Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The chief surprise of the general sessions of the party congress was the speech from that old party chameleon, Anastas Mikoyan. It openly criticized Stalin for his disregard of party democracy and his “cult of personality” which insisted on personal adulation and on the constant rewriting of party records and Russian history so that Stalin would always appear as the infallible and clairvoyant leader.

The real explosion came at a secret all-night session on July 24-25 from which all foreign delegates were excluded; those who listened were warned to take no notes or records. In a speech of 30,000 words Khrushchev made a horrifying attack on Stalin as a bloodthirsty and demented tyrant who had destroyed tens of thousands of loyal party members on falsified evidence, or no evidence at all, merely to satisfy his own insatiable thirst for power. All the charges which had been made by anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists in the 1930’s were repeated and driven home with specific details, dates, and names. The full nightmare of the Soviet system was revealed, not as an attribute of the system (which it was), but as a personal idiosyncrasy of Stalin himself; not as the chief feature of Communism from 1917 (which it was), but only as its chief feature since 1934; and nothing was said of the full collaboration in the process of terror provided to Stalin by the surviving members of the Politburo led by Khrushchev himself.

But all the rest, which the fellow travelers throughout the world had been denying for a generation, poured out: the enormous slave-labor camps, the murder of innocent persons by tens of thousands, the wholesale violation of law, the use of fiendishly planned torture to exact confessions for acts never done or to involve persons who were completely innocent, the ruthless elimination of whole classes and of whole nations (such as the army officers, the kulaks, and the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar minority groups). The servility of writers, artists, and everyone else, including all party members, to the tyrant was revealed, along with the total failure of his agricultural schemes, his cowardice and incompetence in the war, his insignificance in the early history of the party, and his constant rewriting of history to conceal these things.

A few passages from this speech will indicate its tone:

“Stalin’s negative characteristics, which in Lenin’s time, were only beginning, changed in his last years in a grave abuse of power which caused untold harm to the Party.… Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his ideas and by demanding complete submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this or tried to argue his own point of view was doomed to be purged and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.… Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people,’ a term which made it unnecessary to prove the ideological errors of the victim; it made it possible to use the crudest repression and utmost illegality against anyone who disagreed in any way with Stalin, against those who were only suspected or had been subjects of rumors. This concept ‘enemy of the people’ eliminated any possibility of ideological fight or of rebuttal. Usually the only evidence used, against all the rules of modern legal science, was the confession of the accused, and, as subsequent investigation showed, such ‘confessions’ were obtained by physical pressure on the accused.… The formula ‘enemy of the people’ was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating these persons.… He abandoned the method of ideological struggle for administrative violence, mass repressions, and terror. … Lenin used such methods only against actual class enemies and not against those who blunder or err and whom it is possible to lead through theory and even retain as leaders.… Stalin so elevated himself above the party and above the state that he ceased to consider either the Central Committee or the party.… The number of arrests based on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes increased tenfold from 1936 to 1937.… When the cases of some of these so-called ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’ were examined, it was found that all their cases were fabricated. Confessions of guilt of many were gained by cruel and inhuman tortures.… Comrade Rudzutak, candidate member of the Politburo, party member from 1905, who spent ten years in a czarist hard-labor camp, completely retracted in court the confession which had been forced from him.… This retraction was ignored, in spite of the fact that Rudzutak had been chief of the party Central Control Commission established by Lenin to ensure party unity.… He was not even called before the Central Committee’s Politburo because Stalin refused to talk to him. Sentence was pronounced in a trial of twenty minutes, and he was shot. After careful reexamination of the case in 1955, it was established that the accusation against Rudzutak was false and based on falsified evidence.… The way in which the NKVD manufactured fictitious ‘anti-Soviet centers and blocs’ can be seen in the case of Comrade Rozenblum, party member from 1906, who was arrested in 1937 by the Leningrad NKVD.… He was subjected to terrible torture during which he was ordered to confess false information about himself and other persons. He ‘was then brought to the office of Zakovsky, who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning ‘sabotage, espionage, and subversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.’ With unbelievable cynicism, Zakovsky told about the method for the creation of fabricated, ‘anti-Soviet plots.’…‘You yourself,’ said Zakovsky, ‘will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you an outline for every branch of the center; you will have to study it carefully and to remember well all questions and answers which the court may ask. . . . Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head, and we will feed and clothe you at the government’s expense until your death.’… The NKVD prepared lists of persons whose cases were before the Military Tribunal and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the punishments. In 1937-1938 such lists of many thousands of party, government, Communist Youth, army, and economic workers were sent to Stalin. He approved those lists. . . . Stalin was a very distrustful man, morbidly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He would look at a man and say, ‘Why are your eyes so shifty today?’ or, ‘Why are you turning so much today and why do you avoid looking at me directly?’ This sickly suspicion created in him distrust of eminent party workers he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw ‘enemies,’ ‘two-facers,’ and ‘spies.’ . . . How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—by application of physical pressure, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this way were ‘confessions’ obtained. . . . Only a few days before the present congress we called to the Central Committee Presidium and interrogated the investigative judge Rodos, who in his time investigated and interrogated Kossior, Chubar, and Kosaryev. He is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and morally completely degenerate. And it was this man who was deciding the fate of prominent party workers. ... He told us, ‘I was told that Kossior and Chubar were people’s enemies and for that reason, I, as investigative judge, had to make them confess that they are enemies.... I thought that I was executing the orders of the party.”