Where the News Ends
CHAMBEKLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Stalin's Tyranny Guilty As Charged Nikita Khrushchev's indictment of the paranoid, sadistic tyranny which Josef Stalin (with the hearty...
...But with Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's wholesale terror, his personal delight in torture, his mental irresponsibility, the argument about Stalin's place in history is ended...
...The cold war was the sequel to the innumerable toasts of friendship at Teheran and Yalta...
...The list of his crimes was endless, the number of his victims countless...
...Of course, it is good, from the humanitarian standpoint, if there has been some easing of the genocidal conditions in slave-labor camps, if freer contacts between foreigners and Soviet citizens are possible, if tens of thousands of political prisoners have been released in Poland, if Czech students feel able to demand more liberty...
...There has been no move toward implementing German reunion in freedom or giving genuine freedom to the satellite states or toward introducing genuine guarantees of human liberty in the Soviet Union or in the satellite states...
...ten million human beings consigned to the living hell of the slave-labor camps: the physical liquidation of a vast miscellaneous group of old Russian intelligentsia, native nationalists, veteran non-Communist revolutionaries and the majority of Stalin's oldest comrades in the Communist party...
...As I look back to the war years, I can still recall the sick-at-the-stomach feeling of living in a nightmare world where truth and so many other moral values were subverted...
...the deportation of a million and a quarter Poles to slave labor under conditions so barbarous that about a quarter of them died...
...Our best mentor at this time when the Soviet policy of the fixed smile is producing, as it was intended to produce, a good deal of woolly confusion in Western thinking is 80-year-old Konrad Adenauer, who is still in there pitching for the right causes...
...Western statesmen met Stalin in Teheran and Yalta and professed raptures over him as the perfect host...
...Horrible as Khrushchev's list of Stalin's crimes is, some of the worst are omitted...
...It would be impossible to blacken Stalin's record, to make him out worse than he actually was...
...One doesn't hear even Corliss Lamont or Walter Duranty lift a voice in the late dictator's defense...
...Joseph E. Davies found him a man so gentle that a dog would sidle up to him and a child would sit on his lap...
...The horrors of Stalin's First Five Year Plan followed the milder atmosphere of the NEP...
...the murder of 15,000 Polish officer war prisoners in the Katyn Forest and elsewhere...
...There is no mention, for instance, of the decimation of the Soviet peasants, of the Katyn Forest massacre and the mass deportations from Poland and the Baltic States...
...Yet this monster was hailed as a gallant and worthy ally in building a brave new world...
...To myself, as to everyone who had lived for a reasonably long time in the Soviet Union and honestly studied the historical evidence, Stalin was one of the greatest criminals in history, a figure to rank with Nero and Genghis Khan...
...But nothing has happened yet that goes beyond the dimensions of a tactical zigzag, an attempt to cash in politically on a partial repudiation of Stalin (but not of many features of Stalinism), to destroy by smiles the collective defense arrangements of the free countries which could not be destroyed by bluster...
...A man who had much to do with these deportations, General Ivan Serov, still holds a high post in the Soviet security service...
...A good working theory for the Soviet new look was furnished by Adenauer in his address at Yale: "They want to smash the mighty protective shield of NATO and to drive the United States from Europe, so that Europe will fall like a ripe fruit in the Soviet lap and through its industrial potential and the skill of its peoples will lend the Soviets decisive superiority over the United States...
...The graves of his old victims were forgotten, the cries of his new victims were stifled in an atmosphere of callous and ignorant indifference...
...But there is an obvious and serious danger that, by a selective blackening of Stalin, Khrushchev and his associates may succeed in whitewashing their own regime...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Stalin's Tyranny Guilty As Charged Nikita Khrushchev's indictment of the paranoid, sadistic tyranny which Josef Stalin (with the hearty collaboration of Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and all the other present Soviet leaders) inflicted on the people of the Soviet Union and on large areas outside the Soviet frontier is a great service to historic justice...
...It is worth remembering that there have been many tactical shifts in Soviet policy before...
...The Stalin-Hitler Pact followed the "popular front," collective-security strategy which Stalin launched in the Thirties...
...It seemed that if only you committed enough murders, you ceased to be a murderer...
...To list just a few of his achievements in mass murder: a million "kulak" families liquidated and four million peasants starved to death to break the resistance to collective farming...
...Look back to the radio broadcasts, the widely syndicated news commentaries, the publications of that time and see how the American people were misled...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
