"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...
...And that is the problem...
...The "collective leadership" that controlled the Soviet Union after Stalin's death could not tolerate such a concentration of power in one institution...
...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...
...The narrator of Khrushchev Remembers claims to despise "those who still quake before Stalin's dirty underwear...
...How could it have gone right...
...Khrushchev was a less cruel and less powerful tyrant than Stalin, but his rule cannot be described as anything other than tyrannical...
...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...
...He says, " I have no doubt that it is practically as well as theoretically feasible for us to open our borders...
...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...
...His judgements about his colleagues in Stalin's inner circle are harsh...
...Khrushchev's attack on the vestiges of Stalinism is a leading theme of the memoirs...
...He views the human mind as an organ that produces and interacts with such objects...
...Much of Popper's recent work is based upon the investigation of what he calls the three worlds of reality...
...and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee...
...Did the policy simply fall victim to Khrushchev's mismanagement...
...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...
...This, of course, is nonsense...
...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...
...i ables and chairs are provided, but most people prefer to lounge around the counter within easy reach of the beer...
...they exist as an objective characteristic of a man-made but now independent reality...
...In this fundamental respect, Khrushchev remained to the end a political Stalinist...
...Even Trotsky, writing in 1904, identified this danger in the Leninist party: The organization of the Party takes the place of the Party itself...
...Where did de-Stalinization go wrong...
...He is proud of the international reputation of certain Soviet artists and writers...
...In his later years Khrushchev objected to Stalin's despotism because it had been insufficiently benevolent...
...How could it drown us...
...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 portrays himself, especially in the second volume, as a repentant sinner with regard to the handling of dissident intellectuals...
...This claim is at once preposterous and eminently plausible...
...Nor is there any reference to the September 1953 Plenum, at which Khrushchev acquired the title of First Secretary of the Central Committee...
...it seems to him self-evident that such decisions do not concern the public...
...Khrushchev rose to power during the Stalin years...
...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...
...No one actually built those problems into the theory...
...It is the complex of institutions and practices, the regime which Khrushchev inherited from Stalin and within which Khrushchev made his career...
...Benevolence is far removed from the qualities that make for success as a despot...
...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...
...Malenkov was " a good clerk...
...On the contrary, there has been extensive rehabilitation of Stalin in the USSR since the anti-Stalin wave crested in 1961 and 1962...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The Beria purge was directed not only against Beria personally but against the power of the secret police which he headed...
...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...
...Beria, Khrushchev says repeatedly, was a loathesome thing...
...Khrusbchev Remembers is in many ways, of course, an unsatisfactory source...
...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...
...In 1961 the old dictator's body was removed from the Red Square mausoleum...
...In Karl Popper's life that advance still continues...
...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...
...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...
...Yet he dismisses the KGB practice of kidnapping potential Soviet defectors on foreign soil as mere "bureaucratic overzealousness...
...Khrushchev, like Stalin, was such a dictator...
...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...
...Popper never tries to disguise his disagreements with other thinkers, nor hide his revulsion from certain actions...
...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...
...Of his own political demise, he mentions in passing only that he was "forced to retire...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...He needed a brush with which to tar his leading rivals, Malenkov (Stalin's heir apparent) and Molotov (Stalin's closest confidant...
...Khrushchev does not explain why this important appointment was kept secret...
...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...
...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...
...Do not be deceived--this is the taproom...
...If we had been at war, we would certainly have announced my military appointment to the Soviet people...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Although the voice on the tapes has been electronically verified as Khrushchev's, many questions remain unanswered...
...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...
...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...
...An oldtime taproom was a place where the "friends of the brewery" could go for some free beer...
...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...
...Of this a:oup there is no mention...
...It is based primarily on tape recordings dictated by Khrushchev shortly before his death in 1971 and smuggled out of the USSR...
...Nevertheless, Khrushchev points out an important connection between the purge of Beria and the subsequent de-Stalinization campaign...
...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...
...We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn't be able to control and which could drown us...
...Beneath the marlin is a counter which conceals two taps...
...The year 1962 saw the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life o f Ivan Denisovicb...
...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...
...But if Khrushchev was caught by surprise, he must have recovered quickly...
...In between guzzles, Brian Thomas studies philosophy at Brown University...
...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...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...
...Victor Baras "Your Mama Won't Let You Scratch Where It Itches" Nikita Khrushchev used peasant humor to gloss over Soviet tyranny...
...Describing himself during the 1930s, Khrushchev says, " I was a hundred percent faithful to Stalin as our leader and our guide...
...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...
...The Soviet regime may be described in non-Marxist terms as an attempt to establish a benevolent despotism...
...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...
...This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky...
...The creative intelligentsia, Khrushchev says, "suffers more than any other category of people in our society...
...We decided not to publicize the decision and made no mention of it in the press...
...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...
...World 1 is the world of physical objects, World 2 the world of subjective experiences, and World 3 the world of statements in themselves...
...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...
...Stalinism, however, is not just a quality of character...
...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 the other hand, Stalin came to power because he was extraordinarily despotic...
...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...
...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...
...The careful reader may not expect to learn much Victor Baras teaches poh'tical science at the New School Jbr Social Research...
...He states unequivocally, " I consider Stalinism a bad quality...
...I believed that everything Stalin said in the name of the party was inspired by genius...
...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...
...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...
...Khrushchev does mention one interesting incident about his rise to power...
...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...
...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...
...The evidence for this is to be found in the unforeseen problems that arise in man-made theory...
...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...
...Yet the overall pattern of truth, half-truth, and untruth is revealing...
...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...
...What motivated the official or semi-official complicity with the memoir project by authorities in Moscow...
...Stalin, on the other hand, was the object of Khrushchev's veneration...
...On balance Khrushchev seems to express a sort of uncomprehending respect for creative intellectuals...
...it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance...
...This is why Khrushchev refers only obliquely to the most important fact about himself, that he was once ruler of the USSR...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Of course, we too wanted a relaxation of controls over our artists, but we might have been somewhat cowardly on this score...
...One hears little of de-Stalinization nowadays...
...Within two weeks Malenkov was forced out of Khrushchev's bailiwick, the Central Committee Secretariat...
...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...
...Now, more than two decades after the event, is a good time to reconsider the meaning of the Soviet crusade against Stalin...
...There is no guided tour at Schoenling...
...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...
...He says of this appointment: This was a strictly internal decision...
...He rationalizes his previous harshness with the observation that "Stalin was still belching inside me...
...The patronage of regulars and the calm dedication to the consumption of alcohol essential to a great saloon are lacking...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Yet Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism is peculiarly limited...
...This in itself is important, for with Popper above all thinkers we should approach the work in the critical spirit which he himself encourages...
...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...
...New York Times, November 7 and December 28, 1970...
...the Central Committee takes the place of the organization...
...Khrushchev also plays the reformer with regard to Soviet travel restrictions...
...Both Khrushchev and Stalin clawed their way to power, and both held on to it as long as they could...
...He calls on the Soviet Union to rid itself of the "disgraceful heritage of the closed border...
...Kaganovich, his mentor, was "nothing but a lackey," "unsurpassed in "" " vmlousness...
...The earlier writings remain as challenging as ever...
...When Khrushchev chose to denounce Stalin in 1956, it was not because of new revelations but because of new political circumstances...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
