The Thinking Reed

On the other hand, however, Khrushchev’s report produced bewilderment and a demand for deeper analysis. Explanation in terms of ‘the cult of personality’, not relating the tragic events of the Stalin era to social processes in the country and its political institutions, sounded ‘like mockery of any Marxist analysis of history’.59 This was immediately remarked upon by many people, both in the USSR and also — especially — in the West. The very expression ‘cult of personality’ could not but cause bewilderment. ‘If all the unappealing aspects of Stalin’s rule had been limited to the cult of his “personality”,’ an American scholar observes, ‘there would have been no need for de-Stalinization.’60

The restoration of the truth about many Party leaders who had been executed by Stalin was not accompanied by the rehabilitation of such major leaders of Bolshevism as Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, which in itself signified, in Tucker’s words, a ‘re-falsification of Soviet history’.61 The state’s policy changed, but the structure of the state and the Party remained, on the whole, what it had been under Stalin. ‘To bring back old Bolsheviks and others from Siberian exile’, writes Tucker, ‘does not restore the Party as they once knew it.’62

But the people who returned from the camps and from exile brought the truth about the past with them, and thereby raised new questions in people’s minds.

The freeing of Stalin’s prisoners, writes Boffa,

had psychological and political repercussions throughout the country. By how many the population of the prisons and camps was reduced in 1956 and, in general, after Stalin’s death, is not known. But it is clear that the Twentieth Congress lightened the lot of many millions of people. Under Stalin it was impossible even to mention the concentration camps and exile; not only in the press but in private conversation, too, it was preferable to say nothing about them. Now the sufferers were returning en masse

to civil life, and could talk freely about their past. Some were broken, physically and morally, but others, on the contrary, felt ready to engage in fresh activity, fearing nothing any more, and demanded justice.’63

Among the latter were Kopelev, Gnedin, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov and many others.

It was not possible to organize discussion of Stalinism within the CPSU. ‘Attempts by individual Communists to continue discussion of the problem of the “cult of personality” were cut off’, writes Roy Medvedev.64 But the questions did not go away, and even if the fact that, as Shatz puts it, Khrushchev had ‘offered a most “un-Marxist” interpretation of a quarter-century of Soviet history’65 might remain unappreciated among the intelligentsia, nevertheless the incompleteness of Khrushchev’s explanations and interpretations was obvious. Bukovsky wrote:

Khrushchev seemed to think that he had explained everything, that he had given answers to all the questions. According to Khrushchev, they had got to the bottom of it, released the innocent, spoken well of the dead, and life could go on. But for us, and especially for my generation, the questions were only just beginning.66