Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

In his veiled but still powerful critique of Stalin and his legacy, Khrushchev was joined publicly by two recent allies: Anastas Mikoyan, an old Bolshevik bureaucrat and statesman who had himself stood on the brink of liquidation a few weeks before Stalin’s death but now stood just one step behind Khrushchev as top man in the Kremlin; and Georgy Malenkov, another old Bolshevik who had gained Stalin’s favor only to lose it and who, on the dictator’s death, joined Khrushchev in forming an ideological crusade against the cult of the individual. As Mikoyan recalled years later, “For about twenty years we actually had no collective leadership; instead the cult of the individual flourished.” Malenkov was even bolder in his criticism of Stalin’s one-man rule, charging that his “personal leadership” led to “crimes” that could never be explained nor justified.

How different for Mikoyan and Malenkov must the 20th Congress have been from the 19th! At the 19th Congress, chaired by Stalin, Mikoyan referred to him nineteen times. His praise of Stalin was embarrassing though expected: “the genius work of Comrade Stalin… the bright flame of Stalinist genius… Comrade Stalin enriches our life, gives us a program of action and directs our victorious advance toward communism.” But at the 20th Party Congress Mikoyan referred to him only once—and that was to sneer at him. As for Malenkov, at the 19th Party Congress he mentioned Stalin fifty-one times; at the 20th, not even once.

The 20th Party Congress ended officially on February 24, a remarkable ten-day journey that included praise for the Soviet system but also unmistakable criticism of Stalin’s crimes. This criticism had the unintended effect of delegitimizing the whole Soviet system. Every day Pravda ran long reports on the 20th Congress. The newspaper was actually read by some while being used to wrap fish by many others.

At the JPRS these were heady days. Early every morning, with anticipation and excitement, we showed up at Kropotkin’s home. I for one wondered what the idealistic anarchist would have thought about the 20th Party Congress. I was totally absorbed with it—I could imagine nothing in the world that could possibly be more interesting and important. We translated Khrushchev’s opening speech and, a few days later, on February 18, we translated Mikoyan’s and Malenkov’s speeches. At tea time we discussed and debated the speeches—their importance, their underlying message. I suspected that Russia’s political and literary elite were engaged in similar analysis, carefully reading Pravda , checking impressions with trusted friends or colleagues, and asking what was then the unanswerable question—what’s next?

In my diary I made note of two issues especially. I could not help but notice that there were many more editorials than usual, and in all of them Khrushchev was being hailed as a first secretary who believed in the collective leadership of the party. His name began to appear with such extraordinary regularity in the state-controlled media that I assumed editors must have gotten the word—build up Khrushchev! “On the coattails of a vigorous propaganda campaign against a personality cult,” I wrote, “rides the small but growing and powerful personality cult of Khrushchev and his Central Committee.”

It was almost as if the Russian people required a personality cult, a leader of unquestioned authority and power, to help them survive the day-to-day hardships of a lousy, unproductive system. As one cult of the individual was being dismantled, another was already being constructed. One delegate after another lavishly praised Khrushchev’s opening day speech, using the same hyperbole they had heaped upon Stalin only a brief time before.

I also felt that the speeches and the speculation about the 20th Party Congress were only a curtain raiser on developments far more significant looming on the near horizon. “There is something in the air in Moscow,” I noted on February 18, “and it would not be surprising for a big story to break soon. Big, sensational, explosive, and terribly significant. The groundwork is being laid.” At the time I knew nothing about Khrushchev’s final speech to the congress given on February 25; nor did anyone else at the embassy. I simply felt the ground trembling.

It is rare indeed that one speech can change history, but the one Khrushchev delivered unexpectedly on the morning of February 25 did just that. Technically, the 20th Party Congress had ended the night before. Foreign delegates were packing their bags, preparing to leave for the airport and flights home, when they noticed Soviet delegates rushing back to the Kremlin. Khrushchev had summoned them to an emergency meeting. The ax, they feared, was about to fall.

When everyone was seated, Khrushchev, looking “red-faced and excited,” according to one observer, launched into a devastating, four-hour attack on Stalin. It was, wrote Khrushchev’s biographer William Taubman, “the bravest and most reckless thing he ever did. The Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.”

Stalin was guilty of “a grave abuse of power,” Khrushchev charged. He reminded the delegates that during Stalin’s one-man rule there had been “mass arrests” and the “deportation” of thousands and thousands of people. There had also been “executions without trial” that created “insecurity, fear, and even desperation.” Delegates listened in stunned silence.

Khrushchev then reminded delegates of the phrase “counterrevolutionary crimes”—these were “absurd, wild, and contrary to common sense.” Communists, “innocent communists,” had been accused of such crimes, and they had confessed to these crimes “because of physical methods of pressure, torture, reducing them to unconsciousness, depriving them of judgment, taking away their human dignity.”

And Stalin’s role in all this? Khrushchev fingered his former idol: Stalin “personally called in the interrogator, gave him instructions, and told him what methods to use—methods that were simple—to beat, beat, and, once again, to beat.” Stalin governed by “suspicion, fear, and terror.”

One observer later recalled that Khrushchev was speaking with “agitation and emotion.” Another marveled that he “could have brought himself to say such things before such an audience.”

Khrushchev then assailed Stalin’s “mania for greatness.” “I’ll shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito,” Khrushchev quoted Stalin as saying of the Yugoslav renegade. Praise of Stalin was “nauseatingly false,” said Khrushchev. Worse, Stalin “never went anywhere,” Khrushchev charged, “never met with workers and collective farmers.” What he knew about the countryside came “only from films that dressed up and prettified the situation.” Russia was for Stalin a Potemkin village.

But nothing seemed to upset Khrushchev more than Stalin’s astounding misreading of Hitler’s intentions in 1941. The Soviet leader had struck a deal with the Nazi dictator in 1939. The two had cold-bloodedly rearranged the map of Eastern Europe, and Stalin naively believed that Hitler would stick to its terms. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin at first refused to believe the news. He fell into a deep depression, for a time leaving Russia without a leader. The effect on the Soviet military was cataclysmic, the effect on public morale even worse. German troops and tanks cut effortlessly through porous Russian lines. They decimated the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and then Kharkov, and still Stalin did nothing.