Inside the Kremlin

...He hopes conclusively to demonstrate the unity of the Communist world against his Communist rivals, the Chinese...

...He hopes to win not only wholesale success within his own Party...

...He had read it and having read it felt that he knew all the answers to what Moscow was up to...

...The Politics of Totalitarianism is the first scholarly examination of the inner workings of the Soviet Party in three of the most critical periods of its existence—the purge period of the middle and late 1930's, the war years and immediate postwar reconstruction era, and the final stage which encompasses Stalin's death and the rise of Premier Khrushchev...

...Is there some internal compulsion which compelled the Soviet action at this particular time...

...Kennedy's calculated program of response to the Khrushchev challenge and whether or not it has been designed to meet the essence of the Soviet leader's initiative, the question inevitably arises as to why Khrushchev chose this particular moment to touch off a radical rise in the temperature of world relations...

...almost exclusively from the standpoint of 'broad social forces' but I remain unconvinced that one's view can encompass the Soviet forest before one has scrutinized the trees...

...Was his move a piece of international blackmail on a colossal scale...

...Did Khrushchev believe that he could stampede a young and inexperienced American President into premature international negotiations...

...Is that what Khrushchev has been doing again in the summer of 1961...

...T h e crisis, with its corrosive effects upon international relations, its rising and unpredictable effects on American opinion, its tension upon the alliance of Western powers, and its ever-present menace of suicidal global warfare was precipitated by a memorandum presented to President Kennedy at Vienna by Nikita S. Khrushchev...

...However, there is no real limit to the totality of the struggle for power...

...The absolute nature of the conflict leads its participants to utilize, as Lenin seemed to teach, any means to an end...

...The answers are not easy to come by and the more ready and positive the less reliable they are likely to prove...

...The first is the material which became available during and just after the war in the form of Soviet records and documents which fell into German and thence into American hands plus the evidence of the thousands of Soviet citizens who became resident in the West...

...For the serious student of Soviet motivation Professor Armstrong's comprehensive and penetrating examination of the past twenty-five years of the Soviet Communist Party will provide at least the fundamentals of an approach which renders the current crisis considerably less mysterious than the latest headlines...

...He may not be the first national leader who seeks to rally domestic unity by means of an "enemy" beyond the frontier...

...The record Armstrong spreads before us is one of a constantly shifting balance of forces at the pinnacle of Soviet power...

...This was perhaps an extreme case of reliance upon the written record for clues to Soviet conduct...

...He presents to it a radical new Party program...

...Nevertheless, thus far such conflicts have been settled within the general framework of preservation of the Soviet state and party structure (although these were definitely threatened by the late Police Chief Lavrenti P. Beria...

...Does it represent sheer adventurism on the part of an erratic and unpredictable tyrant...

...No doubt this approach will appear superficial to those analysts who view development in the U.S.S.R...

...And in this psychological reality, Armstrong believes, the world confronts a clear and present danger—the danger that "a contestant for Soviet power may precipitate catastrophic world war to enhance his domestic power position...

...And this process has continued since Stalin's death...

...But Khrushchev is a most astute politician...

...Two factors have enabled Armstrong to shed new and revealing light upon the workings of the Kremlin group...

...He reigned with a totality few tyrants have matched...

...Extremism answers extremism...

...But Khrushchev in October confronts the twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party...

...There has arisen, unfortunately, in this country, a whole school of Communist "interpretation," led in his day by the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which assumes that the key to Communist motivation is to be found in the texts of MarxismLeninism...

...But he has detected quite obvious tendencies by Khrushchev to utilize international crisis for possible domestic needs...

...True, Stalin fully dominated the scene...

...If we leave to one side the question of Mr...

...It is perhaps revealing that nowhere except in the footnotes does Armstrong mention this famous Stalin contribution to dialectical thinking...

...With the aid of this material the author is able to construct a fairly adequate guide to the movements, pressures, shifts, conflicts, and evolutions which the Soviet Communist Party has gone through since the assassination of Sergei M. Kirov, the Leningrad Party leader, December 1, 1934—an act possibly instigated by Stalin himself which led to the purges of the 1930s...

...For those who would like to arrive at their own conclusions about the mainsprings of present-day Soviet conduct with somewhat greater accuracy and reliability than contemporary accounts afford, Armstrong's work cannot be too highly recommended...

...The first example was the short-lived Turkish crisis in October, 1957—threats launched by Khrushchev which simmered down after he had successfully removed Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov from high rank...

...Dulles used to point proudly to the volume of Stalin's Problems of Leninism on his desk...

...Armstrong, like most close observers of the Soviet scene, is fully convinced that Khrushchev is intimately aware of the danger of nuclear war and is not himself likely to plunge us over the brink into global suicide...

...A key aspect of CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) history has been the struggle for power among Party leaders . . . "Consequently, I have devoted much attention to personalities and personal relationships in the Party command and in the other Soviet bureaucratic apparatuses...

...These are only a few of the questions which have bedeviled American minds for many weeks...

...Indeed, he may not be the only national leader engaged in utilizing that hoary political device at this very moment...

...The second—and by far the most important— is the enormous amount of material brought to public light by the Soviets themselves in the postStalin period plus the insight available from our much freer view of the political maneuvers within the leadership group since 1953...

...The answer is surely not yet clear...

...1 believe," Armstrong remarks, "that the essence of totalitarianism, Nazi or Soviet, is political power...

...The importance of the task of reconstruction of events which Armstrong has carried out is that only by means of such "sociological archeology" are we placed in possession of accurate evidence as to what factors actually go into the making of high Soviet Communist Party decisions...

...Yet, within that totality struggles were always in progress among the lieutenants—often, indeed, encouraged by Stalin...

...Perhaps, the unifying results of a world crisis upon the Communist parties was entirely absent from Khrushchev's mind when he deliberately timed the Berlin conflict for the late summer and early autumn of 1961...

...The same psychology was revealed by Khrushchev again in June, 1960, when he boasted of success in compelling the liquidation of the Suez crisis of 1956 and the Lebanese crisis of 1958 through threats of Soviet power...

...It has demonstrated clearly, as Armstrong notes, "how inadequate 'democratic centralism' is as a device for attaining the orderly transfer of power and resolution of conflicts within the ruling circle...

...Reviewed by Harrison E. Salisbury SINCE early June the world's attention has been focussed on a gradually rising crisis over Berlin which moved toward a climax in early autumn...