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

It was inconceivable that this extraordinary speech could be kept a secret, in spite of all the warnings at its delivery that it must be. Versions of it, some of them softened, were sent out by the Kremlin to foreign party leaders. One of these found its way to the United States government and was published on June 2, 1956. There is not the slightest doubt that the speech is authentic and that almost everything it says is true. But the mystery remains: Why did the Kremlin leaders decide to speak thus of a situation which every student of the subject knew, at least partially, but which could still be denied so long as it was not admitted? One factor in the making of the speech was undoubtedly the determination of the army to clear itself of the unjust accusations made against its officers in 1937-1941 and against the effort to attribute the disasters of 1941-1942 to professional incompetence. Just as the German generals after 1945 wanted to blame their defeats on Hitler, so the Russian generals, with much greater justification, wanted to blame their early defeats on Stalin. But there undoubtedly must have been other causes of which we are not yet aware.

The anti-Stalin speech, like the admission of error in the alienation from Tito, inevitably had an injurious influence on Communism throughout the world, especially in the satellite Powers, and ultimately became the ideological basis for the splitting of these Powers into Stalinist and anti-Stalinist groupings led by Red China and the Soviet Union.

Certain points about this speech are noteworthy. In the first place, all the criticism of Stalin is directed at his actions subsequent to 1934; these are criticized, not because they were vile in themselves, but because they were injurious to the party and to loyal party members. Throughout this speech, as in everything else he did in this period, Khrushchev was working to strengthen the party. Moreover, by directing his criticism at Stalin personally, he exculpated himself and the other Bolshevik survivors who were fully as guilty as Stalin was—guilty not merely because they acquiesced in Stalin’s atrocities from fear, as Khrushchev admitted in the speech, but because they fully cooperated with him.

A study of Khrushchev’s own life shows that he supported Stalin’s atrocities fully at the time, often anticipated them, benefited personally from them, and egged Stalin on to greater ones. In fact, even as Khrushchev in his speech condemned Stalin’s acts which caused the deaths of thousands in the party, he defended Stalin’s acts which caused the deaths of millions in the country. The fault was not merely with Stalin; it was with the system; and, even wider than that, it was with Russia. Any system of human life which is based on autocracy and authority, as Russian life has always been, will turn up sadistic monsters, as Russia has throughout its history, again and again. And the more completely total and irresponsible power is concentrated in one man’s hands, the more frequently will a monster of sadism be produced.

The very structure of Russian life on the authoritarian lines it had always possessed drove Khrushchev, as it had driven Stalin thirty years before, to concentrate all power in his own hands. Neither man could relax halfway to power for fear that someone else would continue on, seeking the peak of power. The basis of the whole system was fear and, like all neurotic drives in a neurotic system, such fear could not be overcome even by achievement of total power. That is why it grows into paranoia as it did with Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Stalin, and others.

During all the struggle for power within the Kremlin, foreign affairs were still actively pursued by the Soviet leaders. The chief event was a change in direction from Europe to Asia which took place in the spring of 1955. The Austrian treaty, the reconciliation with Tito, the stalemate over the German problem, the Warsaw Pact, and the “Geneva spirit” were all parts of a plan to put Europe “on ice” in order to shift attention to Southeast Asia, to India, and to the Near East. This new direction was opened by beginning arms shipments to Colonel Gamal Nasser of Egypt in the spring of 1955 and reached its peak in the so-called Suez Crisis of October 1956. A similar effort in India, seeking to win its support for the Soviet bloc, began with the state visit to India and Burma by Bulganin and Khrushchev in November 1955. This new direction and its consequences will be described in a moment, but it must be recognized that the continuing struggle for control within the Kremlin and the satellite states ran parallel with the growing crisis in the Near East and that both reached the critical stage at the same time in October 1956.

The struggle between the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists within the satellite states and the discontent of the inhabitants with both groups kept public affairs agitated along the whole zone of satellite areas from the Baltic to the Balkans. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” increased this agitation. Pressure on Khrushchev inside the Kremlin to reverse his professed policy of de-Stalinization grew. Khrushchev struck back. On June 2, 1956, the same day that Tito arrived for a state visit to Moscow, Molotov was removed as foreign minister and replaced by Khrushchev’s agent, Shepilov, the editor of Pravda. But the satellite turmoil continued.

This turmoil, which agitated eastern Europe for many years, may be regarded as a series of clashes between Stalinism and Titoism. Neither of these is an extreme pole of dualistic opposition but rather two positions on a number of scales, concerned rather with methods than with goals. Both have as a goal the creation of powerful and prosperous Communist systems, but they do not agree on methods, or rather on the relative mixture of methods to be used to reach their goal. Each sees industrialization as necessary to such a goal, but Tito is, perhaps necessarily, more willing to use foreign investment and foreign technical guidance, if these are free from any political control.

Stalinism in general distrusts all foreign help as spying. Relying on domestic capital accumulation, and determined to raise it speedily, Stalinism puts severe pressures on the peasantry and thus emphasizes collective farms under political pressure, while Titoism is prepared to make much more use of private agriculture and of economic incentives for food production. This entails a slower rate of industrialization and more emphasis on improved standards of living. There are also other, more pervasive, differences. Stalinism insists on uniformity and centralized authority, while Titoism is more willing to allow diversity and collegial control. This, in their terms, is the distinction between a “monolithic block” and “collective leadership”; when the “monolithic bloc” is subject to criticism, it is called the “cult of personality.”

In the satellites, for historical reasons, there are other sharp distinctions between Stalinism and Titoism. The former favors Russian domination, while the latter favors local nationalism. As a consequence, in 1945-1960, the former favored those local leaders who had spent the prewar and war periods in exile in the Soviet Union, while the latter favored the underground fighters who had stayed at home in the Left-wing resistance groups. And, finally, the Stalinists upheld their road to Socialism as the only road, while the Titoists contended there were many roads to Socialism. As might be expected, political oppression and the rule of the monolithic party was associated with the one point of view, while a greater readiness to allow diversity of outlook and coalition regimes marked the other.

There is no doubt that Stalin intended to establish a fully Stalinist system as just described in eastern Europe, “the Zone,” as Seton-Watson calls it. But this could not be done immediately in the chaos of war’s ending. Accordingly, a period of real coalition regimes was established, based on the association of all groups and parties which had resisted Nazism. Most of these groups were made up of peasants, workers, and intellectuals led by a combination of exiles back from Russia and hardened resistance fighters. One of the chief acts of these coalition regimes, in most countries, was agrarian reform, that is, the division of former large estates into the hands of peasant owners.