Sacrificing Stalin

Sacrificing Stalin
Boris Kagarlitsky
The Moscow Times, 21 February 2006

Fifty years ago this month, the Soviet Communist Party held its 20th Congress. The decisions reached at most Party congresses are long forgotten, but the events of February 1956 continue to inspire interest and debate.

For young people who have grown up in the post-Soviet consumer society, Feb. 14 - the opening day of the 20th Party Congress - is Valentine's Day, when people send flowers and sappy cards to their sweethearts. Yet the ideas first aired at the 20th Party Congress continue to echo in the political debates of the present.

Current Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, commenting on the 50th anniversary of the congress, said that the famous "secret speech" delivered by Nikita Khrushchev to a closed session at the congress was extremely damaging. In Zyuganov's view, Khrushchev's speech, in which he denounced Stalin's crimes and the cult of personality, was the beginning of the end. It left society deeply divided. Everything in the speech was true, of course, but what was the point in airing the Party's dirty laundry? "In his speech, Khrushchev was basically settling a personal score with Stalin," Zyuganov said. "It should be emphasized that the speech was not discussed in advance by either the plenum or the presidium of the Communist Party."

Khrushchev delivered the secret speech on Feb. 25, the last day of the congress. And it wasn't much of a secret. The text was sent out across the country and read at Party meetings, which were, of course, also closed. As a result, millions of people were familiar with the speech within a few weeks. Contrary to Zyuganov's claim, it did not divide society. People accepted it, just as they had accepted previous Party directives about exposing "wreckers" and destroying "enemies of the people."

In geopolitical and economic terms, the Soviet Union reached the height of its power under Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. It led the way into outer space, achieved nuclear parity with the United States and cultivated many new allies in the Middle East and Africa. The standard of living improved at home. But the ideological monolith of the Stalin era was gone for good.

Soviet society was never entirely monolithic. The proof of this can be found in the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as in the Soviet archives. There was, however, a strong sense of a common fate and a common cause that united not just the working class and the bureaucratic elite, but even gulag inmates and their captors. The Stalinist regime was directly linked to the history of the Revolution. It was a sort of communist Bonapartism. It combined totalitarianism with democratic principles, fear and repression with enthusiasm and sincerity. This blend made the 20th Party Congress possible.

Looking back on the congress, some accused Khrushchev of inconsistency and a lack of radicalism, while others objected to the fact that he made Stalin's crimes public and turned political reform into a personal, posthumous reckoning with Stalin. The guilt or complicity of other Politburo members is not the issue, however. Khrushchev heaped all the blame on Stalin because he wanted to avoid a serious discussion of what had happened in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s.

Had Khrushchev's view of the dead dictator been more balanced, questions might have been raised about the inherent contradictions of the Soviet state and about the extent to which the existing order reflected Marxist conceptions of socialism. These questions had been raised by Trotsky, who was anathema to the elite under Khrushchev just as he had been under Stalin. Had Khrushchev been a less virulent anti-Stalinist, he would almost certainly have been forced in the direction of Trotskyism.

The Party elite in the late-1950s opted to forgive no one and to comprehend nothing. Stalin had to be sacrificed in order to protect the system. The secret speech was not one man's initiative; it reflected the general view of the Party machine after three years of infighting.

Another 30 years passed, and Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika drove the Soviet Union to total collapse. Subsequent reforms left millions of people to fight for their lives, as they had once fought to survive in the gulag. Can all of this be regarded as a direct result of the 20th Party Congress, which had such an influence on Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin?

Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin belong to another generation, of course, one both formed and corrupted by the Brezhnev years. The bureaucracy went through a major evolution in those years as well. The 20th Party Congress was nevertheless a watershed of sorts - a superficial victory for the democratic current in Soviet society, but a real victory for the bureaucracy. Democratic reforms were carried out, but only under the control of the bureaucracy, and only to serve its interests. For the country this was the worst possible outcome.

Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times