Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS The Anti-Stalin Drive: What It Means and Where It Will Lead By William Henry Chamberlin The first Soviet Constitution denied lunatics the right to vote, along with ministers...
...On the other, it may not prove easy to eliminate all the effects of the virtual deification of the dead dictator...
...The best answer to this maneuver is to stress that, while Stalin is dead, Stalinism is very much alive and that Soviet overtures must be dismissed as insincere until Germany is reunited in freedom, the satellites are freed, and the Iron Curtain is swept away...
...And, if Stalin the man has been debunked, how can one justify maintaining such features of Stalinism as the forced collectivization of agriculture, the sacrifice of hopes for an improved standard of living to the insatiable demands of militarization and heavy industry, and the complete absence of free discussion, even within the ranks of the ruling party...
...That Stalin was guilty of these and many other ghastly crimes, including the mass starvation of the peasants in 1932-33, the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," the enormous expansion of the slave-labor system, and the massacre of 15,000 Polish war prisoners in the Katyn Forest, is not news to readers of The New Leader or to other informed Americans...
...What are the credentials of the present Soviet rulers, not one of whom would be in power or perhaps even alive if they had not fawned on the tyrant, flattered him and successfully diverted the ever-darting rays of his pathological suspicion...
...2. The hand of the Soviet Army marshals may be seen in this latest development, as in the downfall of Beria and the demotion of Malenkov...
...On the basis of that power, Stalin committed a long series of crimes that recall the psychopathic Ivan the Terrible or the most demented of the "bad" Roman Emperors...
...But now it is revealed on the current highest Soviet authority, Nikita Khrushchev, that a man exhibiting every symptom of paranoia and other mental disorders was able to wield absolute power in the USSR for nearly three decades...
...Whatever immediate tactical gains Khrushchev and his associates expect from their repudiation of the Stalin myth, they may find that they have injected a serious element of schism into Communism within and without the borders of Soviet Russia...
...The professional Army officers are probably as sick of the legend of Stalin's "military genius" as the German generals were of the strategic gifts attributed to former Corporal Adolf Hitler...
...The questions that must now occur to the more intelligent Communists on both sides of the Iron Curtain are many and are not easy to answer...
...There would seem to be three main objectives in the campaign against Stalin's memory: 1. In one of history's ironical retributions, Stalin is now being cast in a role which he imposed on so many of his victims, that of scapegoat...
...And the memory of Tukhachevsky and his murdered colleagues calls for vindication...
...What kind of a system is it that can fall into the hands of a paranoid criminal...
...By liquidating Tukhachevsky and seven other Red Army marshals, together with thousands of officers of lower rank, and by failing to heed warnings of the impending Nazi attack, he was responsible for the death and captivity of millions of Soviet soldiers...
...Confronted with evidence of hardship, of plans that are not working out, the new Soviet leadership can put the blame on Stalin and his "cult of personality...
...His most eminent lieutenants were never summoned to his presence without an uneasy feeling that imprisonment and execution might be in store for them...
...On the one hand, seeds of skepticism about the whole Communist setup have been sown...
...3. Khrushchev & Co...
...He falsified history and sent innocent men to their death on the basis of forged evidence...
...hope, by saddling Stalin with responsibility for the regime's ugly sides, to build bridges of infiltration to Tito, to the neutralist countries of Asia, and to European Socialists with a weakness for popular-frontism...
...What is new and sensational, what may be the equivalent of a time-bomb ticking away in the Soviet Union and its satellites, is the confirmation of these crimes by men like Khrushchev, Mikoyan and Malenkov, who were closely associated with Stalin and his crimes...
...If a monstrous tyrant like Stalin emerged from the "collective rule" which prevailed after the death of Lenin, what guarantee have we that in Khrushchev there is not the making of a new Stalin...
...And what a gigantic swindle was practiced on a whole younger generation, brought up to revere a cruel, capricious tyrant as a mortal god...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS The Anti-Stalin Drive: What It Means and Where It Will Lead By William Henry Chamberlin The first Soviet Constitution denied lunatics the right to vote, along with ministers of religion and members of the "bourgeoisie...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 14
