No, Stalin is not dead… But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin’s heirs.
The idea of “de-Stalinization” is usually associated with the 20th Congress of the CPSU (February 14-24, 1956), which gave the first impetus to the painful process of releasing the Soviet Union from the stronghold of barrack-room and prison-camp “socialism.” Indeed, it is the report of the Central Committee First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev that signaled a departure from the unbreakable canons of Stalinism, even though Khrushchev did this very inconsistently, fearfully and even hypocritically, for he himself bore the deadly spirit of Stalin and had once been his slave.
But if “de-Stalinization” began in the 20th century, where is the end of this process? In reality, there seems to be no end to it: almost 55 (!) years after the congress, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev still insists that society should go on purging itself of Stalinism. (He has ample grounds to say so: there still is too much Stalinist “sludge” in the minds of Russians.) And what is the situation in Ukraine? Although we do not have such a heavy and pressing component of Stalinist legacy as great-power ecstasy (linked to the weak feeling of national identity), there are more than enough problems. Suffice it to recall the tragic phantasmagoria that followed the demolition of the generalissimo’s monument in Zaporizhia, when in fact our go-vernmental machine was mobilized to defend “the Leader” (incidentally, pronounced a criminal by a Ukrainian court!). There is also a noticeable Stalinist “accent” in the speeches and actions of some high church officials, meaning that there is even such thing as “Orthodox Stalinism.” Why does de-Stalinization often resemble a Sisyphean task? Where is the way out of this vicious circle? This is what the Russian political scientist and journalist Nikolai Zlobin and a regular contributor to our newspaper, Yurii Raikhel, discuss on The Day’s pages.
A significant date has passed unnoticed, namely the anniverssary of the 20th CPSU Congress, held on February 14-25, 1956, in Moscow. While Soviet propaganda used to say that each of these party congresses was historic, this one was indeed unique.
It was the first congress after Stalin’s death. Although the delegates who arrived in Moscow did not expect anything special, many of them recall that there was something in the air. The social atmosphere in the country, especially among artists, writers and academics, came to be known as “the thaw.”
In terms of historiography, this phenomenon was named after the title of Ilya Ehrenburg’s short story published in the journal Znamya in 1954. Earlier, in the fall of 1953, a major literary journal, Novy mir, printed the poem Thaw by Nikolai Zabolotsky, much in the spirit of the time. Vladimir Pomerantsev’s article “On Sincerity in Art,” Gavriil Troyepolsky’s short story From the Notes of an Agronomist, Fedor Abramov’s literary notes Kolkhoz Village People in Postwar Prose and others publication of this journal became the precursors of a spiritual and creative “thaw.” In politics, the “thaw” began with USSR Chairman of the Council of Ministers Georgy Malenkov’s statement on the necessity to “stop the policy of personality cult,” which he made at a CC CPSU Presidium’s session The Day after Stalin’s funeral.
By an unwritten rule, all the CC Presidium members were to attend all sessions. Even their seating arrangement and the way they conducted sessions could help size up their clout. Yet the experienced apparatchiks — first secretaries of the regional and other Soviet republics’ party committees — noted with surprise that First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had been absent from several sessions. They knew only too well that it was not accidental.
The first sign of something unusual in the offing was the speech of Anastas Mikoyan. He, who had weathered all the Stalinist purges and launched a successful party career way back under Lenin, sharply criticized the hitherto “sacred” books A Short Course of the History of the VKP(b) and The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR authored by Stalin, and took a dim view of the literature on the history of the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the Soviet state. But he never mentioned the name of Stalin.
Incidentally, according to his brother Artem Mikoyan, a prominent aircraft designer and a congress delegate, most of the delegates condemned the speech. The congress presidium received a telegram from the secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party organization in the city of Teplica: “I cannot agree with the speech of the right-wing Mikoyan, which defiles the blessed memory of Stalin who goes on living in the hearts of all class-conscious workers and will be gladly accepted by the entire bourgeoisie. Stalin brought us up.” No wonder, after all the CPSU remained the “party of Lenin and Stalin,” as do its heirs — the KPRF in Russia and the KPU in Ukraine. It turned out after Leonid Hrach had been expelled from the party that there were quite a few orthodox communist for whom even Petro Symonenko is a traitor and an opportunist. It can be presumed, though, that the mutual accusations were caused not so much by the considerations of ideological purity as by a banal struggle for leadership.
Khrushchev’s report is quite a dramatic story. As he reminisced, “In those three years [after Stalin’s death] we were in a condition when we ourselves could not muster if not courage then inner conviction and necessity to open an unknown page, raise the curtain, and peek into what had been occurring there, i.e., at what took place under Stalin — arrests, trials, arbitrary rule and extrajudicial killings.” Aptly enough, Central Committee Secretary Averky Aristov asked at the CC CPSU Presidium meeting on February 1, 1956: “Comrade Khrushchev, will you have sufficient courage to tell the truth?”
It is quite possible that Khrushchev, whose arms were blood-stained up to the elbows, was tormented by remorse, but his report to the 20th Congress, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences,” was caused by entirely different and quite pragmatic considerations.
First, uprisings in GULAG camps showed that it was too dangerous to delay the release of prisoners. Thousands of people were coming back home and telling their families the truth about what had been going on in the camps. To quote Anna Akhmatova, two Russias seemed to take a look at each other. They all demanded rehabilitation and an answer to the two interconnected questions; “What for?” and “Who will be held responsible?” The people needed to be given some persuasive explanation.
Second, to quote US journalist Anne Applebaum, “Khrushchev’s speech was intended as much to consolidate his own power and intimidate his party opponents — all of whom had also collaborated enthusiastically [with Stalinist terror] — as it was to liberate his countrymen.”
Third, the top- and medium-level party apparatus wanted to get rid of the Stalin-era fear. They needed guarantees that there would be no large-scale repressions ever again. Being part of the nomenklatura was to be a lifetime experience, despite all the vagaries of a party member’s fate, when you could either climb up or fall down the career ladder. Then there was also the intention to slightly upstage Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in order to make one’s way up.
Fourth, Stalin and his cult were to be exposed in such a way that neither Khrushchev nor his CC Presidium colleagues would be set up, to use modern parlance. Besides, it took almost three years after Stalin’s death to browse the archives with the help of KGB chief Ivan Serov and withdraw the documents that confirmed Khrushchev’s complicity in the repressions.
What is more, the task was to expose the cult but leave intact the entire system created by Stalin and forestall democratization as such. Neither Khrushchev nor his party followers and adversaries needed this. We must give Nikita his due: he brilliantly solved this difficult problem.
The very term “de-Stalinization” was coined to disguise the fact that only the most odious features of Stalin’s regime, rather than its foundations, were to be dismantled. This is why Khrushchev’s speech focused so much on returning to Leninist norms in the party life and true socialist ideals. Contrasting Lenin with Stalin was supposed to be a substitute for the much-needed democratization.
Even these limits of a departure from Stalinism inspired fear in the ruling elite. As Khrushchev frankly noted in his memoirs, “We, including me in this team, deliberately opted for a thaw. But we were really afraid of this thaw because it might as well turn into a sweeping and uncontrollable flood.” For this reason, while exposing Stalinism, they were not going to abandon its methods.
Just a month after the congress, in early April 1956, the CPSU Central Committee resolved to disband the party cell at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Thermal Engineering Laboratory for “hostile escapades against the Party’s policies and Leninist foundations.” A Young Communist League member, Generozov, who worked at the Verkhov Forestry, was arrested for “oral hostile propaganda among workers.” In the summer of 1956 the CC CPSU strictly reprimanded party organizations for failure “to give a resolute rebuff” to anti-party activities.
The events in Poland and Hungary in the summer and fall of 1956 clearly showed the communist leadership, and the “loyal Leninist” Khrushchev personally, what kind of a razor edge they were walking on. So they resolutely put aside the pseudo-democratic demagogy; it would only return during the perestroika. In the confidential letter of December 19, 1956, the CC CPSU said that it “most emphatically stresses that we should not be of two minds about how to fight the hostile riff-raff. The communists who work in prosecuting bodies, courts, and state security must protect the interests of our socialist state, exercise vigilance about the schemes of hostile elements and, in compliance with Soviet laws, forestall criminal actions in good time.” And they began to forestall.
In the four and a half months of 1957, the Russian Federation Supreme Court alone received 128 cases lawsuits for “anti-Soviet activities.” In August 1957, the so-called Krasnopevtsev group in Moscow University was arrested, followed by the brutal suppression of “denigrator litterateurs,” harassment of the writer and poet Boris Pasternak, and the visit of Khrushchev to the Manege Square exhibition and subsequent assaults on abstractionist artists. It is at that moment that Khrushchev called the works of the well-known sculptor Ernst Neizvestny “degenerated art.” The “thaw” assumed the shape of samizdat and dissidence. The struggle against the “cult of personality” was also coming to an end. After the CC CPSU plenums in June and October 1957, when Khrushchev in fact concentrated all party and state power in his hands, this topic was struck off the political agenda. Removing the body of Stalin from the Mausoleum put an end to the critique of the “personality cult” rather than to the cult itself.
The lack of real democratization was a death sentence to the USSR and the CPSU. But the problem is that even after 1991 the Stalinist pattern of power still remained, albeit a little updated, in most CIS states. This caused authoritarianism to return, to a greater or lesser extent, in almost all of these countries. As a result, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev does not know what to do with de-Stalinization. He is well aware that the Stalinist system still rules the roost and must not be touched — otherwise, the so much sought-after power vertical will collapse.
The problems of Ukraine and its leadership are of the same nature. Nobody doubts that something must be done to keep the state’s foundations from crumbling. But top officials feel the same fear that Khrushchev did. Like him, they simulate reforms, deceiving themselves and the populace. But this cannot last forever. Historical parallels are always somewhat inaccurate, but when we analyze the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Yemen, we cannot but recall the events of 1956 in Hungary, of 1956 and the 1980s in Poland, or of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. The Soviet leadership ignored those loud signals, resorting to brute force and interventions. But this has also come to an end.
The problem is not only and not so much in Stalin and his monuments as in the absence of freedom, particularly economic freedom. The Soviet administrative command system gave way to total corruption. And the trouble is not in palm-greasing bureaucrats but in the system of their omnipotence that has been inherited, almost unchanged, from Stalin. The problem is that they are not controlled in any form, from above or below. It is next to impossible to bring them to justice, thus allowing them to eat away at the country. Unless this changes, Ukrainian society will be doomed to lawlessness and stagnation.
The shadow of Stalin continues to hover over Ukraine, for our leadership simply does not know how to govern free and independent people. Hence the attempts to force the muzzle of censorship on writers and other free thinkers.
“They, who used to be the mainstay, do not like the time when prison camps are empty but the halls, where people listen to poems, are overcrowded.”
The impression is that Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote this poem not in 1961-62 but now. And although many of our politicians could not be the Stalinist regime’s mainstay because of their age, they would not be against it.
Small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs are being cheated with the Tax Code and other codes now in the pipeline. But the problem is not in codes. The Stalinist constitution of 1936 was far more democratic on paper than those of many Western countries at the time. But the Great Terror began right after that constitution was adopted. No law will help if the government is guided by arbitrariness rather than by rules — as Stalin’s was. He thought this was better. Those who cannot govern adequately and tackle difficult economic and political problems dream that all will be fearing and march in closed ranks. So Stalin remains their ideal.
They never confess this during talk shows, but actions speak for themselves. They forget that no economic achievements could save Pinochet from condemnation. And even if this cannot be added to your account, why not switch on the TV and see Tahrir Square protests? Does the Cairo of February 2011 not remind you of Kyiv in 2004?
