Russia in Flux: Can Khrushchev Survive?
BORKENAU, FRANZ
Russia in Flux A succession of fits and starts has marked the evolution of Soviet Russia in the three brief years since Stalin's death. Just as the West begins resigning itself to the legitimacy...
...On the other side was Molotov, also obviously in conflict with Khrushchev...
...No wonder it took the Soviet press two days to publish the speech, in obviously garbled form...
...Now we present, on the pages that follow, discussions of two aspects of the present struggle by Franz Borkenau and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, and, on page 20, an overall appraisal by William Henry Chamberlin...
...Nicolaevsky, formerly of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, is regular contributor...
...This was a counsel of despair, for Khrushchev's secret speech has alienated him from his old Stalinist friends, who until the end of 1955 at least regarded him as the defender of their hero and as their own champion...
...But Stalin, too, made sure all his slanders of his enemies contained some measure of fact...
...He understood that the most brilliant organizational successes were insufficient and that his reconstruction of the police was still not far enough advanced to ward off such a blow...
...He then named two victims, Antonov-Ovsevenko, a close collaborator of Trotsky in 1917, and Kossior...
...Did he remain completely ignorant of map-reading after this experience...
...Will Khrushchev survive...
...Zhdanov at the time was the youngest candidate (not full) member of the Politburo, and in the later purges Malenkov played a larger role...
...None of these has had quite the impact of the savage repudiation of Stalin unleashed by his heirs at the 20th Communist Party Congress...
...the posthumous rehabilitation of Party chieftains Voznesensky, Kossior, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Chuhar and Rudzutak, and of Army leaders Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik...
...the reappearance in Moscow of Bubnov, "member of the 1917 Central Committee...
...So much for the Soviet "change of heart...
...But Malenkov is alive and Zhdanov is dead, so guilt is shifted to Zhdanov...
...boss of the Ukraine from 1930 to 1937...
...Nor do we need the Soviet Presidium to learn that Stalin committed many grievous mistakes both at home and abroad...
...Khrushchev can hardly have anticipated the revolt in Tiflis, where furious youths, no doubt instigated by local magnates who felt threatened by an anti-Stalin purge, tore his and Bulganin's pictures from the walls and shouted "hail to Stalin...
...What happened between Stalin's birthday anniversary, December 21, and Khrushchev's opening speech at the Congress, February 14...
...In 1936, so the story runs...
...On the first day of the Party Congress, Khrushchev mounted the rostrum and condemned in general terms, as he had before, the "cult of personality...
...a few months after Kossior's arrest, was sent by Stalin to exterminate Kossior's supporters...
...Really...
...Between the last two dates, there was a tremendous event, the significance of which was hardly understood in the West: namely, the speech by Anastas Mikoyan...
...Thus, in the Kremlin, in the presence of more than 1.200 delegates and of the entire higher Party and state bureaucracy...
...And, lo and behold, the Soviet press, which had marked Stalin's previous birth and death anniversaries with awkward words or near silence, now broke out in impressive and universal praise of the dead dictator...
...But even in this sphere the drastic nature of the changes raises huge questions concerning the motives of the Soviet ruling clique...
...On the other hand, old Stalinists openly revolt against their old comrade, Khrushchev, now a traitor to their cause...
...Did not Kaganovich, at the Congress itself, cautiously voice their protests against overdoing anti-Stalinism...
...Did Stalin attempt to direct the conduct of World War II from a globe because he was unable to read an ordinary map...
...The first fact which strikes the experienced student of Soviet affairs is that many of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin charges, as reported in the Western press, are demonstrably untrue...
...But in the USSR such dramatic developments rarely mean what they seem to mean, and icy dispassion is required in analyzing them...
...Some of the stories now being dramatically disclosed are true, of course...
...By Franz Borkenau Zurich The members of the Moscow Presidium, who once vied with one another in cringing adulation of Joseph Stalin, now compete for the honor of heaping the most mud on the dead lion's grave...
...Broadly, Mikoyan continued to hold the same views as Malenkov, who is also far from being broken...
...In past issues, we have brought you analyses of these forces by David J. Dallin, Peter Meyer, Boris I. Nicolaevsky and Tom Whitney...
...Thus, Khrushchev decided that there was only one way to counter the onslaught of his enemies...
...Who exterminated those friends...
...Obviously, vast forces are at work to produce these changes...
...CAN KHRUSHCHEV SURVIVE...
...Khrushchev was shaken...
...In the past, such concoctions have served only one function: the annihilation of some intra-Party adversary...
...Did Stalin really trust Hitler so much that he at first ordered Soviet troops not to answer German fire...
...Not Khrushchev that much is clear...
...personality cult, he did not once speak of Stalin...
...Or is something quite different now in progress...
...It was Nikita Khrushchev, who...
...If Khrushchev now hurls a torch into the dry, inflammable wood of the Stalin heritage, it is to obscure his own responsibility behind the fires of a general conflagration...
...The same is true today, judging by the furious conflicts Stalin's denigration is obviously rousing within the USSR...
...under Stalin and afterward, to weather all crises...
...note that the group of officers who were supposedly the intended victims of the plot Marshals Konev and Vasilyevsky in the first place have since enjoyed Khrushchev's support and reciprocated in turn...
...Stalin was for several years chief political commissar on one of the hottest southern fronts in the Civil War...
...Thus far, Soviet evolution has been restricted primarily, though not exclusively, to intra-Party relations...
...Ever since Stalin's death, his standing had had its marked ups and downs, which Soviet experts noted in puzzled surprise...
...Apart from the attack on the dead dictator's life and works, the last two months have witnessed event after event which would have seemed inconceivable in 1953: the apologies and pensions extended by the regime to the families of Jewish writers purged in the 1950s...
...Mikoyan spoke directly of the crime of having exterminated Kossior and all his friends...
...He must put himself at the head of the anti-Stalin movement and do so in such a way as to hold a sword of Damocles over all heads (for who in the Kremlin can plead "not guilty" to some share in Stalin's crimes...
...Will they go on serving Khrushchev as they served Stalin...
...Mikovan charged Khrushchev with having built his personal power on mass murders concocted by Stalin and himself...
...Stalin's birthday in December was the first suitable occasion on which he could demonstrate his own personal devotion to the old master...
...No doubt they will, explaining that, since Khrushchev has confessed Stalin's sins (though not his own), everything is now different...
...The new anti-Stalin charges are a concoction of falsities and true facts, precisely on the Stalin model...
...On the one hand is a right-wing opposition led by Mikoyan, which genuinely seeks to break one-man rule and intra-Party terrorism...
...They explain that the hymns they sang to him in his lifetime were sung with NKVD men at their backs, ready to shoot...
...Borkenau, author of European Communism, has had an unusual record in forecasting post-Stalin developments...
...Only ten weeks before, he had recognized, on the very day of the Belgrade uprising, the new anti-German Government of Yugoslavia...
...He had demoted Malenkov in February 1955...
...Khrushchev could not eliminate him either, because of the sympathies he enjoys in certain Army circles...
...The entire Congress knew...
...He must head his adversaries off...
...Instead of indulging in anonymous rejections of the past, Mikoyan got up and called Stalin the culprit by name...
...In any case, Khrushchev could not strike as Stalin used to do, as he himself did within the scope of his own limited assignments under Stalin...
...Who, in the last analysis, is behind the furious anti-Stalin campaign, which, if pushed further, will threaten many leading heads...
...The organizational supremacy of Khrushchev has begun under ominous auspices, and at present only one thing seems certain: Khrushchev's survival is a question of who will succeed in to use Stalin's favorite expression "physically liquidating" whom...
...But we should utilize all our past knowledge in assessing the present "disclosures...
...There is no such alibi for the Communists and fellow-travelers of the West, who have now been told that everything they have been saying for a quarter of a century was dictated by one of the worst monsters in history...
...That is unpredictable...
...Stalin and Zhdanov decided on the Great Purges...
...How strange, incidentally, that the very healthy Polish Party Secretary Bierut went to his deathbed almost immediately after hearing Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress...
...the reappearance in the Soviet press of the long-vanished historian Petrovsky, writing to praise Lenin's tolerant treatment of the Workers' Opposition...
...Khrushchev is now obviously caught in a pincers...
...meanwhile, both before and during the Congress, he was manipulating everything so that the elections to the Central Committee and changes in the police brought him a substantial organizational victory...
...There may have been still other focuses of resistance, not yet apparent to us...
...Ed.] Far more interesting, what happened between Khrushchev's public speech on February 14 and his secret speech on February 24...
...There cannot be the slightest doubt that the "debunking" of Stalin is the focal point of a great upheaval throughout the Soviet Union, both in high Party circles and among the masses...
...In effect, Mikovan called Khrushchev a murderer to his face...
...Just as the West begins resigning itself to the legitimacy and stability of the new regime, new thunderbolts issue from Moscow, revealing anew the deep fissures in the system built by Stalin...
...Mikoyan, whose speech also made it amply clear that he did not accept Khrushchev's ideas on the imminent collapse of the West, spoke for a substantial current of thought which advises caution both at home and abroad...
...He can hardly have expected that the Tiflis press and radio would openly rebel against anti-Stalinism and praise Stalin highly for all the world to see...
...Where Khrushchev stood was easy to see...
...Murder is again stalking the Party offices of the USSR...
...True, he later retracted that recognition precisely out of fear of an imminent German attack, of which, Khrushchev now pretends, he was completely unaware...
...This was only the beginning...
...Of all the present members of the Presidium, he was the closest to Stalin in the days of the notorious "doctors' plot...
...In so doing, Khrushchev built up the Ukrainian team which to this day provides him with political mamelukes, and created a personal stronghold in the Ukraine which has enabled him...
...We do not need Nikita Khrushchev to teach us that Stalin killed millions and shattered the lives of tens of millions...
...For a partial answer, see Boris I. Nicolaevsky's article, page 10...
...Amid this triumphal march, and amid his own condemnations of the...
...Do the unpublished charges Khrushchev made against Stalin at the secret session of the 20th Party Congress reflect a genuine change of heart, as the Yugoslav press eagerly claims and as many sincere friends of peace eagerly hope...
...Is it really...
...One can only say how, if at all, he can survive: by destroying his intra-Party enemies...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 14
