The Repudiation of Stalinism

...And we have followed the silent liquidation of Stalin's gigantic projects for the "transformation of nature," the admission of the terrible backwardness of Soviet agriculture and the efforts to overcome it by various new policies, and' the turning away from forced labor as the recruiting method for remote areas...

...There is of course no question of democratizing the regime, or even of permitting a free, public discussion of political issues...

...Khrushchev's "secret" reassessment of Stalin...

...We are far from pretending that, in Communist parlance, these contradictions are "insoluble...

...By subordinating the secret police to the Party, and by rehabilitating many of its victims, Khrushchev on the contrary is trying to revive the Party and to allot it the leading role, in the conduct of the new economic policy—so much so that he urges the Party functionaries to acquire business and technical experience and even seeks to give them a financial interest in the production results of their respective regions...

...Mikoyan's remark that the "cult of personality" had replaced collective leadership for almost twenty years takes us back to this date, the eve of the Moscow` trials...

...Now Khrushchev has gone a step further by proclaiming the general uselessness of "political sections" in industry, on the grounds that Party functionaries are to take a hand directly in the productive process...

...It is difficult to think of a more striking symbol of the} attempt to preserve the Party's rule by reconciling it with the living forces of Soviet society...

...rational management...

...knows that the biggest single factor in promoting waste, inefficiency, corruption, and black-marketeering has been the utopian attempt to establish central control over every detail of production in every single plant...

...We have grown used to identifying it with'Malenkov, especially in connection with the promise of a "steep increase" in the output of consumer goods...

...their first glimpse of the Promised Land after wandering through the desert for almost forty years—the return of hundreds of thousands of deportees from the labor camps, the rise in peasant incomes, the first steps towards a higher output of consumer goods and a shortening of working hours...

...Stalin's method of securing this domination and warding off a "Thermidor"— i.e...

...Attempts to hasten the "transition to Communism" in accord tivization of agriculture along with industrialization of the country as one of Stalin's abiding merits and to confine practical criticism to the period starting in 1934...

...the shaking off of the revolutionary Party regime by the new upper stratum born of the revolution—took the form of the "permanent revolution from above": on the one hand, amalgamation of the ruling party with the new administrative and economic bureaucracy...

...Nor is this merely a matter of terminology: to the change-over from an ideological to a technical vocabulary there corresponds the transition from administrative compulsion as the main instrument of economy policy to the introduction of such improved economic incentives as higher purchase prices to raise farm output, gradual shortening of hours as a stimulus to more intense work, etc...

...It is no accident that the first prominent victims to be rehabilitated—Kossior, Postyshev, Rudzutak, Chubar—were associates of Stalin in the Politbureau who supported his policy against both "left" and "right opposition groups, but were subsequently liquidated during the great purge because it would seem, they had opposed the arrest of Rykov and Bukharin on charges of treason...

...The conduct of the twentieth congress and the elections to the central Party organs...

...The official doctrine of "class-struggle from above" may have been abandoned, but the classes themselves continue to exist, and so do the pressures seeking expression at the political level...

...The elevation of Zliukov to candidate-membership of the Party presidium, and the simultaneous disappearance from the central committee of the heads of the army and navy political departments, can only be regarded as confirmations of this trend...

...Here, too, as was shown by Marshal Zhukov's speech at a meeting of Party members of the Moscow military district before the Party congress, the tendency is to strengthen the authority of the commanding officer (who is a Party member anyhow) under the control of the regional Party organization, and to deprecate the kind of political schooling which is kept separate from military training...

...Nor does the recognition that "peaceful," "parliamentary" roads to socialism are conceivable in certain conditions affect the other part of that basic dogma—that a Communist Party dictatorship ("The rule of the working class under the leadership of its Communist vanguard") is the condition of "socialism" and indeed of any economic and social progress, and that any state not governed by such a regime, including states with democratic Labor governments, remains subject to all the laws of capitalist decline...

...Now, Stalin's heirs have de liberately returned to Kirov, but the Thermidorian forces are stronger by twenty years of social and economic growth, by the spread of tech nical and administrative knowledge and of military self-confidence founded on a victorious war...

...In practice, the Soviet government always strove to avoid involvement in world war even in Lenin's and Stalin's time, including its most aggressive periods, and the new revision does not touch its fundamental belief that the world is sharply divided into two hostile camps—one "imperialist," the other "Socialist...

...hence he prefers to have independent-minded spokesmen of social "weight"—like Mikoyan, Malenkov, and Zhukov—within the inner councils of the Party...

...The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary...

...against the rule of a party which, under Stalin's personal reign and under the intra-party terror of his secret police, had long become a lifeless mechanism, and whose popularity had reached its nadir...

...That discovery was made by the Yugoslav Communists at the beginning of 1952...

...This would be so signal a contribution towards restoring objective stand ards of truth and justice as to make all but impossible a reversion to the specifically Stalinist methods of intra-party terrorism and falsification of history...

...What is being attempted is a transition from arbitrary despotism to a kind of enlightened absolutism: the new boss is willing to listen, to learn from experience, to employ influential counsellors...

...This time they cannot be broken so easily...

...Yet the spectacle of the spokesman of the Stalinist old guard disclosing in secret session the harm done to the Communist Party, the army, and the Soviet people by the "mistakes" of his late master, and naively trying to base his own authority and that of his colleagues on the fact that they were powerless to prevent what they now denounce, is only one aspect of the drama of this twentieth' congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

...If plants can rely on a steady flow of materials, if wage scales are rational, and if there are consumer goods to be had, people will anyhow work as well as they can—and what, in that case, becomes of the Party's role in the production process...

...their leaders have certainly been encouraged to try and win power by their own efforts...

...And there is finally the position of the Soviet Union as a great world power with all that implies for the prospects of peace and war, and hence for the survival of us all...

...The price concessions to the peasants have not been revoked, although so long as consumer goods output lags behind they are bound to result in inflationary tendencies...

...11 The purpose of the whole experiment is to save the Party dictatorship, not to dissolve it...

...The Bolshevik Party is unique in having maintained its dictatorship for decades after the completion of the original revolutionary task...

...The dictatorship is to be preserved by concessions to its subjects, the one-man rule by the myth of collective leadership, the dogma by flexible adaptation to experience...

...the same goes for the destruction of the legend of "Stalin the infallible war leader," and for the rehabilitation of the generals he killed...

...Thus the raising of agricultural productivity de pends on measures which must evoke resistance either from the peasants or from the Party...

...The delay was simply due to the interval between Lenin's death and the concentration of power and authority in the hands of a single recognised successor...

...Hence Khrushchev is trying to canalize them, to win their confidence—and he finds that their price is rising...

...According to Pollitt, it was also the direct cause for the placing of the security services above the Soviet government and above the Party, which enabled them "to make false charges against comrades and violate the Soviet constitution and Soviet laws...

...The pace of investment has inevitably slowed somewhat in comparison with the Stalin era, and the planned increase in consumer goods output, although more modest than that of producer goods, is considerable in the majority of branches...

...yet if the Soviet Union should in our times return, for all the differences between her forms of government and ideology and ours, to respect for the common moral principles of civilized humanity, no one would be entitled to belittle so profound a change...

...ance with Stalin's final prescription, by instituting direct exchange of goods between factories and kolkhozes instead of market transactions, were sharply condemned by Mikoyan at the congress because this would interfere with rational cost calculation—now proclaimed the most urgent task of all...

...That, however, would be to overlook an essential point: while Malenkov proclaimed the new course in his capacity of Prime Minister at a Soviet congress, Khrushchev explains his policy as first secretary of the Party at a gathering of the latter...

...Khrushchev did not bother to sum up after the debate on his report, and indeed the great majority of speakers parroted their themes in the true Stalinist manner—except that their servile praise was reserved not for one man, but for the collective wisdom of the central committee...

...for this destruction of a myth is carried out by Stalin's closest surviving accomplices, within a system of one-party rule whose very existence depends on the pseudoreligion it incessantly purveys...

...111 Any dictatorship needs enemies to justify its existence...

...Against him there is above all the, moral effect so difficult to estimate from the outside, of that fantastic totem feast at which the collective of posthumously rebellious brothers devoured the remnants of their tyrannic father in full view of the nation...

...This being the organizational set-up, the more frequent plenary sessions of the central committee appear as a means of subjecting the other members of the presidium to Khrushchev's control, rather than as a forum of democratic debate...

...This is indeed the authentic vengeance of History, working through blind agents who know not what they do...

...They need not concern us in this analysis of the fundamental forces at work within the regime, but for a brief warning against misunderstanding their true character...

...In fact, a number of measures have been taken during the past eighteen months to transfer responsibility for entire groups of industries to regional authorities...

...The alternative would be to allow the peasants to leave the kolkhoz, a step which the great majority unquestionably still desire to take...

...Only now has Stalin's authority been openly demolished— first on a few specific points in Anastas Mikoyan's public speech, and then by the systematic reassessment of Stalin's "merits and errors" delivered in secret session by Khrushchev in a speech which is now being used as the basis of Communist "re-education" both in the Soviet Union and abroad...

...And indeed this is the only prediction which can today be risked: despite the concentration of power in Khrushchev's hands, despite the genuine successes and the apparent consolidation, the regime remains in flux...

...I venture to think that this is consoling...

...In consequence the kolkhoz always tends to waste labor and to "find work" for peasant families even where it yields very little, until and unless they decide to run off...

...Here we have one major test of Khrushchev's policy...

...The twentieth congress marks a station on the road, an at tempt to consolidate the Pary's rule internally and to reaffirm its dogma in relation to the outside world...

...and although Party discussions over rival "platforms" continued nonetheless, not only under Lenin but until 1928 even under Stalin, their eventual suppression was the logical consequence of the earlier prohibition of factional groupings, and basically of the single-party system as such...

...This is the key to the new directive concerning the revision of Party history and the rehabilitation of Stalin's victims...

...it would in fact constitute a moral guarantee of the permanence of "enlightened absolutism...

...We have seen the reconciliation with Tito's Yugoslavia based on an open apology for the unjust accusations hurled against it and the economic injuries caused to it by the hostility of the Soviet bloc since 1948...

...And we have come to regard Khrushchev as its chief opponent—as the leading advocate of continued priority for heavy industry and intensified pressure upon the peasants with the aim of preparing a "third agrarian revolution" that would nationalize the kolkhozes, a step urged in Stalin's last pamphlet as a precondition for the "transition to Communism...

...the experiment has only just begun...

...The most important measure of farm policy during the past few years, turns out to have been neither the virgin soils campaign nor yet the campaign to grow maize, but the "decentralization" of agricultural planning which allows the kolkhoz administrators greater latitude for independent...

...What will they think of a Party which now admits that it has, fed them lies for twenty years and has shared responsibility for the slow extinction of countless innocent victims, but asks them to believe that it will be the champion of truth and justice in future...

...On his side are the habits of more than a generation of Party government, the concentration of all political experience in the Party machine, and last but not least the remarkable new flexibility and self-confidence which liberation from Stalinist shackles has given to his team...

...Malenkov's resignation last year and Khrushchev's evidently growing ascendancy were therefore widely interpreted as the end of the "new course" and the start of a fresh period of intensified internal class struggle, a further turn of the screw of "permanent revolution...

...That would certainly secure a sensible rise in output...

...Anyone who troubles to think in economic terms also realizes that productivity could be substantially raised and costs Iowered if the central authorities could be brought to renounce this bureaucratic system of planning in detail...

...If it hazards the bold move of renouncing the myth of the internal enemy, and of seeking a reconciliation with its own people, doctrinaire insistence on the irreconcilable conflict with the capitalist environment becomes all the more indispensable...

...First these sections were abolished in the case of the machine-tractor stations, and the district secretaries of the Party charged instead with "assisting" the M.T.S...

...the stability of singleparty dictatorship thus requires the individual dictator...

...What does seem likely is that Khrushchev is willing to permit genuine discussions within the presidium, much as Stalin did unil 1934, and that—also like Stalin in his earlier days—hd does not aim at the complete elimination of unsuccessful rivals popular with the Party membership or the people, but on the contrary welcomes their public support of his policy and even their participation in carrying it out...

...Now such an attempt to reconcile the regime with Soviet society has been made once before: in 1934, following the end of forced collectivization and the completion of the first Five Year Plan...

...In consequence, there can be no question either of returning to "intra-party democracy," for under the system of singleparty control this would lead to factional groupings giving expression to the various conflicting interests within Soviet society...

...even last...

...But the kolkhoz also suffers from another weakness: it cannot calculate labor costs...

...In this respect the kolkhoz displays the drawbacks of a feudal manor whose serfs attempt in every way to limit the services they render to their lord...

...This, and this alone, was the historic core of Stalinism—quite apart from any excesses and personal pathological traits...

...its enemies, not the need for Communist dictatorship and for a Communist bloc...

...In the first place, the individual peasant lacks an adequate incentive for exerting himself on behalf of the collective: long years of experience have taught him, that he cannot get enough out of the joint income of the collective, and in consequence he tends to concentrate on his small personal allotment and his private livestock, a tendency reinforced by his individualist tradition...

...But if this is the purpose, two critical questions arise at once...

...At the congress itself, no differences of opinion were publicly expressed...

...on the other, the systematic use of state power by that party to bring about ever new social upheavals (typically in the process of forced collectivization and in the mass deportations of the purge era) . The Party maintained its hold upon power by refusing to let the people settle down...

...In actual fact the economy only functions, and the overall plans are only broadly fulfilled, because the industrial managers evade the system of detailed bureaucratic control and "scrounge" for whatever materials or spares they need on the black market...

...Khrushchev explicitly revises the doctrine because he aims at preserving the Party's rule by making peace, in the Party's name, with the Russian people...

...The collective decision evidently has been to confirm the political condemnation of the various opposition groups defeated by Stalin, but to dissociate the new regime from the horrors of the purge period...

...The compulsive urge to treat every kind of economic offense as high treason, every internal resistance as an "agency" of the capitalist besiegers, the general spy hysteria and absence of legal security followed from this basic situation...

...their recognition as men who advocated a policy rejected by the Party, but who had been unjustly branded as traitors and counter-revolutionaries...

...The epoch-making feature of the twentieth congress is that it has openly raised precisely this question—which is not to say that it has, by any means, solved it...

...Yet after he perished his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything...

...It was the essence of the "new course" inaugurated by Malenkov's speech of August 1953...

...So far from representing the liquidation of the "new course," these measures amount to its continuation, modified by propaganda campaigns, but retaining its reliance on incentives rather than repression...

...but quite apart from the fact that it would presuppose a previous abolition of the forced delivery system if it was not to disrupt the normal exchange between town and country, such a "counter-revolution" is presumably beyond the horizon of Stalin's erstwhile colleagues...

...Campaigns" such as the settlement of virgin lands or the increased cultivation of maize can at best lead to partial improvements, but do not touch the basic cause of the lag in farm output...

...It is typical of Khrushchev's eagerness to rehabilitate the Party by demonstrating its functional usefulness that he has undertaken to do away with the bifurcation of authority implied by the parallel operation of managers on the one hand, and "political sections" dealing with ideological matters on the other...

...The attempt to use the Party as an extra driving force of an economic system...

...They reflect a recognition of the fact that as the Soviet Union no longer disposes of practically unlimited reserves of manpower, its future economic expansion now depends primarily on raising the productivity of each individual worker and peasant, and that in consequence there is far less scope for the employment of repressive measures in economic life...

...Judging reality by reference to a dogmatically presumed Communist goal of social development, and finding its actual evolution tending in quite a different direction, it kept discovering a succession of "class enemies" who had to be destroyed by terrorist means...

...None of this can bring the victims of Stalin's terror back to life...

...Despite the above comparison with the tyrant of another age, quoted from the book over whose unfinished manuscript Trotsky was battered to death by Stalin's emissary, the present massive denunciation of the initiator of those crimes and the "scraping off" of his falsifications from the record is no less unique...

...but it marks a truly fundamental break with the Stalinist dogma of "the leading role of the Soviet Union" which sought to deny that possibility...

...Moreover, Khrushchev has acquired a new stronghold in the shape of the newly established bureau of the central committee for Russia proper, while the reorganized machine of the secret police is supervised on behalf of the Party by his subordinate Aristov, a member of the central secretariat, but not of the presidium—in other words a man solely responsible to Khrushchev himself...

...This thesis is based on a return to Lenin's views as well as on the facts of the Chinese and Yugoslav revolutions...

...It is the lack of this "dialectical" element that lends to the congress' discussion of domestic affairs such a strikingly technical and quasi non-political character: we are told much about tasks and accomplishments, successes and failures, models to imitate and examples of backwardness, old and new methods, initiative and bureaucratic routine—but there is nothing about ithcl embittered resistance of class enemies, no appeals to "revolutionary vigilance" (except in relation to the arms budget) , no calls for "merciless struggle...

...Why was it necessary, after three years of gradual reform, suddenly to throw continuity to the winds and to demolish the traditional symbol of authority...

...four of them, in addition to himself, belong to the new presidium of eleven members and six candidates...

...How far will the critical faculties of the millions who grew up in Stalin's shadow be awakened by this spectacle...

...Now that the twentieth congress has given the signal for the opening of the Party archives, it will be difficult to bridle the eagerness of Soviet historians to get at the facts about the great treason trials...

...But the solution clearly depends upon further zigzags of the regime's transformation...

...Contrary to the "collective leadership" myth, everything we know suggests that three years after Stalin's death this position of power within the Party has largely been attained by Khrushchev...

...During the weeks preceding the twentieth congress the Soviet press was full of suggestions for reforming the kolkhoz statute in that direction...

...Can Khrushchev succeed in canalizing these forces...

...he was corrected piecemeal and allowed gradually to fade into the background, and where explicit attacks on past mistakes could not be avoided, these were ascribed to Beria...

...Yet, on another plane, the future of the regime may be decided by a hard and prosaic test—its ability to prove itself in the task of economic construction...

...The very form of collective farming implies two major hindrances to a steady rise in productivity...

...Fol lowing the congress a decree was issued empowering the kolkhoz assem blies to scale down the private plots of members who fail to perform enough collective labor...

...The revisions, in fact, merely concern the roads to Communist dictatorship—"parliamentary" as in Czechoslovakia or violent as in China—and the relations between the Communist blocs and...

...If the kolkhoz peasant could be transformed into an agricultural laborer for whom his private plot of land has only marginal significance, it would be possible both to focus his material interest on work for the collective (wages would of course be paid by piece-rates, under the Soviet norm system) , and to rationalize cost calculation...

...Whether Khrushchev (who himself helped at the time to purge some of the men now rehabilitated from the leadership of the Ukrainian party) knows it and likes it or not, men's, thirst for truth is a real force...

...A market economy based on economic incentives can develop quite well within a framework of large-scale planning, but it cannot afford (and does not require) "socialist competition...

...The Great Purge of 1936-8, with its liquidation of the old Bolshevik elite ordered in cold blood two decades after the revolution, and covered by a slimy flood of lies and forgeries was one of those events which revealed to a whole generation new vistas of man's capacity for evil...

...In that case, however, one has got to let the market fulfil its function without constant interference by propaganda campaigns...

...This experiment certainly does not correspond to Khrushchev's original intentions, as witness his past record as Stalin's representative during the Ukrainian purges, and as the originator of the abortive attempt to found agro-towns...

...That interpretation, however, has not been borne out by the speeches at the twentieth congress or by the events which preceded it...

...For this reason, the changes in international policy and doctrine announced at the twentieth congress, while important in themselves, are with one exception wholly confined to the realm of strategy and tactics...

...and this is true independently of whether Khrushchev's disclosures had been planned collectively before the congress, or whether Mikoyan's first public attack, on Stalin came as a surprise and had such strong backing—from Zhukov?—that it forced Khrushchev's hand...

...Under Lenin, the legal existence of opposition groups within the Party was tolerated just as long as legal opposition parties were tolerated: both came to an end with the Kronstadt rising of March 1921 and the introduction of the New Economic Policy...

...The desire to transcend the present forms of collective farming is therefore not confined to the ideologists of the "transition to Communism...

...whether the satellite states, who have had no independent Communist revolutions and whose leaders have taken an active part in Stalin's anti-Titoist purge, shall remain Soviet satellites or, be exposed to Yugoslav influence...

...At the same time the kolkhoz managers are advised to make cash advances on their members' share of collective income, thus introducing both an additional incentive to work and a form of wage payment (calculated on the basis of what a labor day is presumed to be worth) . This decree is evidently a considerable step towards transforming peasants into wage laborers, but it is not at all clear how far it can be carried out without risking "intensification of the class struggle in the countryside," and consequently a threat to the conciliatory policy proclaimed by the leadership...

...Life is getting happier," the slogan of the brief Kirov era, could have been the motto of the twentieth congress...

...A similar though less drastic difficulty presents itself in the other great issue of Soviet economic policy: the decentralization of planning...

...Given this state of affairs, the "return to Leninist norms of party life" has a strictly limited meaning...

...following various personal shifts during the preparatory period, all go to show that he has effective control of the Party machine...

...We have watched the sudden dismantling of Stalin's personal secretariat and the disappearance of its members, the calling off of the "doctors' purge" which had begun in the last months of his life, the systematic downgrading of the secret police and their subordination to the control of the Party, the quiet rehabilitation of some of the surviving old Bolsheviks as well as of victims of pre-war and post-war purges in some East European states...

...There is also, on a vaster stage, the transformation in the lives and hopes of 200 million people who are now allowed to catch...

...but this conclusion has not so far been explicitly drawn in public, and all official statements continue to list the collec Though this revision of Stalin's central doctrine was not yet publicly proclaimed at the congress, it was tacitly implied in the absence, in all the hundreds of, pages of published speeches, of any reference to the need for political struggle against the "internal enemy...

...But the dialectic cannot be halted: the dissolution of Stalinism continues...

...Two pronouncements made at the congress are likely to cause such misunderstandings...

...And what are the chances, now that this has been done, of consolidating the regime on the new basis...

...True, this was not done in the speeches that have so far been published, nor could we have learned it from the Western versions of Mr...

...The kolkhoz thus share the disadvantages of the small peasant farm which keeps going despite uneconomic methods, because the peasant exploits his own labor and that of his family...

...by regular visits...

...But is it possible to carry out such a transformation without provoking bitter resistance...

...I During the three years since Stalin's death, almost every criticism of Stalin's methods and policies now voiced has been implicitly foreshadowed in the action of his heirs...

...IV We have interpreted the twentieth congress as an all-round attempt to salvage the Party dictatorship, its present head, and its Leninist doctrine—not by retaining Stalin's methods but by abandon ing them...

...But these reforms do not touch the core of the problem: the truth is that for a large number of minor economic decisions the most rational solution is not to plan them at all, but leave them to the discretion of the manager and his response to the market situation...

...The dictatorship justified its existence by stressing the alleged necessity of a permanent struggle against the ever renewed growth of "capitalist tendencies"— it lived in a constant state of war with its own people...

...This leads immediately to the problem of the "political deputies" (the former political commissars) in the army...

...The prohibition of intra-party factions was justified by Lenin himself at the tenth Party congress in March 1921, on the grounds that such groupings would become the vehicles of conflicting class interests...

...The collective farmer does not earn wages, but receives a share of the net income, retained by the kolkhoz, a share calculated in relation to the "labor days" performed by him...

...The recognition that world war is no longer inevitable— on the ground that the forces of the Soviet bloc and its sympathizers in the "imperialist camp" may now be strong enough to prevent the imperialists from carrying out their wicked plans—is certainly sincere as far as it goes, but marks no basic change in policy...

...Logically the next step ought to be at least a partial rehabilitation of the Trotskyites and Bukharinites themselves, i.e...

...which tries to raise productivity with the aid of material incentives involves dangerous internal contradictions...

...year's defeat of Malenkov proved no more than a tem porary setback for them...

...Yet this change of methods results not just from the passing mood or tactics of a dictator who still has to consolidate his grip: it is the necessary corollary of the attempt to reconcile the ruling party with Soviet society, and to raise productivity by harnessing economic incentives, much as the style of...

...Social pressures have already driven Khrushchev further away from Stalinism than he intended to go—in fact, beyond the point of no return...

...Malenkov tacitly ignored Stalinist doctrine because he in tended to reduce the Party to a secondary position...

...But all the authoritative statements since made on the subject by non-Russian Communist leaders—notably the article published by Walter Ulbricht, the East German party secretary, on March 4th ( reprinted in Pravda on the following day, the anniversary of Stalin's death) , the statement by Palmiro Togliatti to the Italian Central Committee published on March 15th, Harry Pollitt's article in the Daily Worker of March 24th, and the article by Jerzy Morawski of the Polish Party secretariat published in Trybuna Ludu of March 27th—all base their criticism of Stalin's policies and methods of rule on a condemnation of his thesis of "the intensification of the class struggle in the Socialist state, even after the complete victory over the capitalists and landlords had been established...

...There is no necessary conflict between Khrushchev's renewed condemnation of "Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and bourgeois nationalists," and Mikoyan's demand for a new history of the civil war years...

...for this lag is rooted in the structure of the collectives themselves...

...At bottom, any attempt at a "break with Stalinism" entails the question whether the regime can terminate this domestic state of war and still retain' power—whether the Party can make peace with the Russian people and continue to govern...

...For while the second version would be more dramatic, the basic forces at work would be the same in either case...

...Khrushchev's "virgin soils" campaign has more than doubled the proportion of land directly owned by the state, but it still represents only a modest percentage of the total, and anyhow the campaign has suddenly come to a halt...

...We have long noticed the drastic reduction in the adulation of the late dictator and in the references to his writing as a final source of authority, coupled with an increasing emphasis both on Lenin and on the collective wisdom of the Party...

...Be it noted in passing that the rejection of Stalin's theory for the entire periodafter the destruction of the landlords and capitalists implies a condemnation also of his methods in achieving forced collectivization by the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" and not only of the later purges...

...The reality veiled by the talk about "collective leadership," then, is not a sharing of power within the presidium, but a different manner of exercising control...

...By the manner of his public pronouncements, as well as by his preference for governmental functions, Malenkov sought to harness in his favor the subterranean counter-pressure accumulated within Soviet society...

...These examples should suffice to demonstrate the contradictions inherent in Khrushchev's attempt to maintain the Party rule without an internal enemy...

...The answer lies with the peoples of the Soviet Union...

...Its risks may be shown briefly in connection with two basic problems of Soviet economics—the future of collective farming and the decentralization of planning...

...But the pressure of the social forces in the new, ,industrially developed Russia has apparently become so strong—notably since the destruction of the secret police's former hegemony in the course of the struggle among Stalin's heirs—that the last-ditch defender of Party orthodoxy has had to offer them incentives, at least in the economic field, which differ little from those a political agnostic like Malenkov was willing to grant...

...with Tito—and the creation of new problems, e.g...

...Both questions lead us back to the basic force behind the change —the accumulated pressure of the new society that has grown up within the hard shell of the party regime...

...Khrushchev could crush his inner-party rivals in the Stalinist manner—but he could no longer control Soviet society with a crushed party...

...The way may also be opened to a more independent development of the strategy of some other Communist parties, still within the framework of the general doctrine but with less regard to Moscow's "advice," particularly in Asia, but possibly also in Italy...

...The only exception concerns the relations among Communist states —the recognition that independent Communist revolutions, and independent Communist regimes, are possible, and that the Soviet Union must work with them on a fraternal basis and may even learn from them...

...The low level of agricultural productivity has for decades weighed heavily upon the entire Soviet economy, and it still represents the major obstacle to a notable raising of living standards...

...The open repudiation of Stalin, the admission that all the present Party leaders were helpless tools of his crimes, is not yet the Soviet Thermidor—but it is the greatest victory so far of the forces of the Thermidor...

...This policy of substituting the economic carrot for the administrative stick was, as we know, introduced shortly after Stalin's death...

...If conflicts within the ruling group are not to become public, final authority must be vested in a single leader strong enough to prevent an appeal to wider circles...

...It is because of this open break with "Stalinism" that Mikoyan could rightly describe the congress as the most important one since Lenin's time...

...Since Stalin's death it has become the object of strenuous efforts on the part of the new Ieaders and particularly of Khrushchev himself...

...This thesis, first pronounced by Stalin in his speech to the Central Committee of March 3rd, 1937, which inaugurated the "Yezhov era," the worst period of the great purge, had according to Togliatti led to "a desperate prospect of unending mutual persecution of one part of society by the other, even within the organizations of the working class"—and in practice to "suspicion in all directions and in all circumstances...

...Once again, a comparison with 1934 is instructive: then, Kirov's attempt to liberalize the regime led to the first flowering of "Thermidorian" tendencies, until Kirov's assas sination gave Stalin the opportunity and pretext to start the purges and to develop his specific recipe for preventing the Thermidor by the "permanent revolution from above...

...Everyone in the U.S.S.R...

...It is tempting to sum up the "line" of the twentieth congress as Malenkovism under Khrushchev's leadership...

...back to 1934" sums up its intraparty meaning...

...Like the break with Stalinism in domestic matters, it means both an immediate increase in flexibility and effectiveness—shown in this case in the reconciliatiori...

...From Leon Trotsky's Stalin) Ours is an epoch of unique historical events, most of them horrible...

...For in addition to the denunciation of many of Stalin's individual crimes, the reassessment has touched the central core of Stalinism as a doctrine and a method of rule...

...Up to now, however, all these reforms and policy changes had been carried out without open disavowal of Stalin...

...each of its members and alternates—now numbering over 250—consequently knows to whom he owes his position...

...enlightened absolutism in the past was the corollary of the attempt to foster the economic development of the middle class...

...It was noteworthy that the congress on the whole evaded such concrete issues...

...All those functionaries whom Krushchev, in his capacity as first secretary, had previously dislodged from their regional positions, disappeared automatically from the new central committee, whose election took place unanimously...

...Apart from Khrushchev the central committee has seven secretaries, of whom five were appointed since his rise to power...