Khrushchev (or Somebody) Remembers (Some Things)
Nea;, Fred Warner
BOOKS Khrushchev (or Somebody) Remembers (Some Things) by FRED WARNER NEAL Trying to evaluate the mysterious book Khrushchev Remembers is like what the Americans call Kremlin-ology. It has a...
...It is true that the more stringent attacks on Stalin have ceased and that on several occasions statements have appeared to the effect that bad as Stalin may have been he did perform signal services for socialism and the Soviet Union...
...Yet there is nothing in either the Khrushchev account or in Crankshaw's commentary that even hints at this...
...There were several significant developments at this Congress...
...Khrushchev's account of this is right out of James Bond and is probably true...
...Khrushchev's report on this great turning point in Asian history is highly relevant today," Alsop wrote, because "another somewhat similar turning point may easily be just ahead in Vietnam...
...Stalin had already destroyed everybody—with one exception—who could possibly be a threat to him, and his anti-Semitism, while strong, was never obsessive...
...Khrushchev's brief account of the Nineteenth Congress is concerned al- most wholly with Stalin's plan for reconstituting the Politburo...
...Little, Brown refers inquiries to Time, Inc...
...The one exception mentioned above was Beria, the recognized if unofficial head of the whole police system...
...The implication, of course, is that with just a little more military pressure the French would have won...
...In this book Khrushchev appears as, if not a humane democrat, at least a man motivated only by high ideals of justice...
...As Crankshaw points out, this is the first time there has been an "official" Soviet admission that the speech was actually given...
...Who knows what old, ailing, and retired Soviet leaders may think...
...The Khrushchev account presents (correctly, in my opinion) the Cuban missile gambit as a maneuver to defend the Castro regime from American intervention, with no suggestion at any attempt to change basically the balance of military power...
...In my opinion, Stalin does not get a fair shake in the Khrushchev book, although he often comes out better in the text than in Crankshaw's commentary...
...But it makes no mention at all of Beria in connection with the doctors' plot, which is blamed entirely on Stalin's evil and paranoia...
...It can produce significant insights...
...The stereotype was made almost unbreakable when Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 attacked Stalin for some of the very sins the West had long denounced him for...
...And Khrushchev's account in the book, ambivalent about Stalin in many respects, bears them out...
...It was at this point that Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Politburo "eliminated" Beria, together with his henchmen...
...What is one to make of all this...
...Although acting always in Stalin's name, Beria and his police had become so powerful in the postwar period that they alone in the whole society constituted a virtually autonomous force...
...I am not sure why Khrushchev's assertions should not be taken with at least the same amount of skepticism, even if they happen to agree with previously held conceptions...
...Immediately after the plot was announced, all of Beria's security entourage were fired and jailed...
...Khrushchev once told a Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow that it was for this, above all, that he wished to be remembered...
...Actually, there is no real evidence of either, if by blood purge is meant a sweeping police terror of the whole population and if a pogrom meant a major campaign against the Jews...
...Introduction by Edward Crankshaw...
...10.sorship, but Brezhnev and Kosygin seem to be standing up well under both of them...
...The doctors' plot—obviously, it would seem, a series of trumped up charges—is invariably described by Crankshaw as presaging a blood purge and a pogrom...
...Little, Brown...
...In the meantime, Time, Inc., the publisher, and somebody else are raking in the profits...
...This is misleading, in my opinion...
...Khrushchev, in discussing the days just before Stalin's death, states: "When he was well and sober, he was still a formidable leader, but he was declining fast...
...There are too many questions about it...
...The chronology of events not recounted by Khrushchev indicates that the doctors' plot had as a purpose—if not the major purpose—getting rid of Beria and curbing the police...
...The questions are more easily asked than answered...
...Perhaps the most startling statement in the book is that Ho Chi Minh told Khrushchev in 1954 that his situation in Vietnam was "hopeless" and "on the brink of collapse...
...On the other hand, it acclaims the outcome as "a triumph of Soviet foreign policy," which maintained the existence of Cuba "as an independent Socialist country, right in front of the open jaws of American imperialism . . . good propaganda for other Latin American countries...
...The Khrushchev account documents the rise of Stalin's suspicions of Beria...
...Elsewhere, he implies that this became apparent only in 1951...
...In addition to Khrushchev's ambivalent comments, I recall the testimony of two non-Communist ambassadors who saw the old Vezhd in the two weeks prior to his death and reported him not only lucid but mentally vigorous...
...There may be pressure on the current Soviet leadership to do this, just as there are doubtless pressures to go further with relaxations of police control and cenKhrushchev Remembers...
...I believe this is a correct evaluation...
...There are some highly flavored sidelights—such as, for example, that Stalin made his chef a major general— but with a few exceptions, there is little of real substance that is new...
...Even with the French defeat at Dienbienphu, Ho is quoted as saying, the Vietminh were saved only by Mendes-France's offer to stop the war at the Seventeenth Parallel, an offer that so startled the Communist leaders that they "gasped with surprise and pleasure...
...Joseph Alsop, long the spokesman for the extremists, promptly complained that this part of the book had not been noticed "except for a few inside policymakers in Washington...
...Whether Stalin was in fact a victim of acute paranoia in his last days has significance in relation to the mysterious 1952 "doctors' plot" and the subsequent fall of Beria after Stalin's death...
...It does deal with some current problems...
...Beria himself—after a startling show of his power in the Kremlin—denounced the doctors' plot and promptly put his men back in their jobs...
...The language about President Nixon attributed to Khrushchev in the book is coarse and insulting...
...Even the account of the secret speech is not adequate because it fails to deal with the imperatives of Soviet politics which in part produced it...
...Stalin also hinted at the need for a relaxation of the harsh totalitarianism at home...
...It is Crankshaw's conclusion that "it may be assumed that the chief concern of the person, or persons, responsible for releasing these reminiscences to the West . . . was to counter the current attempts to rehabilitate Stalin...
...Not only is this a long way from "rehabilitation" but such statements have validity...
...But it is based on little more than speculation and guesses, some educated, some not...
...Even though Stalin spoke only briefly at the Nineteenth Congress, in October, 1952, this conclave—the first since 1938—was dominated by the ideas set forth in his "Economic Problems of Socialism," published on the eve of the Congress...
...In this connection, I found the book's treatment of the period of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Party Congresses—the period between 1952 and 1956—particularly faulty...
...The "official" Soviet line about Stalin's health is that he developed mental illness, apparently acute paranoia, in his latter days...
...For example, in the last chapter, while calling for maintenance of Soviet chemical and biological warfare capability, Khrushchev urges unilateral reduction of Soviet military spending— implying that the generals block such a move—and makes an even stronger plea for opening Soviet borders so that those citizens who want to leave can do so...
...If parts of it are significant, they are also devious...
...Neither state, of course, necessarily gainsays a paranoid condition...
...It has a compelling interest...
...The account of the Twentieth Congress is even more narrow...
...Throughout the book, Khrushchev comes back often to Stalin's well-known tendency toward paranoid suspicions...
...Everything Stalin said had to be taken with more than one grain of salt...
...639 pp...
...If I had to make a guess, I would say that the work is based mainly on tape recordings made by Khrushchev—some at least as late as the fall of 1969—and that certain parts have been tampered with either by additions, deletions, or both...
...If Stalin were really "mad" at the time, of course, he could have planned anything...
...Edward Crankshaw, the British journalist and writer on Soviet affairs whose ubiquitous commentary permeates this volume, says his conclusion about the work's authenticity is based solely on the evidence of a Russian typescript...
...If Khrushchev himself "wrote" these accounts and if nothing were taken out, he seriously distorted—chiefly by omission— highly significant developments...
...It is lots of fun...
...Khrushchev's attack on Stalin in 1956 may well have been motivated in part by revulsion at Stalin's excesses...
...It is true, as Grankshaw emphasizes, that the book places responsibility for the war entirely on the North Koreans —without claiming "that South Korea was guilty of aggression or even provocation...
...This is clearly, in Soviet terms, a novel idea, and perhaps the question is an issue among the top leadership...
...It is difficult to credit this book as wholly authentic...
...The publisher (Little, Brown) "is convinced beyond any doubt, and has taken pains to confirm, that this is an authentic record of Nikita Khrushchev's words...
...It is not clear how either a "blood purge" or a pogrom would have served him...
...The most important thing, therefore, is really not so much what the book says as why it says it and in whose interest...
...Most of it does seem authentic to me, although certain passages strike an odd note, and some of the accounts have puzzling omissions...
...Nixon will make them...
...Then Stalin died...
...Nevertheless, despite all Stalin's responsibility for harsh punishment inflicted on a vast number of innocent Soviet citizens— and likely on some who were not so innocent—Stalin should be given greater credit than he usually gets— from the point of view of Soviet interest—on at least three counts: his wartime leadership, his presiding over the achievement of rapid economic and military recovery after the war, and his initiative in reorienting Soviet foreign policy and breaking the power of the police...
...Well, it is difficult to imagine going to all the trouble to fabricate or even alter a manuscript just so the ineffable Alsop can quote it...
...The mystery is further complicated by the fact that nobody—outside Time, Inc., apparently—knows who gets the royalties for the book...
...Translated and edited by Strobe Talbot...
...The account raises questions but does not necessarily suggest fabrication...
...At one point he says, "it was during the war that Stalin started to be not quite right in his head...
...But it was also a clever—and doubtless necessary—tactic in Khrushchev's efforts to strengthen his control by reasserting the power of the Communist Party apparatus, which had been grievously weakened by Stalin's personal "apparat...
...These revelations about the supposed plight of the Vietminh have caused gasps of surprise and pleasure among the Vietnam hardliners...
...Whether phony or real, in whole or in part, Khrushchev Remembers does make fascinating reading...
...The Western stereotype of Stalin as a paranoid ogre is not altogether wrong, but he was an ogre of great intelligence, ability, and imagination...
...If the material strengthens certain biases current in the West, it does not give much aid or comfort to forces which might benefit from a forgery...
...Well, maybe...
...The manner and timing of its appearance all indicate that it is designed to serve some end...
...But the account also emphasizes that if Stalin did not oppose the North Koreans, neither did he encourage them...
...Such slips of memory "occurred more and more frequently, and they used to drive him crazy...
...At the same time, one must remember that there are indications out of Washington of heating up the Cold War, that decisions about Vietnam and Latin America are being formulated and that Mr...
...The general tenor of Soviet policy since the Nineteenth Congress has followed these concepts...
...The Time people say royalties are paid to somebody but that they "can't say to whom...
...Khrushchev was here primarily impressed by Stalin's "eclipses of mind and losses of memory...
...clearly, according to the book, the war was not his idea...
...The book says nothing directly about the present Soviet leadership...
...But no reputable Western analyst has ever suggested such a situation...
...Until the mystery surrounding this book is cleared up, it should be read keeping in mind that strange things do happen, with the ends not always readily apparent...
...It is not impossible that certain people in the Kremlin are experimenting with a new technique—influencing Soviet policies by a feedback from the West—but this is so alien to official Soviet thinking it is difficult to countenance...
...For example, he says Stalin at one point had to ask Bulganin what his name was...
...The question is whether we are going to imitate the French...
...The same can be said of the discussion of the Korean war...
...Khrushchev was often crude, but the expressions used here are so extreme as to suggest a deliberate attempt to antagonize...
...That the distortions are the same as those frequently found in Western treatises is no reason to accept them as valid...
...The chapter on the Twentieth Congress is devoted altogether to that facet which is so often exclusively stressed by Western commentators, the secret speech attacking Stalin...
...Widely neglected in the West, and in this book, Stalin's ideas proposed far-reaching changes in Soviet foreign policy—away from the heretofore inward-looking, defensive, almost isolationist stance and toward a foreign policy offensive, based primarily on support for nationalist movements...
...Fundamentally, the most important was the announcement of the new Soviet concept of coexistence...
...Moreover, Beria and the police had motive for opposing any reforms Stalin may have been contemplating...
...It is also a conclusion held by the hard, anti-Communist right wing of the Nixon Administration, which undoubtedly is pleased to have Khrushchev's testament on this score...
...Being fair to Stalin is not a popular avocation in the West, where the cult of anti-Stalinism is practiced with more enthusiasm than analysis, and, admittedly, Stalin is not an easy subject "to be fair to...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
