbly educated, and a shift of forces at the top, and a return to the days of the 'thaw,' would see them regain their idealism. The working class is now skilled and educated and is bound to move toward self-management."

Even so, he despairs of Russia's immediate future: "The bureaucracy will assuredly continue its dogmatic, aggressive policies at home and abroad. Further arrests of writers and anyone else who dares protest are in the cards. Censorship will remain complete." Hardy ventures a dire prophecy: "Further military adventures against Socialist states, possibly Yugoslavia or Rumania, probably China, cannot be ruled out."

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