Conversations about Stalin
LITTELL, ROBERT
A TRAVELER'S REPORT Conversations about Stalin By Robert Littell Stalin may be dead and twice buried, but he is far from forgotten in the Soviet Union. His name is on the tip of many tongues. and...
...Anyone who differed with Stalin in the slightest...
...He was a hard man, and ran things in a hard way...
...Nowadays you always find flowers on his tomb...
...There were no degrees to this...
...Take...
...It is this that has made the Soviet Union what it is today...
...The signs of de-Stalinization are certainly evident and well-publicized, but there exists at the same time a silent veneration for the fallen hero-"silent," that is, to readers of the official Soviet press, but audible enough to travelers able to converse with the ordinary Soviet citizen...
...In Warsaw, Stalin's name is still inscribed over the entrance to the Stalin-Gothic Palace of Culture...
...He lit a Bulgarian filter-tip cigarette, before explaining: "Peter is far enough back in the history books so we don't feel the pain he caused...
...that...
...In this scheme of things there is little room for an indefinite diet of Stalin the Tyrant...
...and oddly enough, not everything said about him is bad...
...for example...
...He still hurts, so we don't see how much he contributed...
...In my own travels, I have spotted only two items which have somehow survived...
...therefore, has never been told...
...When the Fascist tanks reached the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin stood his ground...
...Are Soviet citizens beginning, then, to view Stalin's tarnished image with a Peter the Great-like respect...
...It is about time we started giving credit to Stalinism" (he emphasized the ism...
...Here he leaped clear of the tightrope and made a mock bow...
...This is Stalinism...
...What came out was a haphazard, selective handle-with-care criticism designed to vent steam, not to clean house...
...I'll tell you how come...
...That much is clear after five months spent traveling in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...He was still running the show in '45-how come they don't give him credit for the victories...
...He is buried at the end of a row of graves behind Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square-no bust to mark the grave, just his name: I period V period Stalin...
...The good that he did (especially industrialization) lives after him: the evils, never fully itemized, seem to have been buried with his bones...
...The speaker was a teacher of English in Moscow and a member of the Communist party...
...Stalin," a professor remarked to me, his soup spoon suspended half way between bowl and mouth, "Stalin made his mistakes, no doubt about it...
...Oh, they say now he was like a chicken without a head...
...V. Stalin...
...If a country tightens its belt-please excuse these elaborate images-as I say, if a country tightens its belt it can spend all its energy building industry...
...Do you understand...
...Geography took over from iconography: Stalingrad reverted to Volgagrad...
...Peter's methods weren't much different, but we see now that he made a great contribution to Russia," the engineer continued, pointing to a small bunch of lilies of the valley on the tomb...
...The only question, of course, is can you have Stalinism without Stalin...
...He had to fend off the capitalist countries-even Churchill, yes, especially Churchill...
...to make her great, to bring her up to European standards...
...He had a certain greatness...
...They wanted to discredit him...
...Faced with Stalin's crimes and their own complicity in them, the post-Stalin Soviet leaders reacted with an "out of sight, out of mind" formula...
...Stalin's pyramid, with him at the top...
...the conversation I had with a young Russian engineer...
...We can appreciate him...
...That was Stalin's method...
...Of course, since the 20th Party Congress, we don't say nice things about Stalin any more-at least not publicly...
...Stalin was a lot like Peter the Great," he said...
...My aunt's husband -one day he just disappeared...
...We were walking in Red Square and he was balancing, arms straight out, on a long white traffic line as if it were a tightrope...
...History was rewritten to produce a Stalin-less account of the past...
...He had to protect the Revolution...
...We forget that without the industry we never would have survived the War...
...This massive redecorating job put Stalin well out of sight-but obviously not out of mind...
...Now I don't say he did not make mistakes...
...The full extent of Stalin's crimes against his people...
...The Great Erasure reached into every corner of Soviet life...
...I said, yes, I would be...
...Italics added...
...He had to nurture Socialism...
...Not one step back,' he ordered, and we held...
...One top Communist official...
...Stalin the Father was edited out of books and plays (Pogodin's Chimes of the Kremlin, for example...
...We have denounced Stalin-but not Stalinism...
...But who is to say it could have been done differently...
...Here he almost lost his balance, and stopped talking while he righted himself again...
...Second, those who were in a position to denounce Stalin and reveal his crimes did so half-heartedly (using such euphemistic phrases as "the un-Marxist cult of the single leader") because they were, directly or indirectly, implicated in those crimes...
...You might say that we are still shaking, yes, still shaking from it...
...It is unfair, yes, it is certainly unfair...
...This is what we call the cult of the individual...
...They both did a lot to strengthen Russia...
...You must remember that Stalin had a good side," he said...
...Khrushchev's speech came as a great shock...
...Right now there is only the debit list...
...As a result Stalin's image was tarnished-but not trampled...
...If they are (and I think they are), it is a logical consequence of at least two things...
...The young economist did not wait for an answer but went right on: "Stalinism, on the other hand, was a highly successful method of rapid industrialization of a country which started with almost nothing, which was surrounded by capitalist enemies who, one way or another, would have liked to destroy it...
...And in Prague a museum still shows an outside relief depicting Stalin as one of the chief mourners at Lenin's funeral...
...Nikolai G. Yegorychev, the Communist Party Secretary of Moscow, put it on the line: "We must constantly show concern that youth see the country's history . not through shortcomings and mistakes of the past but mainly through the great and heroic deeds achieved by the Soviet people...
...Let's face it," an economics student in Moscow told me, "Stalinism worked...
...Here the young engineer traced the name in Cyrillic with his finger tip on Peter's tomb...
...He forgot his soup completely, caught up in the conversation about Stalin...
...Such a person had to be silenced...
...There were gaps in the Moscow subway mosaics where Stalin's portrait had been...
...in the slightest, was a counter-revolutionary who was trying to destroy proletarian democracy...
...All over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Stalin statues were removed from their pedestals...
...But he is maligned, yes, maligned...
...the Soviet attitude toward history which (to say the least) does not emphasize errors...
...Nobody, not even my aunt, asked questions...
...And it is exactly this which attracts the young nations of Africa and Asia to our side...
...The boy, in his early 20s, was a very active member of the Komsomol, the official Communist Youth Organization...
...We thought, 'He has been hard, this Stalin, but he is our leader.' No, you must not think only bad things about this man...
...The trouble with Stalin is, he is still too near...
...Stalinism is a method of tightening the belt before the meal so you will eat less...
...A Ukrainian tourist official picked up the thread of conversation at the mention of the word Stalin...
...Would you be interested in an explanation...
...We forget that he built up the industry...
...We never heard from him again...
...Who knows what he would have done if he had not always been surrounded by enemies...
...How widespread is this new view of Stalin...
...So began the Great Erasure, a period which started in 1956 and lasted well into the '60s...
...Unfortunately, we have not made the distinction clear...
...We were standing in front of Peter's tomb in the giant, tourist-crowded Peter and Paul Cathedral in Leningrad...
...But we must put the man in perspective...
...Eighteen seventy-something dash nineteen fifty-three" He paused, glanced around, and said, "I hope they put flowers on Stalin's tomb some day...
...We must make a list: credits and debits...
...The mere mention of his name today is usually enough to strike up an interesting conversation anywhere in the Soviet Union, or in Eastern Europe for that matter...
...We were told he was an enemy of the people and that was Robert Littell, a new contributor, recently returned from a tour through Russia and Eastern Europe...
...Stalin was a dictator who interpreted Marx this way: The Party is the vanguard of the proletariat and expresses the will of the proletariat...
...They were both hard men and many innocent people suffered...
...To contradict Stalin, there-fore, was to contradict the entire working class of the country...
...Stalin is the vanguard of the Party and expresses the will of the Party...
...An old soldier himself, he had fought long and hard against the Fascists...
...That's what these flowers say, I think...
...First...
...One indication: On the 85th anniversary of his birth, three cellophane-wrapped bouquets of red, yellow and white chrysanthemums were found lying in the snow at the foot of the plain black marble slab inscribed "I...
...Stalin Boulevard in Sofia went back to Vitosha Boulevard, after the Vitosha hills toward which the street runs...
...But he stood his ground...
...They rewrote the books and blamed him for all our defeats of 1940 and '41...
...In fact, some people are just as likely to sing his praises as talk about his purges...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 9
