Purging the Party Apparatus
NICOLAEVSKY, BORIS I.
DESTALI NIZATION-TH REE In our January 8 issue, we published two appraisals of the de-Stalinization campaign launched by Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Soviet party Congress: Arthur E. Adams...
...Both were, of course, concerned with maintaining themselves in power, but that power was used above all to advance the interests of the world revolution...
...Both men worked under the general guidance of Suslov...
...At the 22nd Congress, Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan emphasized that it was impossible to draft the new Party Program only after the influence of Stalin's famous pamphlet, Economic Problems of Socialism, had been overcome...
...Once he was dead, the machinery of terror was bound to crumble—particularly since the dictator himself was soon followed into the grave by Beria and many of the others whom he had trained so well in the technique of medieval Oriental intrigue...
...More than that, they may well have lashed back and exerted an influence on Nikita Khrushchev himself...
...On the contrary, he took the view that, inasmuch as the Soviet Union was shouldering the main burden of carrying out the world revolution, Communists in other countries must be transformed into auxiliary detachments of the Soviet regime...
...These men were no longer a threat to the Premier when the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist party, at which he unveiled his anti-Stalinist campaign to the public, convened in November...
...For the Soviet Union, the history of the post-Stalin period has been one of liberation from the primacy of foreign policy over domestic...
...DESTALI NIZATION-TH REE In our January 8 issue, we published two appraisals of the de-Stalinization campaign launched by Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Soviet party Congress: Arthur E. Adams analyzed its effects within the Soviet bloc...
...Purging the Party Apparatus By Boris I. Nicolaevsky Explanations of Nikita Khrushchevs de-Stalinization campaign as a move aimed at the socalled Anti-Party Group of Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov et al, are wide of the mark...
...Khrushchev, who had hitherto been a protector of Suslov, Pospelov and the others, then changed his position and presented his famous secret report on Stalin...
...Even the partial de-Stalinization undertaken at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 —when Stalin's crimes were euphemistically referred to as a "cult of personality" and their shocking details were revealed only at a closed session—helped to precipitate the Hungarian and Polish revolts, as well as serious unrest among Soviet university students...
...Walter Z. Laqueur discussed the repercussions in non-block parties...
...But its direction has been unmistakable, and it is apparent that, whatever happens in the Soviet Union, the monstrous machinery created by Stalin for the purpose of subordinating that country and the entire world Communist movement to the cause of foreign aggression can never be resurrected...
...The path that led him to it has been a winding one, and it is not yet clear whether he is even aware of the role he is now playing...
...Under Stalin, Khrushchev had been one of the most avid executors of the dictator's policies...
...Thus, although there was a great deal of talk about the need for removing Anti-Party members from the ranks of the Communist party, no such action has yet been taken...
...There can be no question, though, that he is furthering precisely the process described...
...The Stalinists merely took to more cautious, circuitous methods...
...The drive to rehabilitate Stalin was to include the publication of Volume XIV of his collected works, which had already been announced in the Literary Gazette...
...On the eve of the 20th Congress, for example, the Propaganda and Agitation Section of the Central Committee Secretariat launched a systematic campaign to glorify Stalin under the slogan: "Long live the great Party of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin...
...Only Stalin, with his powerful will and his even more powerful terror apparatus, could successfully harness all the resources of the Soviet regime and the world Communist movement in the service of this idea...
...For all their differences, the Lenin and Stalin regimes had one important characteristic in common: Both basically recognized the primacy of foreign over domestic policy...
...They appear to be supported by much of the Party youth, by some literary figures and by such political figures as Averki Aristov, a former Presidium member, and Nuritdin Mukhitdinov, also a former Presidium member as well as a former Central Committee Secretary...
...The new volume, to be edited by Pospelov and brought out by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, was to contain material dealing with the Yezhovshchina period...
...Nothing in his past has fitted Khrushchev for his present role as an instrument of the Soviet Union's liberation from the heavy burden of world revolution...
...This and other measures taken since the Party Congress are surely only the first steps in the process of de-Stalinizing the Party apparatus...
...In particular, Khrushchev was—together with Nikolai Bulganin, then Minister of the Armed forces, Colonel General Shtemenko, the Soviet Chief of Staff, and Marshal Konev, the commander of a special Army group in Eastern Europe—a leading proponent of an aggressive foreign policy...
...Careful reading of Khrushchev's report and the other speeches delivered to the Congress clearly shows that his denunciation of Stalin was not a sudden, impulsive act but a well-planned move...
...the effort was directed instead toward revising his political ideas...
...Even after Stalin's death, he played a major role in torpedoing the efforts by Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria to arrive at an accommodation with the West...
...However, that by no means implied subordinating foreign policy to the demands of internal development...
...Although Mikoyan did not say so, the crucial issue was Stalin's insistence that the conversion of the collective farms into State property was an essential condition for the building of Communism—a theoretical position that Stalin planned to make the basis for the use of more than purely economic coercion against the peasants during the second Yezhovshchina...
...In the last months of Stalin's life, Khrushchev helped carry out the policy of domestic anti-Semitism combined with foreign support of the Arab countries in their campaign against Israel...
...The Premier has spoken so much in recent years about peace and peaceful construction that, even though he has been insincere most of the time, the ideas he has set in motion have taken on a life of their own, independent of their originator, and become a powerful force...
...The latest information from Moscow makes it clear that Suslov has been removed from the leadership of the foreign section of the Central Committee Secretariat and that V. N. Ponomarev is now in full charge of relations with foreign Communist parties...
...True, Stalin consistently upheld the thesis that the interests of the Soviet Union must take precedence over those of the foreign Communist parties...
...Stalin's exposure at the Congress and the policies since adopted are an answer to the attacks the Suslovites have made on Khrushchev and his policies during the past two years...
...It was only after a complex struggle at the top levels of the regime, after the Hungarian, Polish and other foreign Communists had demanded the rehabilitation of their victims of the Stalinist purges, and after Marshal Zhukov had intervened, that the plans of the Stalinists entrenched in the Central Committee Secretariat were finally defeated...
...The process has, of course, been accompanied by bitter intraParty strife and has not gone forward without interruptions and diversions...
...It was he who initiated the consolidation of collective farms into "agro-cities," which represented essentially a continuation of forced collectivization...
...Entombing Stalin's body proved a much simpler task than burying his ideas, as the history of the postStalin years has shown...
...Khrushchev cannot tolerate the existence in the central Party apparatus of a group that is virtually in open opposition to him...
...Suslov and his allies wield a great deal of influence in the Party apparatus...
...Khrushchev was fully aware of the risk he was taking...
...The Premier must have launched his present allout drive, therefore, because the "cult of personality" lives on in the USSR, despite what official Soviet propaganda would have us believe, and today represents a major threat to the country's development...
...He was fighting for a very definite policy which could succeed only if Stalin's ideological and political heritage was dealt a blow from which it could never recover...
...The First Secretary's strategy at the 22nd Congress was essentially to appeal to the rank-and-file delegates to support him in his fight against the remnants of Stalinism...
...This marked the beginning of much more difficult times for Stalin's apologists, but the attempts to rehabilitate him by no means ceased...
...The only Stalinist group now active in the Party's central organs and dangerous to Khrushchev is headed by Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Party Presidium and a Secretary of the Central Committee...
...But starting in 1955, after Malenkov's ouster as Premier, he gradually abandoned his association with the foreign-policy extremists...
...The Agitprop Section was headed at the time by Fedor Konstantinov, and its ideological work was directed by Petr Pospelov...
...He was also one of the chief organizers of the projected second Yezhovshchina in 1952-53...
...It was Suslov and his allies, Pospelov, Konstantinov and others, who propounded Stalin's ideas during the discussion of the new Party Program...
...It was no longer possible to speak openly of rehabilitating Stalin himself...
...Here Boris I. Nicolaevsky, formerly of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, presents his views of the Soviet Premier's action and its relation to the internal Party apparatus...
...He saw world revolution in terms of a global war in which the victorious Soviet Army would carry the revolution to every corner of the earth...
Vol. 45 • January 1962 • No. 2
