THE NEW SOVIET CHALLENGE
Rubin, Morris H.
This report by the Editor of The Progressive is based on his 18,000-mile journey to and through the Soviet Union during the late spring and early summer this year. He first encountered the leaders...
...The foreign press," the reply went, "has sensationalized and misnamed what you call de-Stalinization...
...He agreed, reluctantly...
...But if the spirits of Stalin and Lenin are at war in present-day Russia, their mortal remains still lie side by side in that squat block of polished red granite which is their mausoleum in the heart of Red Square...
...There are strong currents in the Soviet Union that carry hope and promise not only for the people of Russia, but for all humanity yearning for a more durable peace...
...They did not know whether the vast monolithic structure they had inherited rested on a sound or sandy foundation...
...there were only two of Stalin that I saw from my vantage post on Red Square...
...It will be difficult to rescind the recent reforms even if the power to do so remains undisturbed...
...Krushchev has said, 'shrimps learn to whistle.'" I was not able to pierce this armor of doublespeak despite many patient attempts...
...Nothing drastic for a time, mostly a quiet and studied effort to ignore the man and his works...
...They are working hard trying to set the example and the pace for the new relaxation...
...In more than a few places— factories, farms, schools, and hospitals —I was told that I was the first American to come calling, and they showered me with both warm greetings and many questions, some of which reflected genuine interest in American living standards and social mores, while others disclosed a pathetically distorted, government-processed impression of life in the United States...
...three women, doing pick-and-axe work in Gorki Park, exercised the inalienable right of their sex to refuse to pose in their work clothes...
...Were the terror and bloodshed inevitable and inherent in the structure of Soviet government...
...The new Soviet leaders have dealt with them by 1) putting much of the terror apparatus of the secret police in moth-balls...
...Nor did it indicate on what evidence it based its conclusion that "millions of peoples in capitalist and colonial countries" gave the decisions of the 20th Congress their "complete approval and ardent support," Leading from Strength Soviet leaders have seemed slightly annoyed but not greatly disturbed over the pained response of Communist Party leaders abroad...
...Power and authority were so tightly centralized in the Kremlin that there was no opportunity for local or regional initiative...
...The nature of its deliberations is not clear...
...Russians dependent on their own press and radio had no notion for some time that the Khrushchev speech, and the curious circumstances which marked its release to the outside world, had aroused a violent storm of protest among the comrades and fellow-travelers abroad...
...The employee was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 23 years in prison...
...it is possible, too, to evaluate the direction in which they are tending even if it is impossible to specify the goals they are seeking...
...The results were as inconclusive as you might expect...
...In it he mocked many forms of Soviet life and set the mood for the new relaxation...
...The process, it seemed clear, was designed to prevent numbing shock among a people who had been pounded for years with the propaganda theme that Stalin was their father and powerful savior, that he represented every known human virtue—and a few that were processed especially for him—and chat he was the architect and builder of every phase of the Soviet state...
...Gradually, however, condensed versions were made available to local Communist organizations and at factory meetings...
...partly because they were cleverly fed the news in manageable doses...
...When the party broke up, Bulganin and Khrushchev, now well-mellowed by their handsome appreciation of champagne, went out into the streets with Mollet to greet the throng of Russians who had waited patiently more than four hours for a glimpse of their leaders...
...A parallel reform has led to the drastic curtailment of the Military Division of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R...
...Two—Can the present process continue without undermining the very foundation of the Communist system...
...nor do I know any foreigner who has, although many millions of words are being written on the subject...
...On occasions when they are unable to dredge up the appropriate phrase, they are quick with plausible rationalizations...
...A measure of tolerance, even encouragement, of criticism of public policies and officials—within the broad framework of the Party Line...
...I am positive there was not a police agent there during that period...
...Because first we blow him up, then we kick him around, and then we chase him...
...There is still a great frost on the other side of the street...
...It is possible to play around with guesses on the basis of what they say and do...
...When you see them at close range, as I did most of them on a number of occasions, you find it hard to believe that these smiling men in neat suits, so quick with the quip and so assured in the social graces, were trigger-men for Stalin during the periodic blood baths which marked his reign of terror...
...to allow more and more Russians to read more and more foreign publications...
...It is possible to take pictures of just about everything a tourist would want to photograph...
...But not one out of a dozen or more kept the appointment...
...Symbolic of greater tolerance toward religion was the announcement that the first new edition of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) since the Revolution has just appeared...
...I had planned to spend my last afternoon at the Hermitage, a vast treasure house of art through the centuries...
...On May Day, for instance, the streets of Moscow were plastered with giant-sized portraits—of Marx, Lenin, and the members of the present Presidium, but I saw none of Stalin...
...The Presidium, of course, meets far from the prying eyes of the Russian people and foreign observers...
...There were three developments during my stay: Rabbi Solomon Schlieffer of the Moscow Synagogue announced at service the early opening of a Jewish seminary...
...Another Russian, whom I encountered at a cafeteria May Day night, resisted every attempt to engage him in conversation on any subject, including the great parade that day, and finally dismissed me by saying quite sharply: "Do you take me for a fool...
...Stalin did many great things for our country, most notably the building of a modern, industrial society in a country that had been unbelievably backward...
...Nobody challenged me when I entered...
...When I rose to leave, he told me I was the first American he had met and was honored by my visit...
...He loves to talk and has a stinging wit...
...It was brought out by the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church...
...There wasn't, and there isn't up to this moment of writing in midsummer, any general order requiring the removal of the countless thousands of portraits, busts, and statues of Stalin throughout the Soviet Union...
...He made many mistakes, some of them under the influence of the wicked Beria...
...Sialin It is not possible for me to provide any meaningf»l repo:t on the response of the Soviet citizenry to the process of de-Stalinization, and es-pec ially on the celebrated Khrushchev speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party...
...It seems that an employee of the department went about among his co-workers denouncing the boss, accusing him of inefficiency, wasteful ness, and formalism—the last a word of special opprobrium in the U.S.S.R...
...The cumbersome bureaucracy required endless paper work which had often paralyzed production...
...George's Hall in the Great Palace of the Kremlin...
...Foreign books have become more readily available in book stores, libraries, and schools...
...and for the first time since the pre-war period the government will open a kosher butcher shop and a kosher restaurant...
...This was an extraordinary move on the part of the Kremlin...
...We still approve the great things that Stalin did to develop our country, but his excesses have convinced us that we must repudiate many other things he did and return to the philosophy of Lenin...
...Not all of the Soviet brass, by the way, are as fond of the cup...
...to expose Russians to an ever-increasing throng of foreign visitors...
...There are no accurate statistics on the proportion freed, but educated guesses among foreign diplomats resident in Russia range up to 90 per cent...
...When I inquired, how come?, I was told the same story, half-sheepishly, half-aggressively, everywhere...
...When decisions are reached, those who counseled the rejected course are not executed or imprisoned in Siberia, as was so often the case under Stalin...
...Among the younger generation, however, and among the intellectual and political elite, there is a deeply-held hope that the tide has turned permanently...
...He asked me how I had enjoyed my stay in Leningrad...
...The full speech itself, of course, was heard by the delegates to the 20th Congress in February, but thereafter little was done immediately to inform the populace of the character and scope of the Khrushchev outburst...
...He was not executed or imprisoned, but demoted to the post of Minister of Electric Power Stations while retaining his seat in the ruling Presidium...
...After all, the foreign Communists had been pretty shabbily betrayed...
...of Stalin's day...
...The new relaxation was not won by the people of Russia at the ballot box or in revolution...
...Animated discussions of public policies are to be heard on the streets, in restaurants, and in parks...
...My new-found friend reached for a battery of buttons on his desk, buzzed two of them, and said all would be arranged in a moment...
...En route from London to Moscow he tarried for several days each in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki, and, returning, in Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris, where he discussed domestic and foreign affairs, with special emphasis on the impact of Soviet policy, with numerous public officials and private citizens...
...I told him it had been an exciting experience in every way —except for the one disappointment about the Hermitage...
...When I asked one engineer at whose apartment I called how much he knew of and how he reacted to the program of de-Stalinization, he shrugged and said, "I have little time for politics," and then changed the subject...
...Next morning, in the offices of Intourist, the official travel agency which guides and keeps its eye on foreigners, I was greeted with a king-sized painting of the man...
...Mostly the latter shied away—sometimes gently, sometimes vehemently...
...For the questions that Dennis raised, so similar to those voiced by leading Communists in Western Europe, went to the heart of the controversy...
...The command came from the top...
...Forty-eight hours after their arrest they had been executed or were on their way to slave labor camps...
...Frequently, I was told, he goes on the wagon, at the urgent suggestion of his associates, but these periods of abstinence are not so long as his bouts of indulgence...
...The New Mood The party was to begin at 7. My car rolled up to the French Embassy at the stroke of the hour...
...3) decentralizing administration, in part, by assigning more authority to the constituent republics, local Soviets, and individual factories, and 4) opening wide the gates to foreign publications on science, technology, industry, and agriculture...
...French officials told me, for example, that they were amazed at his intimate knowledge of the most precise details of the conflict in Algeria when they discussed that subject with him in May...
...Paralleling this development has been the order to deputies of the Supreme Soviet—roughly equivalent to our Congressmen—to go back to their constituencies at least twice a year to find out what is happening and what people are saying...
...On another occasion I asked a leading Soviet writer if he thought Lenin, for all his flexibility in the face of realities, would countenance the widespread system of piecework incentives employed in Soviet industry...
...During my month's stay, Michael Todd, the theatrical producer, was in Moscow arranging for the filming of Russian novels...
...You are sentenced to serve three years for spreading malicious gossip about your chief," said the judge, "and 20 years for revealing an official state secret...
...Bulganin and Khrushchev, and their associates in the Presidium, were available for conversation and argument as they ate and drank with enormous gusto at one of the banquet tables...
...But it was shot through with many weaknesses, some of which might become fatal if they were not dealt with soon...
...We believe there is ample room for study, research, and exploration within the broad confines of Soviet lite, philosophy, and institutions...
...The stark fact persists that while many of the instruments of Stalin's police state have been dismantled, they have not been destroyed...
...His capacity for work and play is prodigious...
...If my room was wired I wasn't aware of it, although there are many places an eavesdropping device might have been concealed...
...No new likenesses of Stalin are being introduced, to be sure...
...Their optimism centers on their conviction that the developments since Stalin's death, dramatized in the 20th Congress this year, have reached a point of no return...
...The men in the Kremlin were far from confident when they assumed power after Stalin's death...
...No appeal was possible...
...They felt strong enough to destroy a deeply-held mythology in their own country...
...Sounds in the Night There are few if any evidences of harsh police state controls for the foreign tourist...
...they are not even on the agenda...
...I pointed to my champagne glass and suggested I be allowed to finish it...
...I took more than 150 pictures—of the Kremlin, other public buildings, parks, bridges, apartment houses, barns and farm machinery, schools, and universities...
...Bulganin, they wailed, when Stalin was bent on his mad course of murdering countless Soviet citizens and destroying some of its finest minds...
...This I attributed to an unwillingness to take chances just yet, and not to any lack of interest or cordiality...
...This experience symbolized for me the new mood of confidence and relaxation among the Kremlin leaders...
...They were moved, for the most part, by domestic considerations—the urgent need to release energies and develop initiative, long repressed by Stalin, in order to expand the national economy and provide a measure of support and hope among the people...
...I was to encounter this horror ol war everywhere 1 went among the people...
...I was not obliged to open any of my luggage when I arrived at the Moscow airport, or when I left a month later...
...What did the present Soviet leaders do to stop Stalin when he was running wild...
...I would feel vastly more hopeful than I do if the speeches and commentaries by Khrushchev and his associates had ranged beyond the attacks on Stalin and his works to a candid analysis of the institutions and ideology that made Stalinism possible...
...Two men appeared, the city architect and the city engineer...
...There seems to have been some surprise at the immensity and intensity of Khrushchev's exposure, but there was little evidence of widespread shock or despair...
...Khrushchev and Mr...
...A more tangible indicator of the new mood is the revival of what the Communists call "socialist legality...
...This represents a significant break with the iron prohibitions of the past...
...Permission is readily obtainable for some places, but difficult and often impossible for others...
...But if Bulganin and Khrushchev reverted to this significant phase of the Stalin approach, they did not order a return to the repression and terror which were the other hallmarks of the Stalin regime...
...Some estimate of the extent, variety, and speed of reform may be possible if I merely list some of the developments which occurred during the single month I was in the Soviet Union: • The government revoked some of the most stringent of its labor regimentation laws...
...The Army, for example, had been licking its psychological wounds for a decade...
...In another the tenants proudly pointed to their collection of Russian editions of Jack London, Galsworthy, and Dickens...
...An important advance for foreign travelers like myself is the relative freedom of movement permitted within specified bounds...
...None of this comes close to resembling the freedom and ferocity of argument here at home, but all of it represents a considerable advance over the cowed silence of a few years ago...
...If my room was searched during my long absences every day, I wasn't sharp enough to detect the work of a professional...
...There is nothing to indicate that the men in the Kremlin propose to modify the system itself so that it could not again spawn a madman-dictator, who would make cruel playthings of the police and the courts, cow a nation of 200,-000,000 human beings, and have himself acclaimed a god even as he enslaved and murdered millions of citizens...
...Stalin, you see, corrupted Leninism, especially those features of Leninist ideology which emphasized collective leadership and opportunity for discussion and debate before decisions were reached...
...These developments are limited in scope and aim...
...I could have sprayed eight of the 11 members of the Presidium at point-blank range...
...The rulers of Russia felt strong enough to risk a major break with their Communist collaborators in the free world...
...I saw my first large-scale portrait and marble bust of the late dictator, both done in the highly-romanticized manner I was to find many times thereafter, in the Moscow airport a few minutes after I arrived...
...They were not attempting to put the Soviet Union's best foot forward before the world by rejecting the violence and terror of the Stalin era...
...With Khrushchev and Bulganin firmly in the saddle, as leaders of the government and the Party, the major emphasis in Soviet economy was shifted back to heavy industry and away from the Malenkov position that consumers had earned the right to more goods, better quality, and lower prices...
...After a while, the various ambassadors, including our own widely-admired Charles E. Bohlen, came in to pay their respects...
...They understood, too, that Stalin's mistrust of everything foreign was robbing the Soviet Union of opportunities to acquire the technical skills so urgently needed to modernize Soviet industry, agriculture, and science...
...Thus, a major amnesty was proclaimed about a fortnight after Stalin's death...
...I talked with him briefly on two occasions and found him a quieter, more sensitive personality than his colleagues—well read, well informed, almost courtly in a way that made it hard for me to believe that he had stood at Stalin's side during some of the most brutal repressions in the last days of the tyrant...
...Factory managers, I was told, had to fill out some 20 or more forms to go to as many officials in order to get a new bearing for a machine...
...The paralyzing fears generated by Stalinism have abated...
...Its leaders had resented the rise to power of the police under Stalin, and were even more bitter about the extent to which Stalin had claimed personal credit for Soviet victories during World War II and had assigned the blame for defeats to professional Army leadership...
...The thaw survives, two years afterward, but springtime has yet to come...
...I met Russians in restaurants, parks, and other public places who seemed genuinely anxious to continue our conversation over a meal or a beer on another occasion...
...This was doubtless true partly because many Russians had suspected that Stalin had become unbearably arrogant and egocentric in his last years...
...They find it possible to discover sanction for whatever pragmatic step may be required in some obscure clause or paragraph of the masters of Communist philos ophy and action...
...Where were you, Mr...
...Actually, many Russians did not know even then—in late spring and early summer—the extent and violence of Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin the mass murderer and Stalin the paranoid maniac...
...He thought, for example, that the emergence of "collective leadership" meant that "more people would have more to say, which is a good thing...
...The members of the Presidium are shrewd, sharp, able men—realists all...
...This was designed to get over to the people the emotional drive and power of the Khrushchev delivery that historic day in February...
...As for the men at the top of the Soviet hierarchy, the men who rule Russia, they behave in public in a free and easy way that was unheard of in the U.S.S.R...
...Almost every family I visited had had a brother, or father, or son—sometimes all three—killed in World War II...
...Stripping Stalin of his Halo This conscious drive to relax tensions has been progressing fitfully for three years...
...Certainly, they all agreed, there is now no attempt at all by any one of the group to assume the kind of exclusive leadership exercised by Stalin for so long...
...There are more and more places foreigners can visit, but there are also many closed to us, some for strategic reasons, some because they simply don't have accommodations, and some because they are backward, depressed areas which the Soviets prefer foreigners not to see...
...Thus, when I pressed one prominent Soviet editor—who had been expanding eloquently on the possibilities of peaceful co-existence—about Lenin's strictures regarding the inevitability of armed conflict with the capitalist West, he replied: "Lenin lived before the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs...
...This leads inevitably to the second question I raised above...
...Others guessed that the men in the Kremlin could and would keep a tight rein on developments, stop the process if and when they felt it was becoming unmanageable, and reinstate the apparatus of the police state in a way that would wipe out the gains of the current reform...
...It will be equally difficult, I think, to prevent the powerful and articulate elite of Soviet society from demanding and securing greater reforms as they savor the first fruits of the relaxation that is de-Stalinization...
...A delegation of French Socialists touring the Soviet Union while I was there was told by Kremlin officials that all internment camps will be abolished, within a year to 18 months...
...I woke several nights thinking that I heard sounds in the living room of the suite to which I was assigned, but I didn't get up to investigate, and the sounds might have been part of a dream or the wind...
...These Boards have now been abolished...
...At the same cafeteria, however, a recently demobilized Air Force officer was quite willing to talk, mostly in terms favorable to what was happening in his country...
...These four ailments are representative...
...The populace is not wholly convinced it has seen the last of these tools of mass terror, but its hope is considerable...
...Malenkov—you were so close to Stalin— when he was crippling your Communist Party and corrupting Marx-ism-Leninism...
...When Stalin did go calling anywhere, the streets were closed for blocks, the secret police were everywhere, and Stalin's personal cook and physician were on hand to see that no poison found its way into the dictator's diet...
...The Hemitage was opened for me and an official took me to see the chambers of French art—an experience with Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Picasso, Pissaro, Matisse, and Toulouse-Lautrec I shall not soon forget...
...But if talk on war and peace were part of almost every conversation I had with Russians, discussion of internal politics and personalities was a rare occurrence...
...2) eliminating some of the bureaucratic red-tape and encouraging criticism of methods and techniques...
...The likeness of the man who gave his generation the hated name of Stalinism and this generation the more hopeful term of de-Stalinization is still to be found everywhere, in oil, stone, and marble...
...A modification of foreign policy that, for all its built-in contradictions, is now based on 1) the notion of the preventability, rather than the inevitability, of war with the West, and 2) the pursuit of "Socialism" abroad through parliamentary as well Challenge as through revolutionary methods...
...A constantly improving standard of living...
...Later that morning I had a two-hour session with the head of the Leningrad Soviet—equivalent to our city manager...
...Since my return from the Soviet Union this summer I have been sandbagged with countless questions, two of which logically need to be raised at the conclusion of this section of my report to readers of The Progressive...
...Waiting in the room were Mollet and Pineau, as hosts, and the Messrs...
...Indeed there were suspicious bulges in my pockets, for they were jam-packed with notebooks, cigarettes, passport, travelers checks, and the like...
...Rubin had exceptional opportunities to confer with scores of Soviet officials, editors, artists, Communist Party spokesmen, farm and factory managers and workers, and many of the foreign diplomats and their staffs of experts...
...We discussed municipal finances, city services, housing, health, and many other subjects...
...Georgi Malenkov, who became identified in the public mind with the struggle to place a greater emphasis on the production of consumer goods, assumed the number one role in the Soviet hierarchy...
...Soviet workers do not by any means have the freedom of choice and movement characteristic of Western society, but they have considerably more latitude than ever before...
...When I talked with Russians, I asked if they hadn't opened a Pandora's Box by providing a measure of liberalization and relaxation, turning a whole generation loose in libraries and laboratories, and exposing it to foreign values, thinking, and standards of living...
...Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Pervukhin, and Marshal Gregory Zhukov, all members of the ruling Presidium...
...in fact, total indifference...
...I asked this question everywhere, of foreign diplomats and Soviet intellectuals and bureaucrats...
...A group of 29 Oklahoma cattlemen, some of them resplendent in 10-gallon hats and cowboy boots, were touring Soviet farms and seeing the sights...
...in the last years of Stalin...
...These Boards had sentenced countless Soviet citizens accused of being "socially dangerous" to long terms in slave labor camps...
...I stood there for about 20 minutes listening to the half serious, half bantering talk, of which I could understand substantial snatches as it was being translated into French for Mollet and Pineau...
...After a while, I went down the line introducing myself in English and passing out calling cards I had printed in the Russian language before leaving home...
...A year and a half later, in February 1955, Malenkov was forced out as chairman of the Council of Ministers...
...Moreover, they have argued, they did not know the extent of his depravity, but picked up only pieces of the story from time to time...
...The New Soviet By MORRIS H. RUBIN PART I The Riddle of Russia Today SOVIET RUSSIA remains a packet of riddles to a 30-day visitor like myself...
...It attempted no reply in the same issue, but days afterward the rulers of Russia put out their statement emphasizing how difficult if not impossible it would have been to combat Stalin during the period of his greatest excesses...
...One-man rule is not only wrong but dangerous...
...In the morning of that last day my interpreter reported he had discovered that the Hermitage was closed on Thursdays and I would not be able to go...
...today...
...These are the last of winter days...
...I saw them again in the lobby of my hotel an hour later, and in the corridor of the floor on which I lived in Moscow...
...It worked its way downward in the tradition of totalitarian indoctrination...
...Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly, and freedom of movement and enterprise not only do not exist...
...Pravda devoted nearly 60 per cent of an entire issue to present the Dennis indictment...
...1 walked in right behind the Russian leaders before the door could be closed...
...I don't have the answers...
...There is much less chance that we will make mistakes on something important when there are more minds to work on the big problems...
...One of the stories is told about a department head—any department head against whom the teller had a grievance—and sometimes about no less a personage than the boss of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev...
...The late tyrant went only once to a foreign embassy—the British, when Winston Churchill went to Moscow during the war...
...But nobody thought to inquire, let alone search me, to see if I were packing any "hardware...
...They felt strong enough to hand over a vast arsenal of propaganda ammunition to the West...
...Equally significant is the fact that members of the Presidium, notably Khrushchev, now summon department heads for give-and-take consultations and not, as under Stalin, to be whiplashed for real or fancied failures...
...American atomic scientists were on hand for an international conference, and there was a delegation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York...
...Less than a week later came the announcement of a tangible cut in the price of consumer goods...
...But there are more icicles melting today than there were then...
...I encountered no resistance...
...This pragmatic modification of Leninism will accompany the continuing exposure of Stalin, I suspect, as the Kremlin leaders move cautiously to take the people into their confidence...
...In response to the first question, my conviction is that the reforms run more deeply than most of us in the West have suspected...
...The Kremlin announced the establishment of a division in the chief prosecutor's office to serve as a watchdog against the excesses of investigating agencies...
...Collectively, these old Soviet hands assumed the key posts in the apparatus of the government and the Communist Party...
...One of them, Malenkov, formerly Stalin's secretary, is in some respects the most intriguing character in the Kremlin cast...
...As one student, about to graduate from the Institute of Foreign Languages, put it in a conversation in front of the Lenin library: "There has been too much bubbling to make it possible for the cap to be put back on the bottle...
...I encountered countless exceptions to this generalization, to be sure, especially among the older and middle-aged of Russia's population...
...they do not begin to exhaust the list...
...The Russians I saw on the streets, in restaurants, in theaters, and in homes, seemed on the surface, except for the shabbiness and drab-ness of their clothes, much like people everywhere—chatting, laughing, brooding, arguing, and dreaming...
...The New Team in Action It is important to keep in mind that the historic sweep of events since Stalin's death, and most notably those of the past six or eight months, has left totalitarianism intact in the Soviet Union, but its cornerstone, the one-man dictator who carried absolute power in his pocket, is gone...
...Another source of pressure for "normalization" of Soviet life was the Communist Party itself...
...where patience and self-assurance are modifying the agres-siveness of a long-felt insecurity...
...Each day, lines as long as the eye can see form to view the carefully preserved, glass-encased remains of the two greats of the Russian Revolution—both triumphs of the embalmer's art...
...Its leaders had become restive even in the last months of Stalin's life, and when the tyrant died, they pressed their claims for a greater role in Soviet society...
...This is certainly brand new...
...The precise reasons for the violent downgrading of Stalin and many of his works are hard to come by...
...The last, however, is more theoretical than real, for nearly all Russians still shy away from letting you go to their homes, partly because so many of their apartments are dreary, overcrowded, and under-equipped, and partly because they still fear reprisals if the line changes...
...A vast extension of education, notably in science and technology...
...The new Soviet aristocracy, much like the English nobility at Runnymede, may become the initial instrument of a reformation that, in the long sweep of history, could engulf it, too, in the development of political and economic egalitarianism...
...A foreign traveler can walk where he will, in the areas listed above, take a taxi to any part of the community, or visit Russians in their homes...
...And then came other, lesser brass and the correspondents too...
...There has been no basic effort to replace propaganda with something resembling truth...
...But pieces patched together by foreign observers, and the manner in which the members of the Presidium treat each other at public functions, often when discretion is relaxed under the influence of a fair amount of alcohol, would certainly indicate that they get along quite well and work together as a team with a considerable degree of harmony despite pretty obvious differences of opinion on some issues...
...It felt the need for an end to the stifling restrictions on planning, production, and thinking imposed by Stalin...
...But when I boarded a Moscow plane for Warsaw on the first leg of my journey west, I still had more questions than answers...
...Many of the camps are being converted into factory or mining communities with no slave labor at all...
...Anti-Semitism, about which more later on, is decidedly on the wane...
...When I poked around trying to find out how the new team works together, I found no one among the foreign experts with whom I talked who felt that there is presently a struggle for personal power among the eleven members of the ruling Presidium...
...Several American scholars have pointed to a possible parallel in the historic grant of the Magna Carta by King John to the nobility of Thirteenth Century England...
...I had much the same experience next day when the Soviets gave their lavish farewell party for the visiting French leaders in resplendent St...
...This move is widely regarded as the greatest stride yet taken by the "collective leadership" to loosen the iron controls and provide a measure of freedom...
...They could be reassembled tomorrow, or next year, or five years from now...
...is it possible to make so much of science, with its emphasis on skepticism and its reliance on inquiring minds...
...This group, so important in Soviet society today, had become increasingly alarmed under the harsh rule of the late dictator...
...Our people recognize the need for progress and reform, but they do not want to change the structure of the system itself...
...Today, I was told, one agency alone, the Institute of Scientific Information of the U.S.S.R...
...I thought I saw during my four weeks there the blurred outline of something that historians might one day look back at as the beginning of a peaceful revolution—a forward movement whose essential ingredients are: • A wider diffusion of power, with more authority for local Soviets and the sixteen constituent republics...
...It seemed inconceivable to the non-Russians who watch every maneuver of Soviet leaders that they would have gone so far in destroying the concept of one-man rule as practiced by Stalin if any one of them had had any notion that he would soon be seeking the role of dictator...
...The new leadership made no effort to keep Stalin's self-proclaimed glory intact or untarnished...
...If he were alive today, he would say, as we do, that war is unthinkable, for thermonuclear war would destroy communism as well as capitalism...
...It is noteworthy, in any attempt to assess the course of present trends, that for all its affirmative aspects, the process of de-Stalinization was carried out in much the same way that Stalin himself might have downgraded a predecessor whose ways stood in his way...
...A third major force for the repudiation of Stalin was and is the new Soviet elite—the scientists, artists, technicians, factory managers, and leading bureaucrats...
...Substantial numbers of Soviet citizens were authorized for the first time in years to travel in the West— France, Britain, the Scandinavian countries...
...While his relish for alcohol seems as great as Khrushchev's, he doesn't handle it quite so well...
...For example, those that suggest a greater measure of freedom do not even faintly presage the dawn of democracy, as we understand the word in the West...
...The fact that the Aleichem program was held and that foreign correspondents were invited to attend was said by non-Russians in Moscow to represent the most significant official bow to the Jews since the worst days of Stalin...
...It demanded a measure of freedom and relaxation, again not in the Western sense, but rather freedom to develop and exploit their talents and ambitions within the framework of Communist ideology...
...I nursed my champagne as long as I dared in the face of his reproachful glances...
...they were given release from tension by rulers who can revoke it as quickly as they invoked it...
...Mothers pressed their children forward, and Khrushchev jovially reached out and kissed some of them, in the style celebrated by politicians here at home...
...How come 23 years...
...So much of the answer involves motivation—the driving impulses and convictions of the men who run Russia today...
...But having said all this, I persist in my conviction that the trend itself is hopeful...
...Here again countless Russians charged with subversion or espionage had been routed out of their homes during the night, tossed into prison—often solitary confinement—and tried within 24 hours, also without counsel and often without even the privilege of being present at their trials...
...It was this program that found its culmination in the historic repudiation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party this year...
...Types of art and literature long banned in the Soviet Union are appearing in greater number each day...
...A relaxation of tensions on almost every level of life...
...But for the most part, many of the portraits and busts that Stalin inspired during the height of his megalomania remain undisturbed...
...Some of the advances are more symbolic of changing values than significant as concrete evidence of basic reform...
...It feared further loss of its power and perquisites under a continuation of Stalinist principles and methods...
...And the architect and engineer called at my hotel on the dot and took me into half-a-dozen apartments...
...Stalinism, with its one-man rule, its police-state terror, its violent anti-foreignism, and its insistence on total conformity, is gone—for the present anyway...
...If Russians were asking embarrassing questions, foreigners like myself could not hear them...
...Little of this would have been possible a year or two ago...
...They moved, cautiously, one step at a time, stopping now and again to test response, reversing their field when they thought that necessary, and then moving ahead until they produced the crashing climax of Khrushchev's all-out six-hour tirade at the 20th Congress...
...My own assessment of the mood of the intellectual elite of the Soviet Union is that it wants very much to retain most of the economic forms and institutions of Communism, but that it would like to cross-breed them with at least some of the political and intellectual freedoms of Western society...
...They learned about it, in fragments and indirectly as usual, when Pravda, the Communist Party's official daily, blossomed out June 28 with an article by Eugene Dennis, secretary-general of the Communist Party in the United States, which had appeared in the Daily Worker of New York ten days before...
...I followed the Soviet leaders up the ornate stairway, into a long baroque reception hall...
...Unlike most major developments in regimented Russia, the program of de-Stalinization—and its affirmative accompaniment, the release of tensions and liberalization of life—was not preceded or accompanied by a great fanfare of propaganda or massive doses of advance indoctrination, ft all happened quite gradually, and it worked its way fitfully—almost as if the rulers of the Kremlin were playing by ear...
...1 heard a number of such stories, some of which might have landed the teller in a concentration camp in the last years of Stalin's time...
...Shortly afterward the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party released a report which noted that "in discussing the question of the personality cult, a correct interpretation is not always given of its causes and consequences...
...I told him that I had not been able to visit any apartments in Leningrad because Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that plans trips for foreigners, felt that it wasn't its function to invade the privacy of people's homes...
...Almost their first acts, doubtless in response to fears that a psychological and political crisis would follow the death of Stalin, were to ease tensions and hold out the promise of a far greater volume of consumer goods to a people who for so long had been ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed...
...What Does It All Mean...
...to encourage criticism, however confined...
...Later that year, in September 1953, Khrushchev emerged as the man to watch in the new Soviet leadership...
...Nobody stopped me...
...The men who rule Russia today bought personal security and group insurance by agreeing then to hang together, as a joint committee of succession, rather than risk hanging separately in a bloody struggle for individual power...
...The big black limousine that pulled up just ahead of me discharged the ever punctual Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, who together share the leadership of those inseparable twins, the Soviet government and the Communist Party...
...The last move alone has brought enormous gains to many sectors of the Soviet economy...
...These people do speak up, but cautiously and tentatively...
...In the areas open to foreigners— Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Yalta, Kharkov, Stalingrad, Rostov-on-Don, Tifflis, Sukhumi, and Sochi —it is possible to move around almost at will...
...The answer was invariably something like this: "We feel strong enough now to encourage internal relaxation...
...At 54, he is younger than most of his colleagues in the Presidium...
...And finally, they have told the world, Stalin's popularity among the people was so great—as a result of the long propagation of the myth of his godliness—that they thought it impossible that they could lead a revolt against his rule...
...It is these two men who dominate Soviet leadership today...
...He picked up the telephone, spoke a few sentences, and told me that they would open the great museum for me at 1 o'clock...
...They felt strong enough to risk the prospect of serious upheaval in the satellites...
...How great and how serious are the changes now taking place...
...Many of the Russians brightened visibly when I volubly rejected their still surviving stereotype of an all-powerful, war-minded Wall Street dominating and regimenting American life and maneuvering for strategic position to strike at the Soviet Union...
...The word went out that Stalin aides like Bulganin, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and the other members of the present Presidium were powerless to resist or combat the lunatic who led a nation of 200,-000,000 people because he held securely in his hands the terror apparatus of the secret police and would have wiped them out if they had dared make a move...
...On one side of the street there is still frost, and on the other heavy drops are falling from the icicles...
...The report, of course, ignored the outbreak of violent protest in Tifflis, capital of Stalin's native state of Georgia, and the agonized complaints of "fraternal Communist and workers parties" in Europe and the United States...
...In the U.S.S.R...
...There can be no successful attack on fundamental policies and principles because we are a classless society without the class conflicts that prevail in your country...
...It was these men, and their colleagues on the present Presidium, who undertook one of the most delicate operations of modern times—the attempt to break out of the intolerable straitjacket of the recent past without destroying the basic fabric of Communist ideology...
...Inevitably, the announcement of relaxation and reform cast a considerable shadow over what had gone on just before—in the last years of Stalin's reign...
...From his role as First Secretary of the Communist Party, Khrushchev gradually maneuvered Malenkov out of his position as number one man...
...The fact that the man who made repeated pronouncements promising a better life for the long impoverished and terrorized citizenry was at the helm helped enormously to placate public opinion and to give the new ruling clique a chance to develop and consolidate its power...
...We shall go on learning from our mistakes of the past, but there will be no departure from Communist ideology until, as Mr...
...But against the somber background of Stalinist terror, intolerance, and total regimentation, life for the Soviet citizen today is measurably freer, more tolerable, and more hopeful...
...I spent almost every waking moment of my 18-hour working days digging as deeply as I knew how for the answers...
...The more qualified the foreign expert, the less inclined he was to judge or predict...
...Most of those I saw at parties and receptions seemed quite abstemious...
...We are trying to rectify those mistakes now...
...Nobody frisked me...
...it was inevitable that they would feel the compulsion to strike back, even if only for a brief period before returning meekly to the Kremlin fold...
...His popularity is considerable...
...Two years ago Ilya Ehrenburg, the celebrated Soviet author, wrote a novel he called The Thaw...
...For the most part, such answers as there have been, have come slowly and indirectly...
...The execution of Beria signalled a sharp downgrading of the dreaded MVD and the inauguration of a series of reforms designed to protect the individual against summary arrest and arbitrary imprisonment...
...But in his later years he became too egocentric, too lacking in personal modesty, and too harsh and dictatorial...
...Shortly thereafter the controlled press of the Soviet Union began the first mutter-ings about harsh, arbitrary, and lawless conduct in official circles under Stalin, and promised early reforms...
...He told me, with the politeness befitting his post, that the room was reserved for the time being for the top brass only, and wouldn't I please leave...
...One of the most far-reaching and warmly welcomed of reforms concerned the hated three-man "Special Hoards" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs...
...They are concerned lest the line change and they be held to account later for talking to a foreigner, reading a foreign publication, or criticizing some phase of the official program...
...His answer was that "Lenin believed in and fought for nationalization of all industry, but of course he couldn't foresee all the technical and psychological problems involved because he died before industrialization had become a reality...
...It is time to fulfill the task...
...But Communists in other countries—in Italy, France, England, and the United States—were crying out in the anguish of men betrayed by their gods...
...In fact, I found the greatest kindliness and hospitality wherever I went...
...Another reform, still in the drafting stage during my stay, would invalidate convictions based on confessions alone, and sharply curtail the rights of the police to search, seize, and arrest...
...The development, so reminiscent of Stalinism at its worst, was to mark, paradoxically, the most decisive break with Stalinism that has yet occurred...
...They just don't have enough factual data on the thinking and planning inside the Kremlin walls...
...Our research specialists study and search with basic acceptance of the principles of their way of life, just as yours must...
...Today, Bulganin and Khrushchev go almost everywhere unguarded, they eat and drink copiously and always without benefit of doctors, cooks, or guinea-pig tasters...
...When I was in the Soviet Union, the average Russian seemed to know that Stalin was being downgraded, but he had few of the details and little appreciation of the magnitude of Khrushchev's repudiation of so much that Stalin had done...
...in fact, more questions than I had brought with me...
...Of the lot, Khrushchev is clearly the dominating personality...
...On the contrary, they embarked on a program that represented a rejection of Stalin's methods—a program that emphasizes incentives and persuasion rather than penalties and compulsion...
...One of the characters sums up the hopes of Soviet intellectuals in these words: "In my youth I read an article by Gorki in which he said we must have our own, Soviet, humanism...
...There was no intention at the time to set in motion the process that was to culminate, after centuries of struggle, in the destruction of feudalism and the achievement of democracy...
...Lenin vs...
...The first significant step came with dramatic violence three years ago when Lavrenti Beria, the notorious Minister of Internal Affairs, was arrested, expelled from the Party as an enemy of the people, and liquidated in the ruthless manner he had employed on countless occasions as head of the secret police...
...Response to these pressures, and their own need to break free from the straitjacket of the past, led the present rulers of the Kremlin to repudiate Stalin's "cult of the individual" and replace it with what they are pleased to call "collective leadership...
...His ability to master the details of complicated problems is astounding to those who have seen him at close range...
...He first encountered the leaders of the Soviet Union in London—during the Bulganin-Khrushchev talks with Sir Anthony Eden—and talked with them on several occasions in Moscow...
...Workers are now free to quit their jobs on two weeks notice without incurring jail penalties...
...This is only partly because people were disinclined to talk...
...It was Khrushchev who nominated Bulganin for the succession...
...It is conceivable that the men who rule Russia have released forces which may in the end overpower them, and make a shambles of their limited goals...
...It dates from the period immediately following Stalin's death in March, 1953...
...On August 8, five months after Stalin's death, the Kremlin announced a new program calling for a substantial increase in the production of consumer goods...
...The term has somehow disappeared, but the task remains...
...They must have expected something like it...
...As insiders, these successors to Stalin knew how their ruler's ruthless tyranny, enforced by the hated secret police (MVD) under Beria, had paralyzed initiative, crippled production, deadened the spirit of creative planning at home, and multiplied tensions abroad...
...Stalin's morbid anti-foreignism had robbed Soviet science, industry, and agriculture from hearing about and keeping pace with developments in the outside world...
...A few minutes after I had introduced myself around, the Soviet chief of protocol tapped me on the shoulder...
...The new mood of reform and relaxation ranges into a variety of other fields...
...The removal of these two instruments of repression and terror has yielded precisely the results planned by the men in the Kremlin—a great relief and release among the people...
...One—How deep do the reforms of de-Stalinization run...
...But it blandly went on: "The Central Committee notes with satisfaction the complete approval and ardent support of the decisions of the historic 20th Party Congress by the entire Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by the entire Soviet people, fraternal Communist and workers parties, the working people of the great commonwealths of socialist countries, by millions of peoples in capitalist and colonial countries...
...Why is Tito like a football...
...Then there is the story satirizing Soviet policy toward Tito, told in football (soccer) terms in football-mad Moscow...
...Soon paraphrases and commentaries appeared in Soviet newspapers and magazines...
...Bulganin flashed the green light in one of the most significant speeches of the recent past when he decried the lack of technical progress...
...One thing does seem clear: the present rulers of Russia were not principally motivated by external considerations...
...That feeling is fortified by the fact that vast numbers of prisoners enslaved under Stalin have been and are being released and rehabilitated...
...They do involve a greater degree of individual freedom and initiative than was ever the case before in Soviet Russia, and particularly during the past decade or more...
...it was easier to remain silent than to risk being accused of disloyalty to the state by proposing new procedures...
...This is one of the central facts about the historic process of de-Stalinization—that it represents a move from strength, and not, as Secretary of States Dulles has lamely suggested, a retreat compelled by weakness...
...Bulganin and Khrushchev were led to a private room, where tables were laden with caviar, salmon, sturgeon, meat cakes, chickens, salads, and fruits—and the choicest of champagnes...
...Bulganin, for all his surface appearance as a grandfatherly character with merry eyes and a soft manner, commands the great respect of foreign diplomats and experts as a shrewd, tough administrator...
...If the manager skipped part of the endless routine so as to devote more time to actual production, he ran the risk of being labeled and imprisoned as a potential saboteur...
...Communism, as an economic and social system and one-party political control, is undisturbed by recent and current developments...
...The crowd broke through the police lines, to the Russian rulers' seeming delight, and there was much handshaking all around...
...deputies were summoned to Moscow to hear the line and approve it unanimously in the gold-domed assembly building inside the Kremlin walls...
...They sensed that the strain was becoming intolerable for people who had been marched like a ragged, impoverished army— industrializing and collectivizing and fighting wars—for more than three decades...
...I was able to identify everyone in the room while I was alone with the top brass...
...many foreign observers in Moscow are confident he will return to the top when time eliminates his superiors...
...This is precisely what is happening today in a limited way...
...But most of them seemed to me to be moving in the same affirmative direction...
...Mostly, while I was there, they seemed to exploit the new relaxation to grumble about the high prices, poor quality, and shortage of consumer goods...
...I followed in their wake, expecting any moment to feel rough hands on my shoulders...
...There were other pressures for what was to become the explosive outbreak of de-Stalinization...
...Academy of Sciences, has a staff of 1,500 language specialists who do nothing but read, translate, and distribute throughout the Soviet Union the best published materials on science available from every country on earth...
...I saw portraits and statues almost every place I went—in schools, libraries, ministries, universities, airports and railroad stations, stores, and hospitals...
...I was refused only one shot...
...We made a date for late that afternoon...
...Actually, the present rulers of Russia did not strike me as men who are inexorably wedded to the literal teachings of Lenin and Marx...
...On the contrary, I was told time and again, they must argue their case and prove their points in the deliberations of the Presidium on major matters of policy...
...I thanked him heartily, and then decided to make the most of his mood...
...Scientists and technicians, long hungry for a chance to study and harness foreign developments for Soviet ends, eagerly took their cue from this speech...
...The Party's power and influence had eroded greatly under Stalin's all-embracing one-man rule...
...Morris Ernst, the well-known New York lawyer, was in Moscow representing author clients...
...the Soviet Writers Union presented a program of the works of Sholom Aleichem, celebrated Yiddish humorist...
...Conversely, foreigners from Western nations are coming to Russia in increasing numbers—on business or as tourists or students...
...Although Bulganin and Khrushchev are clearly the dominating personalities, they do not run the show with ruthless disregard of the opinions of others, in the judgment of the best-informed non-Russians I met in Russia...
...How far can this process go without striking at the very heart of totalitarianism...
...It is not possible to enter a factory or a government ministry without a pass or an official escort...
...I was told, for example, that the new rulers of Russia were surprised and delighted, in the months after the boss' death, to discover that for all the terror, killings, and enslavement of countless Russians, the economic machine, most especially urban industrialization, was more securely based than they had dared hope...
...It was possible for me to talk of domestic policies with high-ranking editors, government officials, and Communist Party functionaries—but not with many ordinary people...
...But there are cross-currents, too, flowing in sullen contradiction of what seems to be the mainstream of Soviet society today...
...My own impression, reinforced by the estimate of foreign experts in Russia far better qualified than I to judge, was that the people of the Soviet Union took the revelations more calmly and philosophically than their leaders might have thought...
...One of the brightest non-Russians I met during my month in the Soviet Union emphasized that the most significant aspect of the whole process of de-Stalinization is that it represents an unprecedented attempt to institutionalize a dictatorship by downgrading the importance of personalities and elevating the importance of national institutions...
...It is no longer obligatory to fawn over the pompous paintings of the Stalin era, nor is it considered degenerate to approve the works of Western artists...
...Isaac Stern, the Russian-born American violinist, was playing to packed houses...
...Although they feel freer and more secure than they did a year ago, and almost emancipated compared to their plight during the latter phase of Stalin's dictatorship, many of those over 40 are still reluctant to respond to the proclaimed relaxation...
...I was greeted with the greatest warmth and cordiality...
...Americans are highly regarded and warmly received, even if the Russians don't care for John Foster Dulles...
...where a new "collective leadership"— shrewd, confident, and ambitious— is releasing new energies and initiative by breaking away, relentlessly if unevenly, from the iron terror and total conformity that marked life in the U.S.S.R...
...Both promises were kept...
...I was especially eager to see the collection of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists which, I had been told, was one of the greatest in the world...
...In one apartment the mother insisted that I must have tea and freshly baked cake...
...New safeguards for individuals who find themselves in the clutches of the police...
...The restoration of Lenin, after Stalin's long efforts to hack away at his stature, has not meant automatic and total replacement of one iron dogma for another...
...But nothing happened...
...The man-in-the,-street remembers that he was deposed from his top position because he was the people's friend and sought to get them consumer goods...
...he asked the judge...
...I was bitterly disappointed...
...Instead of summoning the country's best scholars and assigning them the task of rewriting the textbooks on the basis of known facts, doctrinaire party faithfuls were ordered to snip out of the books some of the most fulsome hymns to Stalin and, at the same time, to cut out sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters which exposed Tito as the fascist beast he was said to be then, and replace them with sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters acclaiming him as a great leader of one of the world's greatest "People's Democracies," as he is now said to be...
...in fact, the picture of the late tyrant began to disappear from the Soviet press almost immediately, and there were cautiously systematic efforts to strip him of his halo...
...This mellower mood shows up in a variety of ways...
...Now that we are removing the harsh restraints of Stalinism, our press and our people are free to criticize— within the program of the Communist Party and the government...
...At the end of my quest for something resembling objective truth I was able to shake down my impression of present trends to this overall judgment: The Soviet Union I saw is a nation where relaxation is mellowing regimentation...
...Visitors who expect to see a cowed, faceless populace slinking through the streets, eyes warily probing for the secret police, are soon disenchanted...
...It happened the evening the French Embassy gave their party for the top Soviet brass near the end of the state visit of French Premier Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau...
...all of it was unthinkable in Stalin's time...
...They do not, as I have emphasized earlier, suggest the beginnings of democracy and liberalism in the Western sense...
...A striking example of the desire to please foreigners, especially Americans, occurred in Leningrad...
...One personal experience may help illustrate the new mood as it shows up in the highest Soviet echelon...
...The realists who run Russia, and the editor-propagandists who interpret their policies for foreigners, can find obscure passages in Lenin's writings and speeches to justify almost any policy they decide to pursue...
...For example: • The police terror had stifled creative criticism of archaic and inefficient methods...
...The accused were arrested without formal charge, tried in secret, denied counsel, and permitted no appeal...
...Fruits of De-Stalinization What have been the results of their process of de-Stalinization, their revival of "collective leadership," and the reforms associated with these two major moves...
...Here, of course, is the treacherous terrain of speculation and prophecy...
...As it turned out, I didn't have to leave the room at all until the party ended much later...
...Is it possible to expose a whole new generation to ten years of required education...
...There is nothing in the Khrushchev text available to the West that discloses the slightest concern over the absence of checks and balances in the Soviet system...
...In addition to the printed text, I was informed, an edited tape-recording was released...
...A humanizing "of personal relationships...
...A path through the throng of diplomats and bureaucrats opened quickly for Bulganin and Khrushchev...
...Some guessed that the process of reform had become irreversible, that it would gain fresh momentum after a short breathing spell, and that its ultimate shape would be a far-ranging liberalization of the iron controls and rigid patterns of life and thought in the Soviet Union...
...In all of them I was askecl many questions about life in America and told, sometimes tearfully, that war is impossible, that there must be peace...
...In the almost endless May Day parade itself there were thousands of banner-portraits, again of Marx, Lenin, and the Presidium...
...I had only to sign my name on a legal form on which I said I was not carrying any of the articles forbidden by Soviet law...
...In the past, it was the other way around...
...I had no feeling at any time''that I was being trailed, although I had a notion that my goings and comings at the hotel were being observed...
...One of the most re vealing is the extent to which jokes satirizing the regime and some of its policies are told quite openly in public places...
...partly because they are accustomed to being sandbagged by changing propaganda lines—they were taught, for example, to hate Hitler as their implacable enemy, cherish him as their gallant ally, and despise him as the invader of their fatherland, all within a relatively brief period of time—and partly because they were experiencing and enjoying the first fruits of de-Stalinization before they knew that Khrushchev had pinned almost every known crime on the dead tyrant...
...to permit Soviet citizens to travel in the West and observe higher standards of living in a free society—how far can all this go without imperiling the foundations of a system rooted in conformity and regimentation...
...Where were you, Mr...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
