The Thinking Reed

which damped and muted the splendid promise of the Twentieth, there was no way of foreseeing the sudden fury, the reckless eloquence of the attack on Stalin which Khrushchev would decide upon for the Twenty-Second! Nor, try as we might, could we, the uninitiated, ever explain it! But there it was — and not even a secret attack, as at the Twentieth Congress, but a public one! I could not remember when I had read anything as interesting as the speeches at the Twenty-Second Congress.179

In connection with the Twenty-Second Congress, Giuseppe Boffa writes:

whatever Khrushchev’s intentions may have been when he organized the anti-Stalin polemic, its influence in the country was even greater than at the time of the Twentieth Congress. While the limits of criticism stayed as before, this criticism now came not only from above, it corresponded to a new mood which had developed among the intelligentsia, the youth, the former inmates of the camps and prisons: society was better prepared to assimilate its conclusions. The official ideology was momentarily thrown on to the defensive.180

In his report Khrushchev frankly recognized that there were in the Party ‘forces which clung to the old and resisted all that was new and creative.’181 Although he was talking about the period of the Twentieth Congress it was clear that those forces had not disappeared, even if Khrushchev did not say that. At the Twenty-Second Congress Stalinism was no longer reduced to one man’s mistakes, to the personality of Stalin. Some of the accomplices of the ‘leader and teacher’ were mentioned by name. In his address Shvernik spoke directly about the doings of ‘the dogmatists and splitters Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Voroshilov, Bulganin, Pervukhin, Saburov and Shepilov’.182 He spoke, too, about the role that Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich had played in the repressions. For the first time such exposures as these were uttered openly and published in many copies. The facts of Stalin’s crimes were given documentary confirmation by the Party leadership itself.

Although Khrushchev realized that the exposures ‘might arouse a certain bitterness and even discontent… among the people’,183 and in spite of the obvious crisis in the confidence felt by ‘those below’ in ‘those above’, he stressed the need to continue along the road of de-Stalinization. Stalin’s corpse was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and the monuments to him which still stood in some places even after the Twentieth Congress were taken down. Pravda published Yevtushenko’s poem The Heirs of Stalin, and Novy Mir published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The appearance of this novella in 1962 produced a lively discussion. ‘It is hard to realize that only a year ago the name of Solzhenitsyn was unknown to us,’ wrote Lakshin.

It seems now that he had long been there in our literature, and without him it would emphatically have been incomplete. Each new story of his, whether praised or abused by the critics, leaves no reader unmoved. People talk about him, quote him, judge him with a sort of special exactingness which is unusual for our literature and is the first sign that we have really been moved and disturbed.184