Notes on the Russian Turn

...Let us hope so...

...The "cult of the individual" is attacked, yet Pravda hastens to denounce those "immature persons" who use intraparty discussions as a "pretext for fun...

...And let us remind the intellectual apologists for Stalinism, men like Frederick Schuman and Corliss Lamont, what it was that they spent decades in saying—lest they now continue to say it for Stalin's successors...

...Some people now say that such considerations are irrelevant, merely an indulgence in moralizing...

...Which shall one stress—the extent to which important changes have occurred or the extent to which Russian society under Khrushchev remains continuous with that under Stalin...

...Is it not clear that Russian rulers are caught in a dilemma: either risk allowing the present trend to get out of hand, which means to risk their own power, or start tightening up once more, which means to risk a reversion to personal dictatorship...

...The two articles that appear below continue the discussion of the recent events in Russia that began in the last issue of Dissent...

...But when he and Bevan found themselves together, pressing Khrushchev for frank answers to blunt questions, they were speaking—I do not think this an exaggeration— for the bruised conscience of socialism...

...When Trotsky wrote that Stalin was inclined toward antiSemitism, when he raised the possibility that Stalin had murdered his wife, even veteran anti-Stalinists felt a little embarrassed, suggesting to one another that the "Old Man" was running away with himself...

...Nothing is left to the defenders of the Russian dictatorship but the most paltry of arguments—the argument in the name of industrialization...

...To measure the magnitude of this catastrophe, you should imagine a situation in which, for political reasons, Faulkner, Hemingway, Auden and Frost are summarily executed...

...But is there any precedent for a dictatorial junta trying to consolidate its rule and proclaim its virtue by announcing that it participated in outrages that resulted in the murder of millions of human beings...

...But this raises the crucial question: what will happen to these people if they resume Social Democratic political activity...

...Much more will have to be said about this, since it will prove to be the main argument of the New Appeasement, but for the moment it is enough to quote from Miss Jane Degras who has written with admirable conciseness: Russian output in 1955 gave little more than 1 metre of woolen cloth and one pair of footwear per head of population...

...How can you continue to belonc to a movement that supported such bestiality for decades...

...not so fast...

...Far more admissions must be wrung from the Kremlin...

...He barely had the conviction to advance the usual Communist claims...

...The process of primitive accumulation of capital, to which Marx devoted the most readable and biting chapters in Capital, has been illustrated as never before in Soviet history of the last twenty-five years, (The Twentieth Century, April 1956...

...the top leadership, for reasons still to be fully explored, gives the signal for a limited relaxation—but at what point can this process be stopped...

...One of the more terrible disclosures that has recently been leaked out of eastern Europe is that the Stalin regime destroyed the whole Yiddish cultural community...

...But the fact that the regime grants concessions, whether to the workers or to the secondary strata of the bureaucracy, is no reason for modifying one's fundamental opposition...

...Does anyone suppose that as the chief executioner in the Ukrainian purge—the worst in all Russia!—Khrushchev failed to show "initiative" of his own...

...but at no point did he challenge the system of socio-political authoritarianism which made them possible...

...Emphasis added...

...In a totalitarian society every social layer, because it cannot express itself freely, presses in a thousand hidden ways against the layers immediately beneath and above it...

...The Freiheit, in an April 15 editorial, declares that "on the agenda of the day is the need for a declaration by the Russian government concerning what has happened to the Jewish communal leaders and writers...

...Since, in regard to a statified economy, it is nonsense to speak of economic freedom without political freedom, this question, I submit, brings us to the heart of the problem that sooner or later may disturb the life of the Communist countries far more than Khrushchev intends...

...Excellent...

...Particularly in such countries as France and Italy, it would be bombarding the Communist militants with messages such as this: "Look, friends, every accusation made by the antiStalinist left has either been vindicated or is likely to be vindicated tomorrow...

...At the now-famous dinner Khrushchev was taught a lesson in the elements of democracy, and it was splendid that on this issue both right and left wings of the British Labor Party—both George Brown and Aneurin Bevan—united to press the socialist attack upon the Russian despots...

...The "excesses" of Stalinism have been partly removed, but the socio-political system that produced these "excesses" remains...

...The exact nature of this social strain we do not yet know, but it seems likely that it found its first major manifestations in the profound yearnings for a relief from terror that followed upon Stalin's death and also, perhaps, in a crisis of relations between the top leadership and the hundreds of thousands of secondary officials...

...Lowenthal's article, which has appeared in several European journals, among them Preuves, Der Monat and Encounter, is here reprinted with his permission...

...Nothing that any anti-Communist ever charged against the Stalin regime can even approach the horror of Khrushchev's revelations...

...Khrushchev attacked Stalin's repressions and murders as "unnecessary," as directed against the wrong people at the wrong time...

...The present regime in Russia is perhaps the first in modern history to be led by self-confessed murderers...

...There has been no lack of brutal governments in the past, nor even of rulers who confessed their crimes after losing power...

...But how can the French socialists undertake a moral offensive aEainst the Communists when Guy Mollet is busy directing the annihilation of Algerian nationalism...

...Yet it is here that we encounter the political double-standard of "the left...

...But weakness, too, for is it conceivable that a political crisis of this magnitude could have occurred without there having been behind it an enormous social strain...

...but let us forget the past, let us be hopeful of the future...

...If there were a healthy socialist movement in the world today, it would by now have undertaken a furious offensive against the Communist parties...

...The past is still here...

...Yet, to be honest, was he so very different from those authoritarians of the left who, while not Communist, think that to refer knowingly to charts of technological advance is to put forward a particularly Marxist argument...

...In debating with those radicals who seem tempted to soften their opposition to the Russian dictatorship, one must stress that it remains a totalitarian or authoritarian society, qualitatively different from anything that merits the name of socialism...

...but it is not possible for a socialist to say it...

...For it is here, one may suggest, that the regime has come up against the problem that besets all dictatorships and, in the long run, seems beyond solution...

...One can imagine a German Communist worker thinking to himself: If I was ready to face the as chambers, why was not Khrushchev prepared to risk his life too...

...So far, the best political response to the pretensions of Khrushchev and his colleagues has come from the British Labor Party...

...Some people, the amoral realpolitiker of "the left," say: "Yes, the purges were horrible, Stalin a butcher...

...There is nothing magical in the high rate of economic development— it is a function of the gap between production and consumption...

...No...

...The unions are urged in the party press to put up a good "tussle"—but suppose some workers venture to go on strike...

...We haven't seen them in Russia for thirty years...

...We must anticipate and struggle against a New Appeasement...

...It would be a great error if we did not insist upon reminding people that we were right—whatever our shade of socialist or radical opinion, we who for thirty bitter years kept up the fight against the lies of Stalinism...

...Well, George Brown is probably a rather crude trade unionist who in many other contexts would provoke us to sharp disagreement...

...in the end he fell back—irony of ironies!—on a vulgarization of the weakest Trotskyist argument for defending the "workers state," namely, the rapidly increasing rate of industrialization in Russia...

...Modesty or immodesty is irrelevant here: there is a deep moral-political necessity for keeping the record clear...

...my only interest, at the moment, is in indicating what seem to me the premises of a socialist response to these events...

...Khrushchev and his colleagues now admit, yes, we participated in outrages, but we could not help ourselves, we were Stalin's captives, a word of dissent would have meant death...

...It is possible to say that, and possible to say it in the name of History or the Future or Industrialization...

...Those who do not respect the past will always be ready to defile the future...

...I recently read an account of the effort by a Young Communist leader in this country to justify his continued support of Russia...

...Every time the circle of those who participate in making decisions is widen ed, the regime runs the danger that this process will take on a momentum of its own, or that minority factions within the leadership will try, in their own interests, to involve still larger strata of the population in the life of politics...

...Khrushchev and his cronies must be forced to tell the truth about the Moscow trials and Trotsky's murder and much else...

...The active terror of Stalin, as Lewis Coser put it in the last issue of DISSENT, has been replaced by Khrushchev's "terror in being" or terror in reserve...

...Khrushchev is speaking to European and Asian Communists, party militants trained to accept death upon orders...

...the 'housing space' per head of the urban population was roughly 4 square metres (in 1953) compared with 12 in Greece and 16 in Italy, among the lowest in European countries...

...So a healthy socialist movement would speak...

...We have been trying to present a variety of interpretations that fall within the general outlook of our magazine, and we hope to print other articles on this subject in later issues...

...That Khrushchev, while unquestionably a scoundrel and a murderer, is not a fool, is proven by the accuracy of his calculation...

...This report, which admits the existence of wholesale anti-Semitism in Russia, lists the many Yiddish writers who were murdered by the `Beria gang...

...any diminution of human suffering is a positive good...

...That is why Russian policy already shows new contradictions...

...Strength, yes, in that the party leadership feels its institutional position to have been improved vis a vis other agencies in Russian society, and its political position improved by virtue of having provided the class of functionaries and officials with assurances that, if loyal, they can expect stability in office...

...At no point did he even ask: how could these monstrous things have arisen...

...damental criticisms of the party...

...It is no exaggeration to say that Yiddish literature suffered even greater blows from the Stalin regime than from the Nazis...

...what was the social basis of Stalin's crimes...

...A little historical justice would also be appropriate...

...If the Khrushchev regime does close the labor camps (to replace them with "corrective labor colonies," whatever they might be), if it shortens the working day—that is to be welcomed...

...Does not a bit of relaxation stimulate an appetite (as, apparently, in Poland) for a greah deal more of freedom...

...Those who would forget this imperil the moral foundations of their socialist or liberal belief...

...There are ways of handling this problem in the short run...

...to what extent were these crimes "inherent" in a society totally without freedom...

...And here, indeed, was the most shallow and deceitful aspect of Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, which has now been made public by the State Department...

...At the end Khrushchev is quoted as having said: "Who is this George Brown...

...new elements in the upper strata, particularly those concerned with industrial production and indifferent to ideology, find indirect ways to express their yearning for stability within the privileged classes...

...Other repressive governments have also eased the lot of their subjects, and some have raised the standard of living far more than Khrushchev even promises to...

...The past is still here...

...The "wildest" charges he made against the regime have now been show to be literally correct...

...Terror and repression create demoralization and weariness, even among those who rule...

...But even in Khrushchev's terms, his "defense" is absurd...

...As it happens, when most of them were executed, Beria was not even head of the secret police...

...One need not worry that an improvement of living standards in Spain will lead any radicals or liberals to qualify their opposition to Franco...

...In their own Marxist terms, the "rate of exploitation" of the working class is rising...

...I didn't know such people existed...

...If those who have so cruelly exploited the Russian masses realize that terror cannot be extended indefinitely, if they realize that the stabilization and "legitimation" of their class requires a turn from terrorist methods—all this matters most of all because it provides a chink through which the long-repressed energies and hopes and resentments of the masses may break through...

...but in the case of Russia .. . • Much pointless discussion has been taking place as to whether the changes in Russia are due to strength or weakness— as if in actual social life these were not invariably intertwined...

...But there is a profound difference between speaking up in 1936 and admitting part of the truth in 1956—though even Khrushchev's admissions are couched in fundamental falsehood, such as his effort to make Beria, one of his cronies of yesterday, into the scapegoat for murders in the responsibility for which he, Khrushchev, shares...

...We socialists— though not, of course, we alone—cannot afford to have such short memories...

...and these pressures find their climax at the point where a political crisis creates a sudden disequilibrium in social life...

...By all means, by all means...

...Such questions Khrushchev did not and could not ask, for to ask them would mean to imperil the basis of his own absolutist rule...

...It depends on the frame of discourse...

...In these notes I make no claim to be presenting a rounded analysis of the Russian events...

...The Morning Freiheit, Yiddish Communist daily in New York, reprinted on April 10 an "historical document" from the April 4 issue of Folks-Shtimme, the Yiddish Communist paper in Warsaw...

...Well, Trotsky was right...

...What is most important in the Russian changes is that concessions or relaxation on top open at least the possibility of emboldened demands and resistance below...

...In trying to foresee the consequences of the Russian turn one must clearly focus on that which is new...

...but not, I think, in the long run...

...It will not do...

...The Hungarian government has just announced that some imprisoned Social Democrats will be freed...