The Soviet Party Congress: Old Challenge, New Rivalry
MEYER, PETER
Soviet Party Congress??1 OLD CHALLENGE, NEW RIVALRY By Peter Meyer Many developments at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party were expected and predicted; some were surprising and...
...The speakers stressed that violent revolution, civil war and armed uprising are not absolutely necessary for Communist conquest in all countries under all conditions...
...The same principle underlies the revision of the doctrine of inevitable war...
...Mikoyan spoke about leaders "wrongly accused of being the enemies of the people" and called two of them comrades, a title he did not use for Stalin...
...This all boils down to a simple principle...
...Khrushchev used it as a sedative: Don't worry, everything is in good order...
...The turn came suddenly...
...Why did Mikoyan, and not Khrushchev, do so this time...
...Preaching peaceful coexistence and friendly relations with uncommitted countries, attempting to sow discord among the free nations and to isolate America...
...In this respect, the speakers at the Party Congress were unanimous...
...only after the suppression of Communist armed demonstrations in July 1917 (that was the "peaceful way") did he insist on the absolute necessity of an armed uprising...
...Even Molotov, who was visibly sweating in repeating the new formulas word for word and in thanking his new collective masters for improving the stale operational methods of the Foreign Ministry, had to acknowledge that Stalin's successors were executing the great maneuver better than Stalin himself...
...Was this the "collective wisdom" of the Central Committee each speaker of the Congress had to praise in terms no less idolatrous than those they used in praising the wisdom of Stalin (and Beria) a few years before...
...Mikoyan reminded his audience that Marx and Engels, though they generally considered the violent disruption of the "bourgeois state" an indispensable condition for the victory of the working class, nevertheless admitted possible exceptions from this rule for America, England and perhaps Holland...
...Gronchi or Mendes-France fail to heed the experience of Eduard Benes and Jan Masaryk...
...Enemies of the Soviet Union hoped that there would be confusion and discord, but the Party "rallied still more closely around its Central Committee" and "raised still higher the banner of Marxism-Leninism...
...Mikoyan used it as a tocsin: Look what happens when one man is allowed to become too big...
...But he was never publicly attacked, and after a while his name began creeping back...
...In the interval between the 19th and 20th Congresses," he said opening the first session, "we lost several prominent figures* of the Communist movement-Josif Vissarionovich Stalin, Klement Gottwald and Kyuichi Tokuda...
...Perhaps we can find a clue by comparing the speeches of Khrushchev and Mikoyan...
...It is true that the Soviet people hated Stalin, and his immediate lieutenants, whom he had treated like dirt and always threatened with ignominious death, hated him perhaps more than anyone...
...If you can demoralize a country by the threat of military power from outside and by the infiltration of all parties and institutions from inside, if you can lure or force your adversaries into a "common front" and obtain the commanding positions in the Army, police and mass media, you do not need civil war...
...Or, more precisely, you can conduct civil war against the defenseless population after the conquest of power...
...There must have been urgent reasons...
...Khrushchev did not say, and Mikoyan did say, that there had been no collective leadership and that Party and intellectual life had been stifled when one man was allowed to rule as dictator...
...They could have said that his regime had been right for its time but that the situation has changed and, therefore, Stalinism itself had to be creatively developed in the new conditions...
...Perhaps the ever-reappearing cracks in the collective leadership will one day give them an opportunity to help write not past but future Russian history...
...Thus, there was little controversy about the future...
...The Czechoslovak people achieved their victory by peaceful development of the revolution...
...From the first book he sarcastically quoted the nonsensical statement that in the present "crisis of capitalism" the volume of production in the United States, England and France must decline...
...The delegates got the idea...
...For about twenty years, it did not have collective leadership...
...They could have secretly conspired against him (even killed him) and still canonized him after his death- as Stalin did with Lenin...
...Without doubt, all factions in the Presidium will try to hold criticism of the past within the limits permitted by the totalitarian structure of the country and its ruling party...
...In this context, it is difficult to understand Mikoyan's speech except as a move in a deliberate "Stop Khrushchev" operation...
...In December 1955, Pravda marked the anniversary of his birth with a front-page picture and laudatory articles...
...in the second was the attack on Stalin's name, works and practices unleashed by First Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan...
...There were blunders in foreign policy-example: Yugoslavia...
...The 20th Congress convened not to praise Stalin but to bury him...
...This evaluation was revised-in Mikoyan's opinion, rightly revised-by Lenin...
...They are prepared to win in this "peaceful way" in some countries if Nehru...
...Again, speaking of Party affairs, Khrushchev recalled that "shortly after the 19th Congress, death took Josif Vissarionovich Stalin from our ranks...
...The lesson is that one must always consider concrete power relations: Where Communists wield overwhelming power and can intimidate their adversaries into capitulation, they do not have to apply direct force...
...This last process continued outside the Congress hall...
...If Stalin committed this crime, what about Malen-kov who prepared the proscription lists, Khrushchev who conducted purges in the Ukraine, Bulganin who purged the Red Army...
...Khrushchev thus gave his dead master a shabby third-class funeral, but the matter did not rest there...
...Khrushchev studiously avoided the word vozhd, "leader...
...Stalin's successors continued, with more elasticity and imagination, the great maneuver inaugurated under Stalin's leadership at the 19th Congress in 1952...
...If victims of the purges were wrongly accused, the purge was an immense crime...
...War certainly is not inevitable if the free world capitulates without a fight...
...Khrushchev, Bulganin, Mikoyan and the others interpreted this line in the same way and in almost the same words...
...His celebrated works had been held up to public ridicule, his theoretical pretenses demolished, his rewriting of history exposed, his purges denounced, and some of his victims who had been degraded to "unpersons" partly restored as "comrades" to their place in the past...
...For there is no denying that the activities of traveling salesmen Khrushchev and Bulganin are an improvement over the rather conservative mail-order business conducted by the old man from his seclusion behind the Kremlin walls...
...The Communist parties are certainly ready to learn from the experience of the late Klement Gottwald...
...These unprecedented events cannot be explained as a spontaneous outburst of emotion...
...If till now the Communists have stressed the old threat, "If you're not willing, then I must use force," they are now proclaiming its obvious converse, "If you are willing, we can dispense with open violence...
...Furthermore, if it is ridiculous to assert that various Trotskyites were traitors from cradle to grave, what about Beria, whom not Stalin but the present collective leadership accused of having been a British agent from the time of his adolescence...
...If only an idiot can believe that Kossior and Antonov-Ovseyenko were responsible for all the early misfortunes of the Soviet regime in the Ukraine, what kind of mentality can accept Khrushchev's and Bulganin's explanation that the rift with Tito was due exclusively to Beria's machinations...
...The doctrine of collective leadership, laid down by the Presidium as the result of a compromise between various comrades-in-arms, was interpreted one way by Khrushchev and another way by Mikoyan...
...after a long interruption-restored collective leadership...
...The Russian word was deyatel, which literally means a "doer...
...Several new countries have fallen into Communist hands...
...Didn't the collective leadership take eight months to discover that Molotov, in a speech they all had applauded, did not recognize socialism when he saw it...
...Only the immediate danger of the emergence of another Stalin could induce other members of the collective leadership to attack the Stalin who is safely buried in the mausoleum on Red Square...
...After this explanation, it was almost superfluous to stress, as Mikoyan did, that this kind of "peaceful way" had absolutely nothing in common with democratic socialist "reformism...
...On the other hand, for a while in April 1917 Lenin considered the conquest of power by the Soviets in a "peaceful way" possible...
...Did not Malenkov, when demoted, have to confess to all the mistakes in agrarian policy Khrushchev had made...
...It did not just swear by Lenin's name but really tried to fulfil Lenin's testament...
...The greatest harm was done on the ideological front, where for twenty years Marxist theory was not creatively applied to new developments...
...But these men were also his accomplices, and derive their present authority and power from the fact that they were his comrades-in-arms...
...Even the uninitiated delegates from the provinces must have understood this when they first entered the Congress hall...
...It is an old and undisputed Communist tradition that the Secretary and rapporteur of the Central Committee lays down the line on intra-Party affairs...
...But the lid of Pandora's box has been lifted, and the ghosts of past crimes begin to haunt the corridors of the Kremlin...
...Let it never happen again...
...The Soviet people are still mute, but they are not blind or deaf, and they are watching...
...Such digging in the graveyards of the past is risky for all pretenders...
...For instance, what sense does it make to write a history of the Ukrainian Communist party which attributes the successes of Makhno and Petlura in the Civil War to the mistakes of Comrades Kossior and Antonov-Ovseyenko...
...Why didn't Mikoyan use it this time...
...The Communist-inspired "peace movement" aims at making non-Communist countries unable to defend themselves...
...this was evidently a joint decision...
...True, Stalin's name virtually disappeared from the Soviet press for several months after his death in March 1953...
...Then came the big shock...
...There were mistakes in economic policies-result: a serious disproportion between industry and agriculture...
...some were surprising and sensational...
...The Communist bloc has been immensely strengthened...
...And if the doors are open to critical examination, what happens to the myth of collective leadership...
...it was not clear whether the delegates were applauding Stalin, the Central Committee, or-death...
...But Khrushchev was silent about Stalin-Mikoyan attacked him openly...
...in some situations, Communists can lake over peacefully and transform even "bourgeois parliaments" into tools of proletarian dictatorship...
...Khrushchev reminded his audience of the "Trotskyites, Bukharinists, bourgeois nationalists and other malignant enemies of the people" who "wanted to restore capitalism" and "broke their necks...
...The second work, he said, cannot serve, as it has thus far, as the chief textbook of Communist theory...
...And don't the existing histories of the Trans-caucasian organizations falsify facts, magnify the exploits of some persons, and conceal the very existence of others...
...Lenin also wrote that in a small bourgeois country, surrounded by "socialist" (read: Communist) powers, the transition to socialism may proceed in a relatively peaceful manner...
...But Communist leaders not only decide what should happen in the future...
...The real sensation came when Mikoyan rose to say that he entirely agreed with the report of the Central Committee but wished to dwell on some particular aspects of its activities...
...Mikoyan's address explained this revision...
...In the first category was the general tone of the Moscow meeting and the so-called theoretical revisions of Leninism...
...They could have reversed certain features of his policies and still declared themselves his legitimate pupils and successors...
...There, they argued in the 1870s, no powerful bureaucratic-military machinery existed and therefore the proletariat could perhaps take power peacefully...
...All these facts point to one conclusion...
...In their own way, but also without a civil war, the working classes of Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Poland and other people's democracies won their victories in the socialist revolution...
...The Communists came to power by concluding an alliance not only with the kindred parties of the toiling masses but also with bourgeois parties which joined them in a common National Front...
...He did not say, however, that they would now be remembered in a moment of silence had they done so...
...against all Marxist and Leninist tradition, a cult of personality flourished which had an utterly negative influence...
...When Mikoyan ended, interrupted by many and increasing bursts of applause, few of Stalin's practices remained intact...
...This is the standard formula for turns in Communist policy...
...The 20th Congress, Mikoyan concluded, was the most important one since Lenin's death because it restored the Leninist spirit...
...It is silly, said Mikoyan, to explain everything that happened during the Revolution and Civil War by the "wrecking" activities of some leaders of that time who were, many years later, wrongly denounced as enemies of the people...
...Two months later complete eclipse and Mikoyan's open attack on his memory...
...It was here that the surprise came...
...they also decree what has happened in the past...
...The most important thing, said Mikoyan, is that the Party has...
...Period and "prolonged applause...
...Since Lenin's lime, Mikoyan continued, much has changed...
...To the degree that it succeeds, a "peaceful" conquest of the world in installments is possible...
...I suggest we observe a moment of silence in their honor...
...This aspect of the Congress has been explained in the general press and hardly needs additional comment...
...It is even possible that they killed him when he was about to start a new purge in 1953...
...This is clearly the meaning of the much-heralded "revision of Leninism" and of the Soviet policy of coexistence...
...The Congress aimed generally to strengthen neutralist and appeasing tendencies abroad...
...some of them without civil war...
...With exquisite hypocrisy, Mikoyan reproached Soviet economists and historians for not studying and analyzing facts instead of repeating the holy scriptures...
...If anybody wants to follow this example, he is cordially invited...
...Hungarian Communist Bela Kun was rehabilitated by Pravda...
...Behind the rostrum, traditionally decorated by superhuman likenesses of Lenin and Stalin, there stood only the solitary statue of Vladimir Ilyich...
...it must be revised to conform to real facts...
...The prewar leaders of the Polish Communist party, liquidated by Stalin, were posthumously declared innocent...
...in the epoch of imperialism, taught Lenin, even England and America had developed powerful state machines which had to be broken by violent revolution and civil war...
...Mikoyan then began to demolish Stalin's most sacred works, his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR and his Short Course in the History of the Communist Party...
...Both praise the principles of collective leadership...
...What happened...
...As for the so-called theoretical revisions of Leninism, the Congress proclaimed that war is not inevitable even in the period of imperialism...
...Khrushchev, the main speaker, the "most faithful comrade-in-arms of the great Josif Vissarionovich," mentioned his master only twice...
...There were no barricades in Czechoslovakia -only defenestrations, executions and concentration camps...
...Take Czechoslovakia: "Thanks to the favorable postwar situation, the socialist revolution in Czechoslovakia won in a peaceful way...
...If it is a crime to falsify history, shouldn't one explore the true facts of Stalin's death, Beria's fall, and Malenkov's demotion...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 11
