Khrushchev's War with Stalin's Ghost

Author(s): William Henry Chamberlin

Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Jan., 1962), pp. 3-10
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/126780
Accessed: 01-09-2018 02:21 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Russian
Review

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Khrushchev's War With Stalin ' Ghost
By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

T HERE was high historical drama and some political risk

in Nikita Khrushchev's decision to carry his war with the
ghost of Josef Stalin to the point of removing the embalmed
corpse of the deceased dictator from what was, until recently,
the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum, the great secular shrine of the
Soviet Union. Even more challenging was the decision to erect
a memorial to the innocent victims of Stalin's tyranny.
Eloquent proof of the powerful spell Stalin cast ipon the
country he ruled with a rod of iron for twenty-four years is the
fact that only now, more than eight years after his death, are
the Russian people being told the truth about his grim record
of brutal criminality. It is true that about three years after
Stalin's death, at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Com-
munist Party, in February, 1956, Khrushchev took the first step
toward destroying the image of Stalin as the all-benevolent, all-
wise, all-powerful "father of peoples" and "sun of the universe,"
to recall two phrases of Byzantine flattery which were frequently
used about Stalin in his lifetime.
At that time Khrushchev's indictment of Stalin's crimes
was selective. He said nothing about those acts of mass cruelty
which might be regarded as enhancing the power and interests
of the Soviet state, the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," the
man-made famine of 1932-33, the deportations from Poland
and the Baltic States, the massacre of some 15,000 Polish officer
war prisoners in the Katyn Forest and elsewhere in 1940. What
he emphasized was Stalin's habit of torturing and killing devoted
Communists, his miscalculations in the planning and conduct
of the war.

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
4 The Russian Review

However, this speech was not officially published in Russia

It remained in the category of Lenin's famous Political Testa
ment, something known to sophisticated Communist Party mem
bers, but a matter of rumor and hearsay to the majority of th
Soviet people. Khrushchev even tried to soften the impact of his
own indictment, delivered behind closed doors, by publicl
referring to Stalin as "a great fighter against imperialism,"
leaving the impression that he had rendered great services t
the Soviet Union, even if he had been led astray by what wa
euphemistically referred to as "the cult of personality."
But now the declaration of war on Stalin's ghost is uncom
promising and implacable. What was authorized by the Twenty
Second Congress is comparable with the practice of the impotent
Roman Senate, in the time of the absolute power of the Em
perors, in decreeing the throwing down of the statues of tho
Emperors who had behaved as tyrants-once they were safely
dead. The most remote collective farm, the loneliest mountain
village in the Caucasus will hear that the body of Stalin, once
adored as a mortal god, has been excluded with infamy from
its place next to Lenin in the Soviet pantheon.
The motivation for this spectacular denigration is not al-
together clear, although three factors seem to have played a
part.
First, the Twenty-Second Party Congress, hailed as a demon-
stration of unity of the triumphant "builders of Communism"
in the Soviet Union with the fraternal Communist parties of
some eighty countries, may be remembered as an occasion which
emphasized the rift between Moscow and Peiping, for which
the ostensible issue of tiny backward Albania is scarcely the
most important explanation. Peiping and its sympathizers in
the world Communist movement have always refused to accept
the downgrading of Stalin. For Khrushchev to emphasize this
downgrading is a natural reaction to strained relations with
Peiping.
Second, it has apparently seemed expedient to stigmatize as

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Khrushchev's War With Stalin's Ghost 5

"Stalinists" the "anti-Party" group of Khrushchev's open and

secret opponents in the Communist Party. To associate Malen-
kov, Molotov, Voroshilov and other individuals who have op-
posed Khrushchev as closely as possible with Stalin's acts of arbi-
trary cruelty is a normal maneuver in inner-Party in-fighting.
Third, Khrushchev, in trying to exorcise the ghost of Stalin,
may be hoping to win popular support by creating the impres-
sion that he is completely dissociating himself from Stalin's
policies. As against the risk of administering a traumatic shock
to those Soviet citizens who are still indoctrinated with the cult
of Stalin's unique virtue and wisdom, there is the possibility of
rallying the allegiance of those who remember with bitterness
the undeserved suffering Stalin brought to the uncounted thou-
sands whom he slaughtered, to the millions whom he banished
to slave labor concentration camps.
To be sure, Khrushchev cannot assume the role of Stalin's
accuser with clean hands. Like every prominent political figure
in the Soviet Union, he survived the purges of the Stalin era
only by obsequious sycophancy and by zealously carrying out
any purging assignments which the dictator entrusted to him.
Here is the voice of Khrushchev, greeting Stalin on his seven-
tieth birthday in December, 1949:
"Comrade Stalin, the genius leader of our party, rallied the
peoples of our country and led them to the triumph of socialism
... Stalin stood at the cradle of each Soviet Republic, protected
it and paternally helped it to grow and flourish . . . This is why
all the peoples of our country, with extraordinary warmth and
filial love, call the great Stalin their dear father and genius
teacher.

"To-day the peoples of the great Soviet Union and all ad-
vanced progressive mankind wholeheartedly greet our dear Com-
rade Stalin, inspirer of the indissoluble friendship of peoples.
"Glory to our dear father . . . the genius leading the Party,
the Soviet people and the working people of the whole world,
Comrade Stalin."

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
6 The Russian Review

The following passage in the most authoritative biograp

of Khrushchev' brings out the present Soviet dictator's full id
tification with Stalin's method of rule by unlimited terr
directed against the ruling Communist Party, as well as ag
the Soviet peoples as a whole:
"In 1937 Khrushchev became a member of a 'purge troi
sent to liquidate 'the enemies of the people' in the Ukr
The other members were Molotov and the dreaded NKVD
chief, Ezhov. The purge-team worked effectively. Most
bers of the Ukrainian Cabinet, of the Ukrainian Sup
Soviet and of the Ukrainian Central Committee were sum
executed. According to conservative estimates, sixty perc
the Ukrainian CP apparatus was liquidated, not to speak
thousands of ordinary Party members, and their accom
the 'class-hostile' elements among non-Party people.
"According to the official Soviet 'History of the Ukrain
'With the arrival in the Ukraine of the close comrade-in-arms
of Stalin, N. S. Khrushchev, the eradication of the remnants
of the enemy and the liquidation of the wrecking activities pro-
ceeded particularly successfully.'"
Stalin was a most vivid living illustration of the eternal truth
of Lord Acton's dictum: "Power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely." He was a figure of blood and horror in
Russian history unmatched since the paranoid Tsar Ivan the
Terrible, whom in many ways he resembled. In the violent
twentieth century the only man who might rival him in the
number of human lives he blighted and destroyed was Adolf
Hitler. Stalin also represented the most emphatic refutation of
Lenin's utopian dream that, after a period of absolute dictator-
ship, the very need for the existence of the state would disappear
and men would live in perfect freedom. This theory presupposes
a measure of selfless dedication on the part of the wielders of
the dictatorship which is contrary to all historical experience
of human nature. When entrusted with unlimited power,
1George Paloczi-Horvath, Khrushchev, p. 92.

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Khrushchev's War With Stalin's Ghost 7

Stalin's proved record of criminal super-gangsterism, now at

last revealed to the Russian people, warrants every word of
George F. Kennan's eloquent indictment:2
"This was a man of incredible criminality, of a criminality
effectively without limits; a man apparently foreign to the very
experience of love, without pity or mercy; a man in whose
entourage no one was ever safe; a man whose hand was set
against all that could not be useful to him at the moment; a
man who was most dangerous of all to those who were his closest
collaborators in crime . . .
"By way of response, apparently, to what seems to have been
some opposition to his purposes on the part of the Seventeenth
Party Congress in 1934, Stalin killed, in the ensuing purges of
1936 to 1938, 1108 out of a total of 1966 of the members of the
Congress. Of the Central Committee elected at that Congress
and still officially in office, he killed 98 out of 139-a clear
majority, that is, of the body from which ostensibly he drew
his authority. These deaths were only a fraction, numerically,
of those which resulted from the purges of those years ...
"All this is apart from the stupendous brutalities which
Stalin perpetrated against the common people: notably in the
process of collectivization, and also in some of his wartime
measures. The number of victims here-the number, that is, of
those who actually lost their lives-runs into the millions. But
this is not to mention the broken homes, the twisted childhoods
and the millions of people who were half killed, who survived
these ordeals only to linger on in misery, with broken health
and broken hearts."

It might also be noted that Stalin killed all his six colleagu
in the Politburo at the time of Lenin's death (Trotsky, Zinovi
Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky), thereby giving r
to the grim joke that, having killed all his friends, he was b
ginning on his acquaintances. After the end of the war, enra
by the cordial reception which Moscow Jews gave to the A
2Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, pp. 256-258.

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
8 The Russian Review

bassador of Israel, Mrs. Golda Meir, he let loose a wave of

anti-Semitic terror and persecution, in which some of the best
known Russian Jewish writers and intellectuals perished.
It is perhaps understandable that a cunning tyrant, possessed
of the two mighty weapons of the totalitarian state, unlimited
terror and unlimited propaganda, could have fooled a consider-
able number of his own people. But one of the most depressing
aspects of the Stalin story is the way in which he fooled consider-
able numbers of people in the West. The United States Ambas-
sador to the Soviet Union, Mr. Joseph E. Davies, described
Stalin as a man so kindly that a child would sit on his lap and
a dog would sidle up to him .Although the list of Stalin's broken
treaties and promises is endless, this same Ambassador Davies,
in a speech in Chicago in February 1942, offered the following
endorsement:

"By the testimony of performance and in my opinion, the

word of honor of the Soviet Government is as safe as the Bible."
There is nothing in the memoirs or in the available historical
material to show that either Roosevelt or Churchill realized
that, in Stalin, they were dealing with a monster, with one o
the greatest mass murderers of all time. Had this been realize
even when military expediency dictated co-operation agains
Hitler, Western policy in the concluding phase of the war an
in the immediate postwar period might have been shaped alo
more realistic lines.

Stalin's career is another historical illustration of the poin

that revolutions are usually made against weak, rather than
strong governments, that the most terrible tyrants are likely to
die peacefully in their beds. (Whether Stalin's own death was
due to natural causes is a mystery that may never be cleared
up with certainty. His personal secretary Poskrebyshev mysteri-
ously disappeared at the time of his death and was never hear
of again. As Stalin's paranoid mind was apparently tending i
the direction of another big purge, with the arrest of a number
of prominent Russian physicians on poisoning charges as a ma

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Khrushchev's War With Stalin's Ghost 9

cabre curtain-raiser, his death was distinctly convenient to his

lieutenants, none of whom could be sure of not being one of
the victims of the new purge.)
It is by no means certain that Khrushchev has finally banished
Stalin's ghost, even though he felt politically strong enough to
evict the deceased dictator from the shrine which his body had
occupied since his death. Stalin has become such a gigantic
myth in Soviet history that its elimination seems bound to leave
a big spiritual and psychological vacuum. His belated condem-
nation poses distinctly awkward questions.
What, for instance, was Khrushchev doing in the Stalin era
to thwart Stalin's crimes? What about the Communist Party,
which is supposed to be the highest source of authority and
the supreme repository of political wisdom? What went wrong
with its functioning when a bloody tyrant could place himself
above all restraint and put to death large numbers of veteran
Party members who were innocent of any crime? If so many of
Stalin's judgments were nothing but a despot's whims, what
a'bout the trials of an earlier period which sent to their deaths
Lenin's old comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, Bukharin and
Rykov? What about Trotsky? Once Stalin's method of extorting
false confessions by torture is officially established, who can be
sure of the genuineness of any political trial that took place
under his rule?

It is sometimes reported from Germany that parents avoid

talking about the Nazi period, because of fear that their children
will reproach them for not having done something to prevent
the monstrous crimes that took place in the concentration
camps. This moral and psychological problem is compounded
in the Soviet Union, because there has been no break in con-
tinuity, because Khrushchev and his associates are the direct
political heirs of Stalin.
"The truth shall make ye free" is a famous Biblical phrase.
It would probably be too much to hope that the final moment
of truth about Stalin and his crimes will immediately free the

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
10 The Russian Review

Soviet people from the effects of for

indoctrination and regimentation.
will probably make it more difficu
It will almost certainly sow seeds o
intelligent young Soviet citizens abo
system. And the exposure of Stalin f
of the peoples," not a "genius leader
but an amoral monstrous tyrant, se
cocky self-confidence of the most
munist.
Nor will the dual role of Stalin's faithful henchman and
Stalin's belated accuser be altogether easy to play, even fo
politician of Khrushchev's audacity, bounce, and ingenuit

This content downloaded from 152.74.16.35 on Sat, 01 Sep 2018 02:21:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms