Stalin: A Biography

The Congress audience was stunned into silence. Khrushchëv had achieved his purpose: he had made it difficult for his Soviet opponents to attack his leadership and policies without seeming to advocate a reversion to state terror. Yet there was a problem. It had been Stalin who had established the communist states in Europe’s eastern half. By discrediting Stalin, Khrushchëv reasserted a line of legitimacy in the Soviet Union stretching from Lenin and the October Revolution. This was not the case in eastern Europe, where it was Stalin who had installed communism. Khrushchëv’s report was political dynamite there. Strikers organised protest demonstrations in Poland. By October 1956 a popular revolt had broken out in Hungary.

Opponents of reform struck back in the Party Presidium in June 1957, calling for Khrushchëv’s removal as Party First Secretary. But the Central Committee protected him and, after years of further struggle, he delivered a still more devastating attack on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961. Old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina was given the podium. Bent with years, Lazurkina told how the shade of Lenin had appeared in a dream to her demanding to rest alone in the Mausoleum on Red Square. This sentiment evoked tumultuous applause. The deed was done at dead of night and Stalin’s embalmed corpse was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried below the Kremlin Wall; a simple bust and pillar were placed above his grave only years later. The historians were ordered to search the archives for proof that Stalin had frequently fallen out with Lenin and always behaved brutally. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. The Lenin cult was joined by a growing cult of Khrushchëv. A new party-history textbook appeared in 1959.¹⁰ Those communists who admired Stalin kept quiet or risked expulsion from the party ranks. Only a few communist parties abroad dissented. Chief among them was the Communist Party of China. Mao Tse-tung had resented Stalin in life but thought Khrushchëv’s policies of reform made too great a rupture with the kind of communism espoused by both Stalin and Mao. This contrast added to the tensions, leading to a rift between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.

Khrushchëv was removed from power in 1964. The Party Politburo (as the Presidium was renamed) ditched the more idiosyncratic of his policies at home and abroad; it also stifled dissenting opinion more harshly than under Khrushchëv. But this was a modification of Khrush-chëv’s programme rather than a reversion to full Stalinism. The new Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev never contemplated terror or individual despotism. ‘Stability of cadres’ became a slogan. Behind the scenes, however, the Politburo seriously considered rehabilitating Stalin’s historical image in 1969 on the occasion of his birthday. A laudatory Pravda editorial was prepared. Only a last-minute intervention by Italian and French communist party leaders prevented publication. (This was too late, however, to stop the Mongolian Communist Party from printing it as Ulan Bator lies in an earlier time zone.)

Yet the desire to rehabilitate Stalin persisted. In July 1984 — less than a year before Mikhail Gorbachëv came to power — the Politburo mulled over the question. The older members retained affection for him and hostility to Khrushchëv:¹¹