Crimes of the Stalin Era

SPECIAL REPORT TO THE 20TH CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION

By Nikita S. Khrushchev
First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Introduction

(by Anatole Shub, Managing Editor, The New Leader)

MR. ISAAC Deutscher concluded his controversial biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 1949, by classing the Soviet ruler as a "great revolutionary despot" like Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was a historical verdict which many, as unfamiliar with Stalin as they were with Cromwell and Napoleon, accepted. A few months ago, Stalin's successor and former "close comrade-in-arms," Nikita Khrushchev, provided the evidence to place Stalin in a class by himself, beyond Caligula, Philip II of Spain and perhaps even Adolf Hitler.

Khrushchev's indictment is a healthy antidote to 30 years of pro-Stalinist apologetics; at the same time, it does less than justice to Stalin's predecessors and successors. To understand the dictatorship of Stalin, as it is described by Khrushchev, one must also understand the dictatorship of Lenin and of Khrushchev and his colleagues.

The Communist party came to power in Russia by force, overthrowing an eight-month democratic regime which had made Russia (in Lenin's own words) "the freest country in the world." The coup d'?tat of November 7, 1917, actually led by Leon Trotsky, was quickly followed by repression of democratic parties and institutions. In December 1917, the Communist terror apparatus, known as the Cheka, was set up, and it has continued to function ever since -- under the successive names of OGPU, NKVD and MVD-MGB. Nevertheless, three weeks after the Communist coup, 36 million Russians voted in free elections for an All-Russian Constituent Assembly, gave only a fourth of their votes to the Communists and a clear majority to the agrarian, democratic Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their associates dispersed the Assembly by force on January 19, 1918.

For more than two years, Russia was engulfed by civil war, which crushed the democrats and socialists and ended as a battle between Communists and reactionary militarists. Trotsky's Red Army was victorious, despite sporadic foreign intervention, but the Communist regime continued to meet with opposition in factories and villages. Many of the Lenin-Trotsky measures antagonized even veteran Communists. At the start of 1921, outbreaks of unrest among Petrograd workers followed peasant revolts in Tambov and elsewhere; an influential group of Communists called the Workers' Opposition demanded factory self-management and an end to centralized militarization of the workers; finally, the sailors of Kronstadt naval base, who had carried Lenin to power in 1917, revolted and demanded democratic freedoms. At the 10th Communist Party Congress, meeting in March 1921, Lenin prescribed an economic carrot and a political stick: He proclaimed his New Economic Policy, which restored free trade in the villages and permitted free enterprise elsewhere, but crushed the Kronstadt rebellion and the Workers' Opposition. Kronstadt was physically annihilated under the command of Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former Tsarist officer who had turned Communist; the Workers' Opposition -- and future Communist dissidents as well -- were curbed by new decrees forbidding the formation of any groups critical of the general line of the Party Central Committee, and forbidding agitation against that general line even by leading Communists.

It was, then, in an established one-party dictatorship that Joseph Stalin began his rise to autocratic power when he became General Secretary of the Party in 1922. The next six years, in which the various Communist "collective leaders" maneuvered for supreme leadership, were years of economic recovery, relatively mild compared with what was to come, but they were years of dictatorship nonetheless. Only a Soviet citizen of the 1950s could regard them as the "good old days."

By the time Lenin died, after several previous strokes, in January 1924, a troika or triumvirate was ruling Russia, consisting of Stalin, Leo Kamenev, head of the Moscow Party organization, and Gregory Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd party and of the Communist International. Trotsky had already been successfully elbowed out of the way; his program of concentrated industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture seemed too radical and repressive for most party members. Consolidating his control of the Party apparatus, Stalin next defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev, who joined Trotsky in what became known as the "Left Opposition." Stalin was aided in this by Nikolai Bukharin, theoretician and editor of Pravda, Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Soviet Premier, and Mikhail Tomsky, head of the Soviet trade unions; these men. who favored a cooperative approach to the peasantry and a parallel growth of light and heavy industry, became known as the "Right Opposition" when Stalin turned on them in 1928-29 and introduced Trotsky's old program as official Soviet policy.

In the collectivization, industrialization and famines of 1929-33, it is estimated that 5 to 10 million Russians died and another 10 million were sent to forced labor under Stalin's slogan of "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class."

In addition, Russian livestock, destroyed by starving peasants, suffered a setback from which, according to Khrushchev, the nation has not yet recovered.

The violence and brutality of what Stalin (and Khrushchev) called "the era of socialist construction" soon repelled many Communist party members previously loyal to Stalin, and by 1934 the dictator no longer had a majority in his own party. Stalin, however, succeeded in having the opposition leader, Sergei Kirov, murdered and thereupon crushed resistance in the Party by mass terror. The Great Purges of 1936-38, known popularly as the Yezhovshchina (after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov who conducted them), wiped out an entire generation of Communist leaders. Public trials of such Old Bolsheviks as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Rykov were marked by astounding "confessions" of dastardly crimes; behind the scenes, thousands refused to yield to torture and met their deaths in silence. Khrushchev here tells of several who perished with defiance on their lips. Not only Lenin's old comrades in exile and underground fell; so did hundreds of the very leaders who had championed Stalin in the struggles of the Twenties. In the Ukraine, for example, the purge claimed such Stalinist stalwarts as Vlas Chubar, Chairman of the Ukranian Council of Ministers for a decade, and Pavel Postyshev and Stanislav Kossior, the Ukrainian Party Secretaries through most of the 1930s. Khrushchev succeeded Kossior.

The Communist leaders who emerged from the Yezhovshchina unscathed were those who had stood by Stalin throughout the bloodbath. Among them were Andrei Zhdanov and Khrushchev, the only two Party Secretaries to profit from the purge; Georgi Malenkov, Yezhov's chief aid; Nikolai Bulganin, who took over the Red Army after Stalin had purged it of its best officers; and Lazar Kaganovich, who had rewritten the Party statutes to expedite Stalin's purge of the Party majority.

During and after World War II, Zhdanov and Malenkov vied for the role of Stalin's second-in-command. Zhdanov's death in 1948 led to the purge of several of his supporters, including the chief state planner, Nikolai Voznesensky. This purge, known in Russia today as "the Leningrad case," boosted the cause of Malenkov and of MVD chief Lavrenti Beria, who had succeeded Yezhov in 1938. But at the end of 1952 came the affair of the "doctors' plot," which not only shocked the world with its vicious anti-Semitism but seemed clearly aimed at Beria. Several of the latter's associates in the satellite states, notably Czechoslovakia's Rudolf Slansky, had already been executed when Stalin suddenly had a stroke and died on March 5, 1953. Malenkov, Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov were the chief speakers at his funeral.

Amid feverish imprecations against "panic" in the ranks, the new regime took over, with Malenkov as Premier, Khrushchev succeeding him within a month as Party Secretary, and Beria seemingly in the saddle. The latter repudiated the doctors' affair, let the world in on the tortures used to extract confessions, made all sorts of promises of new "legality," and began colonizing the Party, the Government and the satellites with his supporters. The Czech and German workers' uprisings of June 1953, however, served as pretext for his overthrow and execution. Malenkov lingered on; bolstered by vague promises of more consumer goods, until February 1955, when Khrushchev nominated Bulganin to succeed him as Premier.

Most of the Kremlin's moves since the death of Stalin have been attempts to streamline and rationalize his paranoid tyranny, to make it operate efficiently in a complex political and economic system ruling a third of the world's population. The 20th Party Congress, first under the new regime and only the third such gathering since 1934, was an attempt to legitimize and consolidate the "collective leadership,'' but it took place against a background of fierce maneuvering among the collective leaders. On the first day of the Moscow Congress, Khrushchev delivered the traditional Secretary's report, an all-day address which contained only two non-committal references to Stalin. Two days later, however, Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier and veteran trade wizard, rose and denounced Stalin on several counts; he named several Old Bolsheviks who had ''wrongly been named" enemies of the people by Stalin. Among the hundreds whom he could have mentioned, he singled out -- purposely, it seemed -- several from whose deaths Khrushchev personally had profited. A week later, in a dramatic, closed two-day session, Khrushchev delivered the speech which startled humanity. Not its least interesting aspect is Khrushchev's succession of sly references connecting his present associates to Stalin and Beria: Malenkov at Stalin's right hand in the mishandling of the war, Kaganovich and Mikoyan "present" at the initial promotion of Beria, and so on.

Most significant, however, is the paradoxical dualism that runs through Khrushchev's address from start to finish: While Stalin's crimes against his Communist associates are vividly spelled out and deplored, his infinitely greater crimes against the Russian people are applauded in the name of "socialist construction." Khrushchev's "anti-Stalin" speech reaffirms the basic Stalinist policy line explicitly and implicitly, although now it is affirmed in Lenin's name.

This line includes a one-party dictatorship dominated by a self-perpetuating ruling clique at its center, responsible neither to a popular legislature nor to freely-chosen party bodies; an economy concentrated on war industry and the promotion of international Communist power, to the virtual exclusion of citizens' needs for food, clothing and housing; a system of justice still marked by kangaroo courts, forced labor on a vast scale; and secret executions, industry and trade directed from Moscow by Party bureaucrats acting through autocratic managers; a working class shorn of basic rights to the redress of grievances through collective bargaining or strikes, impoverished physically and spiritually by primitive working conditions and a constant speedup; a peasantry herded into collective farms and state farms, harassed at every turn by Government restrictions and demands; a synthetic culture managed by Party officials, frankly directed to the service of State power, now engaged in xenophobic crusades against "cosmopolitanism," now fearfully following official orders to enjoy a "thaw."

This is the heritage of Lenin-Stalin from which the present Soviet leaders, picking and choosing as best they can, hope to fashion a more secure rule. It remains to be seen whether other powerful forces in modern Soviet society will ultimately accept either that rule or that heritage.
-- ANATOLE SHUB
Managing Editor, The New Leader

THE ANNOTATOR

Boris I. Nicolaevsky is one of the free world's most authoritative students of Soviet affairs. Active since his youth in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, he served in Moscow's Marx-Engels Institute after the democratic revolution of March 1917, but left Russia after the Civil War had insured the triumph of Communist dictatorship. Since that time, in Berlin, Paris and New York, he has devoted himself principally to amassing a unique archive of materials on Communism and the Russian Revolutionary movement. His personal knowledge of many of the early Soviet leaders enabled him to publish, two decades ago, the famous Letter of an Old Bolshevik; the basic accuracy of this sensational document, which explained the intra-party struggle leading to the Great Purges, has now been officially confirmed by Khrushchev. Mr. Nicolaevsky is author of Azeff: The Spy and co-author of Karl Marx: Man and Fighter and Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, and has contributed to numerous scholarly journals here and abroad. Mr. Nicolaevsky's notes have been translated from the Russian by Louis Jay Herman.

Leon Trotsky|| Crimes of the Stalin Era|| Crimes of the Stalin Era (Introduction by Anatole Shub)|| Reform Party

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