Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THIS COFFIN i want to congratulate you on acquiring Tris Coffin as your Washington correspondent. His September 2 piece, especially, on the questioning of Ambassador Gluck by the...
...Nicolaevsky refers to Lavrenti Beria's attempts, in the spring of 1953, to reach accommodation with the West by withdrawing Soviet power from East Germany...
...2) that Khrushchev himself is as thoroughgoing i Stalinist, in both domestic and foreign policy, as anyone in the Kremlin hierarchy...
...It is a question of historical importance...
...and (3) that his purged opponents were by no means all Stalinists, since Malenkov was clearly identified with n more liberal policy at home and a non-aggressive policy abroad...
...Washington, D. C. Ernest Gruenbacii I have been following Boris I. Nicolaevsky's series on the battle in the Kremlin with great interest...
...Clinton, Ohio Abner Wricht NICOLAEVSKY Boris I. Nicolaevsky, in his series of articles, "Battle in the Kremlin," has rendered a genuine public service...
...I was also a bit surprised that Mr...
...Malenkov promising more consumer goods and forswearing nuclear war...
...to the decentralization of the Soviet economy, were merely part of « campaign to destroy his rivals for personal power...
...One point, however, struck me...
...For if he ever tried, his end would be more sudden and unexpected than Stalin's...
...Ruth Carlson...
...Mrs...
...Coffin seems to me to dispense more common sense on the Washington scene than a lot of commentators syndicated in the dailies...
...He can retain his power only if he sticks to his promises and provides the food, housing, legality and shorter working hours that he has promised...
...Eugene O'Neill...
...They are doing it not because they want to but because they must...
...New York City Jason T. Clark It is disappointing to me that Boris I. Nicolaevsky, a veteran of the Marx-Engels Institute and biographer of Marx, has made such a Machiavellian analysis of the recent Soviet developments, when for the first time in years the materials for a truly Marxist analysis are clearly apparent...
...The Leningrad speech was broadcast (monitoring reports are available), but Soviet press abridgments of it omitted the most explosive material: a call for "justice" for the Red Army heroes who perished in 1937...
...And he knows it...
...Stalin left a legacy of hatred, fear, resentment and accumulated injustice in every sphere of Soviet and satellite life...
...As we have seen, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, most prominent of these heroes, has just been rehabilitated—indicating that Zhukov has won his point despite the reticence of the Party press...
...Beria promising an end to terror and new rights for nationalities...
...The man who prevented such a meeting—and may have stymied a chance to reunify Germany in freedom and liberate the satellites—was the man everyone now agrees is our greatest Secretary of State since Dean Acheson...
...Oak Park, III...
...Churchill, as evidenced by his speech of May 11, 1953, was eager to take a chance on a new "meeting at the summit" with Beria and Malenkov...
...He will no more carry out the dark plans of 1952-53, as Nicolaevsky implies, than Stalin did...
...It matters little, it seems to me, whether Khrushchev was associated with Poskrebyshev in 1952, for he no more possesses a free hand today than Beria or Malenkov did before him...
...Willi a few exceptions, American commentators have swallowed the Moscow line that Nikita S. Khrushchev represents the "liberal," "coexistence" wing of the Soviet Communist party and is engaged in crushing the resistance of the diehard "Stalinist" faction...
...Pawtucket, R. I. Elmer Anderson DIANA TRILLING Am I wrong to assume that the last sentence of Diana Trilling's "An Evening with 'My Fair lady' After a 'Long Day's Journey'" (NL, July 29) places her in what a recent Saturday Review article described as "the catty school of writers...
...To use Sidney Hook's famous distinction, Khrushchev is, assuredly, not an event-making man in the sense that Stalin so clearly was...
...That, to quote one of SR's ironical comments on the felines, "pretty well disposes of Mr...
...he is at most an eventful man, the suitable expression of contending forces in a transitional period...
...By his concentration on the intrigues of Khrushchev, Poskrebyshev, Aristov, Ignatyev et al., I think he has missed the major political point of the post-Stalin era: namely, that for the first time since the 1920s the Soviet people as .. whole have had to be taken into account...
...Nicolaevsky has failed to analyze them...
...That the sole member of the Soviet leadership for whom there is anything like mass affection has steadily forged ahead in post-Stalinist crisis after crisis is but another indication of the growing weight of the Soviet masses, including rank-and-file Party members, in Soviet politics...
...His September 2 piece, especially, on the questioning of Ambassador Gluck by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was both hilarious and informative...
...tempts...
...such are the pressures from below, which cannot be dismissed even though Mr...
...The important fact of the post-Stalin era is that every one of the Kremlin contenders, when he had his day in the sun, has had to promise the Soviet people a better life...
...Drawing on knowledge of Soviet politics which few observers can match, Nicolaevsky effectively shows (1) that all of Khrushchev's recent moves, from the ouster of Molotov, Malenkov & Co...
...The answer must be John Foster Dulles...
...Khrushchev and Bulganin journeying to Geneva, wooing Socialists, denouncing Yezhov, now promising meat, milk and butter on U. S. standards—all of these men, Stalinist gangsters for years, have had to rely in their struggle for power on wooing the Soviet masses...
...Nicolaevsky, analyzing the fall of the Molotov-Kagano-vich-Malenkov-Shepilov group, failed to discuss the role of Marshal Zhukov in these events, particularly the speech he made in Leningrad after their fall and the enthusiastic reception he received from the population...
...Who foiled those atThe New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Trilling ended with this dubious accolade: "Quite without perversity, perhaps the best compliment 1 can pay O'Neill is to acknowledge that his autobiographical drama had for me an import almost as large and lasting as a superb musical comedy...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 36
