"Your Mama Won't Let You Scratch Where It Itches"
Baras, Victor
while our species survives. In this way Popper builds on his view of science as a matter of conjecture and refutation to a Darwinian view of evolution. Popper is the first to admit that his...
...He states unequivocally, " I consider Stalinism a bad quality...
...World 1 is the world of physical objects, World 2 the world of subjective experiences, and World 3 the world of statements in themselves...
...Beneath the marlin is a counter which conceals two taps...
...Who was responsible for the obvious erasures on the tapes ? Nevertheless, these are Khrushchev's memoirs, and no student of Soviet politics can afford to ignore them...
...Of course, we too wanted a relaxation of controls over our artists, but we might have been somewhat cowardly on this score...
...The patronage of regulars and the calm dedication to the consumption of alcohol essential to a great saloon are lacking...
...As for the top officers of our armed forces, they certainly knew who their commander in chief was without having to read an announcement in the newspaper...
...Most of my breaks and meals I spent swilling delicious amber fluid with my fellow employees, smug in the knowledge that at any other job I would have spent a chunk of my paycheck on beer, while at Schoenling the beer was understood as a part of the already substantial wage...
...Despite the added wisdom of hindsight, Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin is not so different from that offered by Lenin in 1923: Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary...
...We shall all discover points of dissent (my own most basic ones relate to Popper's criticism of what he calls "essentialism") but no one can fail to be stimulated by what he finds...
...The Beria purge was directed not only against Beria personally but against the power of the secret police which he headed...
...Within two weeks Malenkov was forced out of Khrushchev's bailiwick, the Central Committee Secretariat...
...Presumably the absence of an official announcement was a concession to Khrushchev's opponents, who resisted public confirmation of an appointment which they may yet have hoped to alter...
...But if Khrushchev was caught by surprise, he must have recovered quickly...
...The "collective leadership" that controlled the Soviet Union after Stalin's death could not tolerate such a concentration of power in one institution...
...The Soviet regime may be described in non-Marxist terms as an attempt to establish a benevolent despotism...
...I believed that everything Stalin said in the name of the party was inspired by genius...
...Of this a:oup there is no mention...
...The Secret Speech marked the beginning of the public attack on the "personality cult" of Joseph Stalin, a crusade that came to be known in the West as"'de-Stalinization...
...Since his own theories concerning the psychology and logic of discovery were set off by his curiosity about the invention of polyphony in early mediaeval music, an invention unparalleled in other musical cultures, it is easy to see what he means when he argues that it is the encounter with the objects of World 3 that provides the main spur to intellectual advance...
...An oldtime taproom was a place where the "friends of the brewery" could go for some free beer...
...The documentation of the case against Beria created an occasion for open discussion of the ugliThe Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 21 ness of Soviet history, and it provided an arsenal of facts that could be used against anyone connected with the Stalin era, including Stalin himself...
...20 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 from Khrushchev, but he should expect learn a good deal about Khrushchev and the regime that left its imprint on him and his autobiography...
...Do not be deceived--this is the taproom...
...He rationalizes his previous harshness with the observation that "Stalin was still belching inside me...
...Khrushchev, like Stalin, was such a dictator...
...Now, more than two decades after the event, is a good time to reconsider the meaning of the Soviet crusade against Stalin...
...Or was there from the beginning less to the attack on Stalin than met the eye...
...Why did the former ruler of the Soviet Union prepare material for publication abroad, a measure which even many Soviet dissidents view as a distasteful last resort...
...and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee...
...And that is the problem...
...The high ceiling is crisscrossed with pipes which are painted the same ugly beige as the porcelain brick walls, and the sole decorations consist of a few of Schoenling's promotional gewgaws strewn about and a stuffed marlin landed on someone's Florida vacation years ago hanging high on a rear wall...
...Khrushchev also plays the reformer with regard to Soviet travel restrictions...
...In any case, it became more difficult after the Beria purge to maintain the fine distinction between the "crimes" of Beria and the "genial leadership" of Stalin, especially since the greatest excesses of the secret police were committed during the 1930s, before Beria took over...
...He claims, for example, that he was not consulted about the composition of the new leadership after StaJin's death in 1953, that the distribution of power represented the result of a deal worked out privately between Beria and Malenkov...
...The careful reader may not expect to learn much Victor Baras teaches poh'tical science at the New School Jbr Social Research...
...Nevertheless, Khrushchev points out an important connection between the purge of Beria and the subsequent de-Stalinization campaign...
...Nor is there any reference to the September 1953 Plenum, at which Khrushchev acquired the title of First Secretary of the Central Committee...
...The clarity of his expression highlights the power of the argument, but it does more than that in pinpointing the moments at which we may wish to disagree with Popper's premises or conclusions (the intervening steps are usually faultless...
...He views the human mind as an organ that produces and interacts with such objects...
...Malenkov was " a good clerk...
...Khrushchev does not explain why this important appointment was kept secret...
...What motivated the official or semi-official complicity with the memoir project by authorities in Moscow...
...Popper is the first to admit that his Darwinian view is not susceptible to tests of falsification and cannot therefore be regarded as a scientific theory...
...He calls on the Soviet Union to rid itself of the "disgraceful heritage of the closed border...
...i ables and chairs are provided, but most people prefer to lounge around the counter within easy reach of the beer...
...Since the Soviet regime half pretends that there is no supreme political office, there can be no way of explaining how anyone Came to hold that office...
...With regard to such problems as censorship and travel restrictions, the narrator of Khrushchev Remembers advocates reforms more extensive than those instituted under his own rule, not to mention the more repressive policies of his successors...
...the Central Committee takes the place of the organization...
...Much of Popper's recent work is based upon the investigation of what he calls the three worlds of reality...
...It is the complex of institutions and practices, the regime which Khrushchev inherited from Stalin and within which Khrushchev made his career...
...The evidence for this is to be found in the unforeseen problems that arise in man-made theory...
...And he offers this rather convincing description of the dilemma faced by Stalin's heirs: We in the leadership were consciously in favor of the thaw, myself included, but...We were scared--really scared...
...I t is preposterous because if Zhukov had really planned the military overthrow of the Soviet regime, he would be viewed as one of the greatest villains of Soviet history rather than one of the greatest heroes...
...One hears little of de-Stalinization nowadays...
...Obviously the document is full of factual errors and self-serving lies, most of which are noted by Edward Crankshaw in his helpful notes and commentary...
...This claim is at once preposterous and eminently plausible...
...He tends to view Stalinism as a personal vice rather than a political one, a vice that is not so much a defect of government as of character...
...This, of course, is nonsense...
...Early press reports linked the Khrushchev memoir with the name of Victor Louis, the shadowy Soviet journalist who is rumored to work for the KGB (the Soviet secret police...
...On the contrary, there has been extensive rehabilitation of Stalin in the USSR since the anti-Stalin wave crested in 1961 and 1962...
...The narrator of Khrushchev Remembers claims to despise "those who still quake before Stalin's dirty underwear...
...Although the voice on the tapes has been electronically verified as Khrushchev's, many questions remain unanswered...
...But it is plausible because, in the absence of any prescribed procedure for leadership selection, every transfer of power in the Soviet Union has something of the character of a coup...
...It is hard to realize in reading his more recent work that we are reading the prose of a man to whom English was once a foreign language...
...There is no guided tour at Schoenling...
...He says, " I have no doubt that it is practically as well as theoretically feasible for us to open our borders...
...Help is available in this project from an unlikely source, namely the two volumes of memoirs by the de-Stalinizer himself, Nikita Khrushchev, which were published in the West in 1970 and 1974...
...How could it have gone right...
...Khrushchev rose to power during the Stalin years...
...It is hardly surprising that Khrushchev provides little useful information about his own political career--how he came to power, how he stayed there, and how he was deposed...
...Khrushchev accounts for the 1958 purge of his friend and ally, Marshal Zhukov, with the almost offhand observation that Zhukov had planned a military coup d'~tat...
...It is based primarily on tape recordings dictated by Khrushchev shortly before his death in 1971 and smuggled out of the USSR...
...Of his own political demise, he mentions in passing only that he was "forced to retire...
...After being trooped through a guided tour, visitors are herded into an ersatz beer garden with tasteful decor harkening back to some heartier era and treated to an hour or so of phony yo-ho-me-lads atmosphere before being bundled out onto the street...
...This in itself is important, for with Popper above all thinkers we should approach the work in the critical spirit which he himself encourages...
...Beria, Khrushchev says repeatedly, was a loathesome thing...
...it seems to him self-evident that such decisions do not concern the public...
...We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn't be able to control and which could drown us...
...Victor Baras "Your Mama Won't Let You Scratch Where It Itches" Nikita Khrushchev used peasant humor to gloss over Soviet tyranny...
...He is, in the best sense, a very plain-speaking philosopher who uses the English language with a skill that would be exceptional even in one born into its heritage...
...The appointment came at a time when Khrushchev held no formal position of leadership in the government (although he was already the leading contender for supreme power by virtue of his position as head of the Communist Party bureaucracy...
...Our people had a good expression for the situation we were in: "You want to scratch where it itches, but your mama won't let you...
...Popper never tries to disguise his disagreements with other thinkers, nor hide his revulsion from certain actions...
...It soon became apparent that the taproom included among its clientele more than employees and customers who had just bought a keg down at the loading dock...
...The removal of Beria, and consequently of his henchmen, weakened the police decisively and probably ruled out, at least in the short run, a return to Stalinist terror as an instrument of rule...
...He needed a brush with which to tar his leading rivals, Malenkov (Stalin's heir apparent) and Molotov (Stalin's closest confidant...
...We decided not to publicize the decision and made no mention of it in the press...
...In this fundamental respect, Khrushchev remained to the end a political Stalinist...
...He says of this appointment: This was a strictly internal decision...
...No one actually built those problems into the theory...
...His judgements about his colleagues in Stalin's inner circle are harsh...
...For it is one of Popper's strongest contentions that our statements and theories, though made about physical (World 1) objects because of our subjective experience (World 2) of them, develop an independent existence once made...
...He wishes he could apologize to his former victims, including the physicist P. L. Kapitsa, the poet Boris Pasternak, and the sculptor Ernst Neizvesmy, about whom Khrushchev had this to say in 1963: "The last time we saw the nauseating concoctions of Ernst Neizvesmy, we were disgusted to notice that this man, who is evidently not devoid of talent and who has graduated from a Soviet institution of higher learning, is repaying the people with such black ingratitude...
...During the early post-Stalin years, he says, he was secretly appointed "commander-in-chief of the armed forces" at the initiative of Prime Minister Bulganin...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Brian Thomas The Taproom of the Schoenling Brewery The proliferation of singles bars and artsy, cloying coffeehouses has made finding a good place to drink beer as difficult as getting a summer job, but I am pleased to report that there is a place where one can do both--at the Schoenling Brewery on Central Parkway in Cincinnati...
...it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance...
...In Karl Popper's life that advance still continues...
...Kaganovich, his mentor, was "nothing but a lackey," "unsurpassed in "" " vmlousness...
...Khrushchev's attack on the vestiges of Stalinism is a leading theme of the memoirs...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...
...Benevolence is far removed from the qualities that make for success as a despot...
...But with the consolidation of the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, who overthrew Khrushchev in 1964, there has been increasing repression of "dissident" movements-movements that came into being largely in consequence of the confusion engendered by Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin...
...Khrushchev does mention one interesting incident about his rise to power...
...Where did de-Stalinization go wrong...
...The creative intelligentsia, Khrushchev says, "suffers more than any other category of people in our society...
...The year 1962 saw the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life o f Ivan Denisovicb...
...Stalin, on the other hand, was the object of Khrushchev's veneration...
...In between guzzles, Brian Thomas studies philosophy at Brown University...
...Founded by Ed and George Schoenling shortly after Prohibition was repealed, this brewery is one of the last local establishments in a town which once boasted of over forty different brands bottled within its city limits...
...This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky...
...Khrushchev was a less cruel and less powerful tyrant than Stalin, but his rule cannot be described as anything other than tyrannical...
...Whatever the statutory status of the title "commander-in-chief," it appears that a more or less formal decision was taken to recognize Khrushchev's ascendancy in the sphere of defense policy...
...On balance Khrushchev seems to express a sort of uncomprehending respect for creative intellectuals...
...Even Trotsky, writing in 1904, identified this danger in the Leninist party: The organization of the Party takes the place of the Party itself...
...He is proud of the international reputation of certain Soviet artists and writers...
...A lifetime spent in the criticism of other men's theories and his own is continued in the investigation of an area of problems that he himself has opened up...
...If we had been at war, we would certainly have announced my military appointment to the Soviet people...
...How could it drown us...
...Stalinism, however, is not just a quality of character...
...He calls Darwinism " a metaphysical research program," a theory which presents us with a framework of intelligibility within which interesting and vital problems arise for investigation...
...On the other hand, Stalin came to power because he was extraordinarily despotic...
...It could have overflowed the banks of the Soviet riverbed and formed a tidal wave which would have washed away all the barriers and retaining walls of our society...
...But twenty years after his "Crimes o f Stalin" speech, Khrushchev's memoirs can help us understand the limits o f ' 'de- Stalinizatio n. " Twenty years have passed since Nikita Khrushchev delivered his now famous "Secret Speech" at a closed midnight session of the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956...
...This is why Khrushchev refers only obliquely to the most important fact about himself, that he was once ruler of the USSR...
...Describing himself during the 1930s, Khrushchev says, " I was a hundred percent faithful to Stalin as our leader and our guide...
...New York Times, November 7 and December 28, 1970...
...In his later years Khrushchev objected to Stalin's despotism because it had been insufficiently benevolent...
...Khrusbchev Remembers is in many ways, of course, an unsatisfactory source...
...Khrushchev can condemn Stalin's "excesses," but he cannot challenge Stalin's right to rule, for to do so would be to cast doubt on Khrushchev's own reign as well...
...When Khrushchev chose to denounce Stalin in 1956, it was not because of new revelations but because of new political circumstances...
...But today the slick national bottlers have transformed what was once a genteel, civilized feature of the neighborhood brewery into a weapon in their public relations arsenal...
...In the course of a summer spent in Schoenling's bottle shop, I worked nine hours a day, six days a week, for about ten weeks, and discovered first-hand the infuriating array of taxes and union dues which plague the working stiff, acquired a number of cuts and lacerations from flying glass, learned how to operate a forklift, and drank gallons of "Cincinnati's Finest" in the taproom...
...The New York Times reported on November 17, 1970, that the Times of London had printed an unconfirmed report that the KGB was in possession of some 400,000 words of manuscript, of which 275,000 words had been released to the West...
...Khrushchev maintains that he knew nothing of Stalin's crimes until after the old man's death and, in particular, after the investigation into the Beria case...
...In 1961 the old dictator's body was removed from the Red Square mausoleum...
...they exist as an objective characteristic of a man-made but now independent reality...
...Books, paintings, music, scientific and philosophical theories all belong to World 3, and Popper believes that it is through our interaction with such realities that we develop...
...At the same time, his heart is clearly with the Party when he observes that "Writers are forever delving into questions of philosophy and ideology--questions on which any ruling party, including the Communist party, would like to have a monopoly...
...Yet the overall pattern of truth, half-truth, and untruth is revealing...
...traverse an engine room with its deafening roar and stench of ammonia, and ascend an abrupt flight of stairs into what appears at first to be a locker room in a decrepit YMCA...
...Both Khrushchev and Stalin clawed their way to power, and both held on to it as long as they could...
...The earlier writings remain as challenging as ever...
...Yet Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism is peculiarly limited...
...Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority--namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc...
...Yet he dismisses the KGB practice of kidnapping potential Soviet defectors on foreign soil as mere "bureaucratic overzealousness...
...Khrushchev does not explain why Malenkov "resigned" as Prime Minister in 1955 or how Khrushchev survived the demand for his own resignation by a hostile majority within the Presidium in 1957...
...He portrays himself, especially in the second volume, as a repentant sinner with regard to the handling of dissident intellectuals...
...Did the policy simply fall victim to Khrushchev's mismanagement...
...to get to the taproom you must go through the loading dock, pass under the paint-peeling stare of George Schoenling (who still refuses to give people change for a quarter --"No profit in it for me...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
