Reports from Correspondents of the New York Times
REPORTS FROM CORRESPONDENTS OF The Nem Book Times. The New Soviet Party Line KHRUSHCHEV SPEAKS Moscow March 10—Premier Khrushchev has warned the Soviet people against wrongly interpreting his...
...The Chinese are now vigorously propagating their attacks throughout the Communist world, seeking to win Communists and Communist parties to their camp...
...According to this version, given by a private source that prefers not to be identified, the U-2 approached the Sverdlovsk area in the Urals undetected and caught air defense units unprepared...
...The existence of the letter was disclosed by Ilyichev on December 17, at the first meeting of the Soviet leadership with the intellectuals...
...Referring to the arrests by the Stalinist police of thousands of Soviet citizens who were labeled "Enemies of the People," Khrushchev said: "The question is asked, did the leading people of the Party know about the arrests of people at that time...
...He added that the pogroms were staged by the Tsarist rulers "as a way of diverting the working people from the revolutionary struggle...
...Alluding to what he considered Yevtushenko's undue stress on Jews in his depiction of the wartime massacre, Khrushchev said in his speech: "It can be seen from this poem that the author didn't show political maturity, and demonstrated ignorance of historical facts...
...An extension of the severe death-penalty tactics imposed for economic crimes to other fields of civil indiscipline is said to have been advocated...
...The trend of liberalization of Soviet society has been periodically interrupted since Stalin's death in March 1953...
...This heightened sophistication is the price that the Communist party has been required to pay for the supply of specialists to develop the Soviet economy, military power and influence abroad...
...There remain severe curbs on travel and the East-West exchange of information, but foreign contacts are relatively much greater than in Stalin's day...
...The Premier asserted that the enemies of Marxist-Leninist ideology would run afoul of what he described as the "monolithic ideological and political unity" of the Soviet people...
...In one of his frequent anecdotal recollections, the Premier talked about having worked as a mechanic's helper under a Jew, Yakov Isaakovich Kutikov...
...He said that "Russians, Jews, and Georgians and Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians" were among those accused of economic crimes...
...Khrushchev went on to reject what he described as the "moldy idea of absolute freedom...
...Thousands of young men and women are graduating each year from Soviet schools with broader appreciations of the outside world than were allowed their predecessors...
...Babi Yar," first published in the newspaper Litarturnaya Gazeta in September 1961, was used by Dmitri Shostakovich in the choral section of his 13th Symphony...
...Disturbances in smaller Soviet communities where housewives and others have protested shortages and absences of commodities were said to have been magnified by hard-line advocates to justify demands for stricter controls...
...Returning to the subject at another point, the Premier added: "There can be no jokes in politics...
...REACTION March 11—When the Soviet people read or listened to Premier Nikita Khrushchev's massive dictate to the intellectuals, there were some who wondered if in certain respects the clock was being turned back to Stalin's times...
...They made noncommital replies to questions about the late dictator, whose body was removed from the Mausoleum in October 1961 after he was publicly denounced as a tyrant...
...He recalled that a Jew named Kogan, a former Communist youth aide under Khrushchev in Kiev before World War II, went over to the German side and served as an interpreter for General Friedrich von Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad...
...Jews hold a somewhat anomalous position in the Soviet Union...
...The Party staunchly proclaimed that Stalin has positive as well as negative qualities...
...The recent appearance of a small Yiddish professional acting group and a drive for more circulation by the magazine have been interpreted as faint signs of further liberalization.—T.S...
...He strongly criticized liberal writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Yevgeny Yevtushenko for defending abstractionism and other deviations from Socialist Realism in art...
...The Premier's speech not only definitively lays down the Party line after weeks of public and private debate...
...Khrushchev said that Jews should not be regarded as members of a given ethnic group in connection with their acts...
...The present crisis has much the same kind of roots...
...Leonid F. Ilyichev, the Party's ideological spokesman, criticized Ehrenburg for his "theory of silence" as a code of conduct during the Stalinist terror...
...Khrushchev complained that some Soviet writers today were ignoring the positive accomplishments of the Stalin era and dwelling too much on "instances of lawlessness, arbitrariness and abuse of power...
...This produced extraordinary ferment and liberalizing tendencies among the Soviet creative artists...
...Khrushchev's new Party line is seen as an effort to demonstrate to the Communist world that his doctrine and his Party are the true heir of classical Marxism while China is the deviationist...
...Speaking of Stalin's purges and crimes in the years before his death on March 5, 1953, Khrushchev said: "But after all, comrades, there would have been far more cases if all those who worked with Stalin at that period had agreed with him on everything...
...The Soviet leader said that Beria "did not consider it necessary to conceal his happiness at Stalin's coffin and madly sought power...
...Barring some reversions to rigid police control, which in itself entails risks that the Soviet leadership might hesitate to hazard, it seems unlikely that Khrushchev's new dictate will end intellectual ferment in the Soviet Union...
...The Party will not, repeat not, let anyone blunt or weaken the strength of its effectiveness...
...I don't force my tastes on others...
...The Premier's retreat to stricter Party discipline and control parallels almost precisely the intra-Party developments following Khrushchev's famous de-Stalinization speech of February 1956...
...The Nazi regime was able for a time to enforce ideological conformity, although it had to cope with large, welleducated classes and the influence of foreign ideas...
...The antiaircraft unit launched three missiles in rapid succession in an ultimate effort to down the U-2...
...Recently some Soviet writers, such as Viktor Nekrasov, have been under attack for talking too freely while abroad and for ideological errors of objectivity in reporting their impressions of the West for their readers...
...Khrushchev's statement implied that there might have been a link between these proposals and the abortive workers revolt in East Germany in June 1953 which was crushed by Soviet tanks...
...On March 7, the day before Khrushchev's speech...
...He described Kutikov as a "skilled worker" and as a religious person who came to the factory on Saturdays but did not work...
...Khrushchev also charged that Ehrenburg was painting the Stalinist period entirely in "gloomy tones" in his memoirs, although he had "not been subjected to persecution or restrictions...
...In the resulting confusion a Soviet Interceptor plane was said to have been shot down together with the United States aircraft...
...The Premier compared this attitude with that of writers who had actually suffered in the period, but who in his view were giving a more balanced picture...
...Carter is now head of Republic Pictures Corporation...
...V. Stalin 1879-1953...
...It was assumed here that the anniversary was also noted by Communist China, which continues to hail Stalin as one of the major contributors to Communist ideology.—S.T...
...At that time, in the ensuing uproar within Soviet intellectual circles and among foreign Communists—culminating in the uprisings in Budapest and Poland in the autumn of 1956—-Khrushchev was compelled to beat a hasty retreat...
...The official view is that the people believed in Stalin and were unaware of his excesses until they were disclosed after his death...
...How can he forget that and neglect to draw the proper conclusions...
...There is evidently much the poet doesn't understand in the policy of our Party," the Premier remarked.—T.S...
...The New Soviet Party Line KHRUSHCHEV SPEAKS Moscow March 10—Premier Khrushchev has warned the Soviet people against wrongly interpreting his denunciation of Stalinism...
...In ideological documents totaling nearly 400,000 words issued in the last fortnight, the Chinese have clinically dissected Khrushchev's policies and denounced him, naming chapter and verse, as the heir of Leon Trotsky, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin and others regarded by the Chinese as arch-traitors to the tradition of Lenin and Stalin...
...leaders of the get-tough line were said to be Alexander Shelepin, Party Secretary who formerly headed Soviet security services, and Vladimir Semichastny, security chief and former head of the Young Communist League...
...At the same time, the Premier observed, another Jew he had known in Moscow by the name of Vinokur served as political commissar in a Red Army unit that seized the German headquarters in the Volga city...
...It gave impetus to the violent break between Peking and Moscow...
...Nevertheless, it brings the ideological positions of Moscow and Peking somewhat closer together...
...He said that Stalin had upheld Leninist positions and was supported in the 1930s "in the struggle against Trotskyites, Zinovyevites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists...
...The anniversary of Stalin's death apparently was also ignored officially in the other East European countries, with the exception of Albania...
...Jewish cultural outlets have been limited to a literary journal, Sovietish Heimland (Soviet Homeland), published since 1961, and a few traveling theatrical and variety shows...
...This is a very dangerous subject and difficult material," he said, and irresponsible handling of it would be exploited by the West...
...The Soviet jets proceeded to follow the U-2 at a lower altitude...
...The problem of the rebellion of son against father, which now is actively under discussion here, is believed to be one of the reasons why Khrushchev insisted that writers give more attention to the positive accomplishments of the Stalin era...
...Evidence of bitter behind-scenes debate in Moscow over the new line is evident in many passages of Khrushchev's March 8 address to the Moscow Ideological Congress...
...Tirana Radio reported that monuments to Stalin throughout Albania were decorated with flowers...
...Some of the visitors said they did not know it was the anniversary of Stalin's death...
...Western observers here said Khrushchev's remarks were evidently intended to check a liberalizing trend in Soviet society that had been encouraged by deStalinization...
...Many of the Russian sightseers who filed through the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square did not pause at the rear of the tomb at the grave covered with a black marble slab inscribed "J...
...Writers, artists and scientists are among those who are traveling abroad and absorbing ideas...
...The Premier also chided Ehrenburg for his choice of the title The Thaw for a short novel published in 1954, in which the author was one of the first to write about the Stalinist purges and excesses...
...Leonid F. Ilychev, a former Stalinist propagandist, has emerged as the chief spokesman for the new line...
...Premier Khrushchev is battening down hatches at home in preparation for a global struggle with the Chinese for world Communist leadership...
...Ehrenburg contends in his memoirs that many Russians knew of the innocence of Stalin's purge victims but kept silent...
...The emphasis on the positive became louder than that on the negative...
...The Premier charged that Beria, who was executed in December 1953, and Georgi Malenkov, whom Khrushchev ousted as Premier in 1955, had proposed the liquidation of East Germany as a Communist state...
...According to the Soviet leader, the 72-year-old author had committed a "gross ideological error" in defending modernist tendencies in the arts, now under attack by the Communist leadership...
...Each address has shifted position, but all have moved toward a "harder" line...
...It was not until this threat was finally squelched with the expulsion of what Khrushchev called the "anti-Party group" that the anti-Stalin drive was resumed...
...One missile, according to available information, caught the U-2 in the tail assembly as previously reported...
...He quoted a provision of the Soviet Constitution that any ethnic discrimination was "punishable by law...
...Khrushchev contrasted Ehrenburg's position as a "bystander" with what he described as the direct involvement of Mikhail A. Sholokhov...
...You are wrong...
...Though the attacks against Ehrenburg are probably the most severe made publicly against him in recent years, they are not expected to interfere with the continuing publication of his memoirs, now being serialized in the literary journal Novy Mir...
...In making public the letter for domestic consumption, the Government appeared to be coming to grips for the first time with foreign accusations that Jews were being singled out in the current campaign against economic crimes...
...He became First Secretary of the Central Committee in September 1953...
...Soviet youth, many of whom regard Yevtushenko and young liberals like him as their spokesmen, also have been affected by Khrushchev's revelations of the Stalin crimes...
...They believed in Stalin and did not tolerate the thought that repressions were being used against honorable people who were devoted to our cause...
...he told the writers, alluding to Tsarist treatment of Jews, "the Jew Kutikov with whom I worked at a plant could not live wherever he wanted in Tsarist times, and such a Jew as the father of the Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles could live wherever he wanted...
...You know very well that it was precisely Lenin who pushed the principle of ideological content and Party orientation in art and literature...
...It was here that the Premier referred to Beria and Malenkov as having joined in making "a provocative proposal for liquidating the German Democratic Republic as a Socialist State," The two men, he said, also had recommended that the Socialist Unity (Communist) party of East Germany "abandon the slogan of struggle for building Socialism...
...He then declared: "The Central Committee of the Party indignantly rejected these treacherous proposals then and there and offered a devastating rebuff to the provocateurs...
...he was said to have been shot five months later...
...Headquarters radioed to the two jets to return to base, but for an unexplained reason one continued to track the intruder plane...
...He said the Party regarded the press, radio, literature, painting, music, cinema and theater as sharp ideological weapons...
...Neither Powers nor Soviet witnesses at his trial mentioned such a possibility.—T.S...
...What worries them particularly are his attacks on liberal writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, his grim insistence on unswerving discipline and his demand for a more sympathetic re-examination of the history of the Stalin era...
...Hitler, like Stalin, eliminated dissent through police terror, an instrument that Khrushchev has dispensed with...
...REVISED U-2 STORY March 10—Information has been obtained that sheds additional light on the circumstances under which Francis Gary Powers* U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Ural Mountains nearly three years ago...
...The Russian leader asserted that unswerving conformity with the Communist party line would be demanded of the Soviet press, literature, fine arts, music, theater and the cinema...
...In the memoirs, Lenin is quoted as having said: "I am not a specialist in this [art...
...Yevtushenko was also criticized for his defense of abstract art...
...This has been regarded as a remarkable range for anti-aircraft rockets...
...They are regarded as a nationality and, like members of other nationalities in the Soviet Union, have their ethnic affiliation entered in their internal passport...
...Khrushchev made his 15,000-word statement on March 8 before a closed Kremlin meeting of top Soviet leaders, outstanding figures in all cultural fields, and Party officials from all over the country...
...But did they know that completely innocent people were being arrested...
...Writing on February 2, Russell said he was "deeply disturbed by the death sentences that are being handed out to Jews in the Soviet Union and by the official encouragement of anti-Semitism that is apparently taking place...
...There were no memorial articles in the newspapers here, only reviews of new literary works dealing with the sins of the Stalin era...
...Confronted with problems of corruption that were undermining the strength of the country, Khrushchev did not balk at reinstituting the death penalty for major economic crimes and setting up a vast new Government and Party control system to keep the economy under close surveillance...
...In one of the most significant definitions of de-Stalinization since the policy was initiated in 1956, Khrushchev said that it should not be interpreted as meaning that "the reins of government have been relaxed...
...No, that they did not know...
...Because of various unspecified mishaps, however, the installations were unable to go promptly into operation...
...As occasionally happens in radar, only one blip showed on the screen, although two planes were in the air...
...tn Moscow there were strong indications that neo-Stalinists within the Presidium had won substantial power in the maneuvering over how best to meet the Chinese attacks...
...Alluding to Ehrenburg's defense of his views on art at that meeting, Khrushchev said: "The last time Comrade Ehrenburg said the idea of coexistence expressed in the letter was a joke...
...He declared that it did not signal any drift toward ideological or political liberty...
...In the letter addressed to Bertrand Russell, Khrushchev described the charges of anti-Semitism as "malicious calumny" and said that crimes were being punished without regard to creed or nationality...
...You cannot joke that way in the field of ideology...
...There has been no suggestion thus far in published sources that a Soviet pilot was lost in the incident...
...In essence, it was noted, Khrushchev has reined in on the Soviet intellectuals to present a unified battle array against a devastating ideological assault that has been hurled against him by Peking...
...This was the third major address Khrushchev had made on the subject of ideology in the last three months...
...Theodore Shabad ON YEVTUSHENKO In his reference to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Khrushchev accused the young Soviet poet of revealing political immaturity and ignorance of historic facts in "Babi Yar...
...Precisely the opposite contention is made by Peking...
...In addition to Ilyichev...
...The Kremlin has been sensitive to Communist Chinese charges that the Soviet party has abandoned orthodox Marxism-Leninism and become subject to bourgeois influences.—Seymour Topping ON EHRENBURG In criticizing Ilya Ehrenburg, Premier Khrushchev warned that the writer may be "slipping into an anti-Communist position" by advocating peaceful coexistence with the West in the realm of ideology...
...in effect, it also applies the brakes to the process of deStalinization itself...
...Khrushchev was also faced with a strong internal challenge to his leadership, culminating in the effort by Georgi M. Malenkov...
...Labor desertions, particularly in Siberia, almost paralyzed some construction projects in the past year...
...Malenkov served as Premier from March 1953 until he was forced out by Khrushchev in February 1955...
...Khrushchev was First Secretary of the Moscow Regional Party Committee from 1949 until after the death of Stalin...
...The Premier recalled his youth in the coal mines of the Donets Basin of the Ukraine, and said that the "workers branded those who took part in the Jewish pogroms...
...The removal to a large extent of the fear of physical coercion and the secret police has encouraged Soviet intellectuals and ordinary citizens to express individual opinions...
...Meanwhile, there are multiplying signs of sharp increases of internal political pressures upon Khrushchev's regime...
...In questions of art," he continued, "'the Central Committee of the Party will demand from everyone— from the most merited and renowned as well as from the young budding artists —unswerving adherence to the Party line...
...On Khrushchev's insistence, the 29-year-old Yevtushenko changed the poem in two important respects for inclusion in the symphony...
...The Soviet leadership had reacted in alarm after an upsurge of ferment in literature and the arts which took place at the end of last year...
...It may be that Soviet information media and literary publications will for some time reflect meticulous adherence to the Party line...
...Meanwhile, an alarm was sounded among anti-aircraft missile units stationed in the Urals south of Sverdlovsk...
...STALIN IGNORED March 5—The Soviet Union today commemorated the 10th anniversary of the composer Sergi Prokofiev, but nothing was said here officially about the demise on the same day—March 5, 1953—of another noted Soviet figure, Joseph Stalin...
...In other regions, labor turnover has been as high as one-third to one-half within 12 months...
...There have been reports of widespread labor troubles and minor disorders in the countryside...
...In discussing the leading figures of the Stalin era Khrushchev made his most damning references to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's secret police chief...
...The desire for change also has been stimulated by the exposure of Soviet society to the non-Communist world...
...The Soviet leader said that Ehrenburg, who spent most of his time abroad before World War II, had not directly participated in many of the events he describes in his memoirs...
...Vycheslav M. Molotov and others to overthrow him in June 1957...
...The speech has been published in Soviet newspapers, broadcast by Moscow Radio and is now the center of public attention and respectful comment...
...It had its origin in Khrushchev's violent anti-Stalin attacks at the 22nd Party Congress in autumn 1961...
...Conservative influence appears to have come to the forefront within the ruling Soviet party Presidium after a period of foreign and domestic policy reassessments that extended over several months...
...many have become critical of their fathers for having tolerated injustices and infringements on intellectual freedom that obtained then and persists now...
...Two Soviet Interceptors were sent up as soon as the unknown plane was tracked, but they were unable to reach it because of its unusually high ceiling...
...The U-2 was about to leave the range of the air defense zone when one of the missile units reported it was ready to go into action...
...Even within this frame of reference, some Soviet liberals view Khrushchev's clampdown with more than usual apprehension...
...So you see," Khrushchev summed up, "one Jew serves as interpreter in von Paulus' staff and another Jew served in our forces that took von Paulus and the interpreter prisoner...
...Though he denied the Government was pursuing an anti-Semitic "policy," Premier Khrushchev did not disavow the possibility that anti-Semitism existed as a social phenomenon in the Soviet Union...
...It is believed these shifts reflect harsh debate and controversy within the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party, the ruling Soviet elite...
...Yes, they knew...
...ANALYSIS New York March 11—In the opinion of specialists in Soviet affairs...
...Born to the Communist creed, Soviet youth does not seem to question the basic system, but is concerned more with the direction of its development...
...The bouquet did not bear the name of the donor...
...Information which supplements and partly contradicts published versions of the incident cannot be officially verified, but it contains enough circumstantial detail to warrant a degree of credibility...
...He also may well be coming under strong crossfire from within his own Presidium—a crossfire in which not only China and the revolt of the intellectuals but also the Cuban debacle may play a role.—Harrison E. Salisbury Also From Moscow . . . LETTER TO RUSSELL February 28—Izvestia, the Government newspaper, has published a letter by Premier Khrushchev to Lord Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, denying that the Soviet Union is pursuing an anti-Semitic policy...
...Many Russians here seem confident that eventually the hands of the clock will respond to natural mechanics and will go forward again.—S.T...
...And Khrushchev himself has been compelled to fall back once again on the line that there was a "good Stalin" as well as an "evil Stalin...
...This, combined with limitations on Yiddish cultural outlets and pressure against synagogues, has given rise to concern abroad that Jews are being discriminated against...
...The Premier pointed out that the denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality did not mean "the time had come to let things drift, that the reins of government had been relaxed, that the ship of society is sailing where the waves carry it, and that everyone is free to do and behave as he pleases...
...Under Communism, too, the will of one man must be subordinated to the will of the collective...
...Sholokhov was held out by the Premier as an example of a writer whose Communist party orientation "not only does not restrict artistic individuality but actively promotes the flowering of his talent and raises his works to the level of the highest social significance...
...On his visit to Los Angeles in 1959, the Premier continued, he met a Russian-speaking Deputy Mayor of the city who had introduced himself as the son of a well-to-do Russian Jewish merchant from Rostov on the Don...
...The second hit the Soviet Interceptor, piloted by an air force major, and the third went wild...
...The Soviet Communist party has denounced the Albanian leadership for continuing to practice Stalin's cult of personality...
...Let us assume that this is so...
...Western observers in Moscow feel that Khrushchev's speech, taken at face value, seems to contradict profound post-Stalin changes, some of which the Premier himself has been instrumental in bringing about...
...The pilot declared publicly that he was at the plane's maximum elevation of 68,000 feet...
...Khrushchev apparently was referring to a conversation with Victor M. Carter, then a member of the Los Angeles Fire Commission...
...A Party aide said the letter was retracted by the writers after "careful consideration...
...The text has just been published in the principal Soviet newspapers...
...Western observers do not exclude the possibility that the Soviet leadership might, under stress, enforce discipline through a strengthening of the authority of the secret police...
...This is the interpretation being placed upon the agonizing reappraisal of the Soviet party line, particularly in the field of creative arts, that the Soviet Premier has just completed...
...Khrushchev continued: "We learned about the abuse of power by Stalin and the acts of arbitrariness which he committed only after his death and the exposure of Beria, this inveterate enemy of the Party and people, this spy and infamous provocateur...
...After all," the Premier said, "it is widely known that Comrade Yevtushenko's poem was criticized by Communists...
...It also lends to the Soviet party an appearance of greater revolutionary militancy that will enable it to compete more effectively with Peking's bid for leadership of the international movement...
...Newspapers published photos of the former Soviet leader as well as editorials praising him...
...There was speculation here that the apparent adoption of a tougher ideological line within the Soviet Union might in part be a reaction to the dispute with Communst China...
...They have obviously been repelled by Stalin's excesses...
...In the past, Soviet denials have been directed mainly at the foreign accusers, and the problem has been largely ignored in the press and other domestic propaganda media...
...The new version does not clarify the key question of the altitude at which Powers was flying in his unusual long-winged, high-altitude plane at the time of the incident...
...The Premier brought what has long been a behind-the-scenes discussion of the controversial poem into the open for the first time, and his comment served as the starting point for one of the longest discourses on Jews he has ever made in public...
...He said: "In my opinion there shall never be absolute freedom for the individual, not even under full Communism...
...He said that Stalin in those years "was a seriously sick man suffering from suspiciousness and persecution mania...
...If Stalin was remembered in Gori, his birth-place in the Georgian Republic where sentimental attachments persists for the native son who ruled in the Kremlin, there was no hint of it in Moscow...
...The arrest of Beria was announced on July 10 of that year...
...Now, with the showdown approaching between Peking and Moscow, Khrushchev is mending his fences at home...
...Presumably, the course of discussions has been strongly affected by the violence of the Chinese Communist assault upon Khrushchev and the Soviet party...
...The Communist party, he said, would not compromise with any ideological wavering...
...Describing a thaw as "an unstable, incomplete" natural phenomenon, Khrushchev said the concept did not fit what he characterized as the purposeful changes of the post-Stalin era and "the clear, bright outlook for the Communist tomorrow...
...The Premier's warning that resistance to the Party line would be interpreted as anti-Communist should effectively silence the dissenting voices which recently have been allowed some expression in newspapers and literary publications...
...The Soviet leader insisted that not only Jews, but Ukrainians and people of other nationalities be identified by the poet as victims of the German massacre at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev in World War IL Khrushchev also demanded that Russian workers be described in the poem as opposed to the Tsarist pogroms...
...There have been many Jews among those condemned to death on charges of currency dealing and speculation...
...The predominance of any one group among those implicated is "a social rather than a nationality question," he added...
...In addition to the text of Khrushchev's letter, which had been made public previously in London, Izvestia published a letter by Lord Russell in which he expressed concern over Soviet policy toward Jews...
...Comrade Ehrenburg," Khrushchev said...
...Too many manuscripts had been submitted for publication, the Premier added, that dealt with the Stalinist concentration camps...
...But critical examination of the state of Soviet society and Western ideas is expected to continue privately among intellectuals and youth...
...Publication of the text of his letter was, therefore, taken by some observers as a warning to Soviet citizens against antiJewish bias in education, culture or any other sector of the Soviet society...
...Ehrenburg also was accused of spreading what the Premier described as the "myth" of Lenin's tolerance toward modernist trends in art...
...It was noted here that there were no flowers on the grave of Stalin, although wreaths decorated the nearby graves of other notables buried at the foot of the Kremlin wall...
...So you see...
...Diplomatic observers here believe that the new line has been adopted largely for internal reasons...
...In his speech, Khrushchev identified Ehrenburg as one of the signers of a letter to the Party's Central Committee, pleading for "peaceful coexistence" of all trends in art...
...Although the Soviet and Chinese parties have apparently agreed to carry on discussions looking to a liquidation of their differences, the statements by both suggest that only liquidation of Khrushchev or the Chinese party leadership would be likely to ease the bitterness...
...his noted poem about German killings of Jews and Russian antiSemitism...
...Rejecting any acceptance of Western ideas in the cultural field, Khrushchev declared "he who preaches the idea of peaceful coexistence in ideology objectively slides down to the position of anti-Communism...
...The new information gives the sequence of events in the Urals that ended the ill-fated spy flight on May Day, 1960 as follows: The U-2, contrary to assertions in the Soviet indictment against Powers, was not detected by radar until it approached the Urals air defense zone...
...Some time later in the day a small spray of mimosa wrapped in transparent plastic was placed on the grave...
...Returning to Yevtushenko after his lengthy digression on Jews, Khrushchev chided the poet for having told listeners on a recent trip to West Germany and France that "Babi Yar" had been criticized by "dogmatists...
...But then it was a bad joke...
...While denouncing Stalin's abuses of power, Khrushchev defended some of the former dictator's purges of those the Premier described as "enemies of the revolution and Socialist construction...
...He who preaches the idea of peaceful coexistence in ideology is objectively slipping into an anti-Communist position...
...But, unlike most other ethnic groups, Jews are not concentrated in any one republic or region of their own and do not have the privilege of education in their native language, Yiddish...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
