the persistence of Stalin’s terrorism, Khrushchev described the ethnic deportations of the Second World War and the post-war carnage in the Leningrad Affair, the Doctors’ Plot and the Mingrelian Affair. Stalin had brought about a drastic decline in internal party democracy. Thirteen years elapsed between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Party Congresses. After 1945 the Central Committee rarely met, and the Politburo fell into desuetude.
Khrushchev had agreed to exculpate the current Presidium. Allegedly Stalin had decided everything. Only fitfully did Khrushchev yield to the temptation to score points off fellow Presidium members. For instance, he mentioned the difficulties in Ukraine in the Second World War when an appeal was made to Stalin for increased supplies of equipment. Malenkov had given the following answer on Stalin’s behalf: ‘You have to arm yourselves.’ The revelation of so curt a response, even if Malenkov had merely been relaying a message, reflected badly upon him. Khrushchev was casting a shadow over the reputation of his most powerful rival.
Otherwise he heaped the blame on Stalin and the conveniently dead leaders of the security police. On the Great Terror he declared to the Congress: ‘The majority of Politburo members did not, at the time, know all the circumstances in these matters and therefore could not intervene.’ He suggested that only a handful of associates helped Stalin in his dastardly activity: the security-police leaders Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov (and subordinates of theirs such as the ‘bird-brained’ Rodos).11 Supposedly the repressions could not have been stopped by well-meaning communist party leaders because they lacked the necessary information about the purges undertaken by Stalin and his police cronies. Khrushchev, who had helped to organize the terror in Moscow and Ukraine in 1937–8,12 was lying shamelessly; but this is what he knew he needed to do if he was to retain his reputation and ruin Stalin’s.
For the supreme intention was to knock Stalin from the pedestal of public esteem. Stalin was portrayed as a capricious autocrat. As an example of Stalin’s megalomania he recalled the comment: ‘I’ll wag my little finger, and Tito will be no more!’ Stalin, moreover, had been extremely distrustful. ‘Why,’ he would enquire of his associates, ‘are your eyes so shifty today?’
Khrushchev’s analysis was focused more upon personality than upon policy. He stipulated that the bloodshed had started only after the assassination of Kirov in 1934. Indeed Khrushchev proposed that, before the mid-1930s, Stalin had performed ‘great services to the party, to the working class and the international labour movement’. Thus the horrors committed in the Civil War, the NEP and the First Five-Year Plan were ignored. Agricultural collectivization, despite all the deaths and deportations, was condoned. In addition, the burden of Khrushchev’s message was that mostly it was prominent officials who had been Stalin’s victims. There had been, he suggested, ‘several thousand’ functionaries of party, government and army; he gave no hint that millions of people, many of whom did not hold any rank at all in public life, had died.
His undeclared purpose was to show the Congress that the attack on Stalin would not involve a dismantlement of his entire system. Arbitrary arrests and executions would cease; but the communist one-party state would be preserved, alternative ideologies would be suppressed and state economic ownership would remain intact. In Khrushchev’s presentation, this would involve a reversion to the days of Lenin, when supposedly all the working people of the USSR had luxuriated in the beneficent farsightedness of Marxism-Leninism. The future for the USSR lay in a return to the past.
By reassuring, flattering and inspiring the Congress, Khrushchev won support from its delegates even though many of them were so shocked by the contents of the closed-session speech that they fainted. Molotov could frighten them, Malenkov confuse and sedate them. Only Khrushchev had had the animal boldness to exhilarate them; and, having pulled off this achievement, he turned his attention to the rest of the country. Confidential briefings of party members were given to activists in local party organizations. Khrushchev gave transcripts to foreign communist party leaders as they departed home. As if suspecting that several of the recipients might censor its contents, he also arranged for the KGB to ensure that the CIA should obtain a copy, and the London
In the West his policies were dubbed de-Stalinization. This was understandable since Khrushchev had devoted an entire report to denouncing Stalin. But Khrushchev himself talked instead of a campaign to eliminate ‘the cult of the individual’.13 This was not an inappropriate term even though it was so euphemistic. For Khrushchev kept Stalin’s kolkhozes in agriculture and his capital-goods priority in industry; he also refrained from rehabilitating Trotski, Bukharin and the various other communists alleged to have been foreign spies. Much remained in place that would have been congenial to Stalin.
Despite the limited nature of the closed-session speech, however, Khrushchev was already experiencing difficulty in Moscow, where the Presidium baulked at his efforts to publicize the report. Only a brief summary was published in the press. Even this caused a furore. Many citizens were astounded by what was revealed about the 1930s and 1940s. It was not news to them that abuses of power had occurred: practically every household in the land had at least one relative who had fallen victim to the Gulag. But not everyone, especially amidst the generations born and educated under Stalin, had known that Stalin was the instigator of the horrors recounted by Khrushchev. In Georgia he was venerated as a national hero although he had executed many Georgians. A riot took place in Tbilisi. Yet by and large, the revelations evoked an enormous sense of relief, and the decrease in overt political intimidation was enjoyed even by Stalin’s admirers.
Nevertheless Khrushchev and his historians, crafty as they had been in formulating the case against Stalin, had not been quite crafty enough. They had done an efficient job solely in relation to the pre-war USSR. Since Lenin had founded the Soviet state, a ‘return to Lenin’ was an attractive path to recommend to comrades at home. But this could not be the case for the other countries of Eastern Europe or indeed for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had been conquered not in the Civil War but in Stalin’s military campaigns of 1944–5 — and now Khrushchev, the Soviet communist leader, was claiming that Stalin was a mass murderer. The closed-session speech gusted away the rags of legitimacy claimed by communism in the countries of the Warsaw Pact.
First to express discontent were Polish industrial workers. As the rumours spread in Poland about Khrushchev’s closed-session speech, they went on strike. Poles had always known that Stalin had been a wrong ’un, but Khrushchev’s confirmation of this gave them irrefutable grounds for revolt. Compromises were swiftly agreed. Wladislaw Gomulka, the veteran communist imprisoned by Stalin in 1948 for showing too much care for Polish national interests, was released and, with much grumpiness, Khrushchev assented to his becoming First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party.14 This manoeuvre was combined with police action in Warsaw. The strikes faded and order was restored. But the episode was yet another indication of the unpopularity of the Soviet Army, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB throughout Eastern Europe. No Presidium member took seriously the official Soviet trumpetings about the fraternal feelings felt by the peoples of the Warsaw Pact towards the USSR.
Gomulka’s transfer to supreme power was the most spectacular example of the trend towards compromise. The Kremlin already in Beria’s time had slackened the pace of ‘Sovietization’ in Eastern Europe. Changes of personnel had been undertaken so as to hasten the acceptance of reforms. In particular, campaigns for agricultural collectivization had been halted. Recalcitrant Stalinists had been reprimanded in mid-1953, and told to adopt the Kremlin’s new course of policies.
But things went badly for the USSR. Rakosi was replaced as governmental premier by Imre Nagy but remained leader of the Hungarian party. Only after Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in Moscow was Rakosi at last constrained to step down entirely. By then Budapest’s workers and intellectuals were pressing for the regime’s fundamental reform.15 Nagy’s Hungarian patriotism proved stronger than his Marxism- Leninism and he went along with the crowds, trusting that Moscow would not resort to forcible intervention. He also assumed that the West would lean on the Soviet Union to respect Hungary’s sovereignty. On 23 October a popular disturbance took place in Budapest. In the following week a revolt against Soviet domination occurred; and the courageous but naive Nagy, a communist who had fallen foul of Rakosi in the late 1940s, continued to believe that a political compromise could be reached with Moscow. Visits by Mikoyan, Malenkov and Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, failed to induce a more realistic judgement.
On 4 November 1956 the tanks of the Soviet Army moved against the rebels. Resistance was fierce but futile. The Hungarian revolt was castigated by Khrushchev as a counter-revolution inspired by the West, and Nagy fled to the safety of the Yugoslav embassy; but he was tricked into leaving it and taken into custody — he was executed in 1958 for refusing to repent of his actions. The NATO countries refused to intervene on Hungary’s side. The joint attack by British, French and Israeli forces on the Suez Canal preoccupied the West at the time; but in any case the major powers flinched from risking the outbreak of a Third World War. A tame Hungarian regime was set up in Budapest under Janos Kadar, and the countries of the Warsaw Pact were put on notice that, under
