[A-List] Roy Medvedev: Khrushchev's secret speech and end of communism

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/

Monday, March 06, 2006

VIEW: Khrushchev's secret speech and end of communism - Roy A Medvedev
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\03\06\story_6-3-2006_pg3_
6

The 20th Congress shattered the world Communist movement, and it turned out
to be impossible to cement the cracks. The Soviet Union and other socialist
countries faced a crisis of faith, as the main threat to communism was not
imperialism, or ideological dissidents, but the movement's own intellectual
poverty and disillusion

In history, some events at first appear insignificant, or their significance
is hidden, but they turn out to be earthshaking. Such a moment occurred 50
years ago, with Nikita Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" to the 20th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It ranks, I believe,
just below the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the start of Hitler's War in
1939 as the most critical moment of the 20th century.

At that moment, the communist movement appeared to be riding the tide of
history, and not only for those in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s,
communism was on the offensive in Europe, as well as in the emerging Third
World. Capitalism seemed to be dying. All of communism's imperfections were
deemed temporary, just bumps on the way to the just society that was then
being born. A third of humanity saw the Soviet Union as leading the world
toward global socialism.

The 20th Congress put an end to that. It was a moment of truth, a cleansing
from within of the brutality of Stalinism. Khrushchev's speech to the
Congress inspired doubt and second thoughts throughout the worldwide
Communist movement.

Khrushchev's motives as he took the podium on the morning of February 25,
1956, were, in his mind, moral ones. After his ouster from power, in the
seclusion of his dacha, he wrote: "My hands are covered with blood. I did
everything that others did. But even today if I have to go to that podium to
report on Stalin, I would do it again. One day all that had to be over."

Khrushchev had, of course, been an intimate part of Stalin's repressions,
but he, too, didn't know half of what was going on. The whole Stalinist
system of government was built on absolute secrecy, in which only the
general secretary himself knew the whole story. It wasn't terror that was
the basis of Stalin's power, but his complete monopoly on information.
Khrushchev, for example, was stunned when he discovered that some 70 percent
of Party members were annihilated in the 1930s and 1940s.

Initially, Khrushchev didn't plan to keep his denunciation of Stalin a
secret. Five days after the Congress, his speech was sent to all the leaders
of the socialist countries and read at local party meetings across the
Soviet Union. But people didn't know how to discuss it. And with good
reason, for the problem with the de-Stalinisation process was that, although
the truth was partly revealed, no answer regarding what to do next was
offered.

After the Congress, it became clear that the communist gospel was false and
murderously corrupt. But no other ideology was offered, and the crisis - the
slow rot of the system that became clear during the era of stagnation under
Leonid Brezhnev - that began with Khrushchev's speech lasted another 30
years, until Mikhail Gorbachev took up his mantle of change.

The doubts inspired at the Congress may have been inchoate, but they
nonetheless sowed genuine unrest. In the first protests that rocked the
communist world in 1956, huge crowds in Georgia demanded that Khrushchev be
fired and Stalin's memory reinstated. An uprising in Poland and the far more
tumultuous Hungarian Revolution argued for the opposite. The Poles demanded
communism with a human face, and the Hungarians, after Imre Nagy sought to
reform communism, ended up wanting no communism at all.

All of these protests were brutally crushed, which resulted in many West
European Communists leaving the Party in utter disillusion. Khrushchev's
speech also ignited the feud between Mao's China and the USSR, for it
allowed Mao to claim the crown of world revolutionary leadership.

Worried by the protests, Khrushchev tried to cool off the anti-Stalin
campaign. The release of the Gulag prisoners that followed his speech
continued, but it was done in silence. Party membership was restored to
purge survivors, and they received new jobs, but they were forbidden from
discussing the horrors that they had endured.

That silence lasted until 1961, when Khrushchev permitted new revelations of
Stalin-era crimes. These were publicly reported and discussed on TV and
radio. Stalin's body was removed from Red Square, Stalin monuments were
destroyed, and cities restored their original Soviet names. Stalingrad
became Volgograd.

The idea of the Gulag entered our literature with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This second anti-Stalinist campaign
lasted two years, which was not nearly enough to change the country's
mentality.

The 20th Congress shattered the world Communist movement, and it turned out
to be impossible to cement the cracks. The Soviet Union and other socialist
countries faced a crisis of faith, as the main threat to communism was not
imperialism, or ideological dissidents, but the movement's own intellectual
poverty and disillusion.

So, although it is common today in Russia to blame Gorbachev and Boris
Yeltsin for the collapse of the USSR, it is both useless and unfair to do
so. The system was dead already, and it is to Yeltsin's great credit that he
was able to bring Russia out of the ruins in one piece. Although Russia's
future is uncertain, its history is becoming clearer, in part because we now
know that the 20th Party Congress started the process that brought about the
end of Soviet despotism. -DT-PS

Roy Medvedev, historian and Soviet dissident, is an author of many books,
including 'Stalin: Let History Judge' and 'Khrushchev: The Years in Power'
(with Zhores Medvedev)

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