Death & Deviation

In the world's chancelleries the No. 1 item of wonderment was the Soviet Union's unflaggingly active and aggressive foreign policy in the face of convulsive disorder within the Communist Parties. While the West grappled with problems created by Soviet diplomacy, the process of destroying the legend of Joseph Stalin was causing obvious and increasing confusion in Russia and the satellite states. If the Soviet Union had not yet found it necessary to make policy concessions on this account, it was because the West had not yet discovered how to exploit a state of disorder, which may even reflect a critical weakness.

The only people who seemed to have put destalinization to some advantage so far were some deviationists in Russia. In a burst of articles the Moscow press last week revealed that party meetings called to criticize the "cult of personality" frequently became critical of the party itself. Said Pravda: "We cannot disregard the fact that some rotten elements are trying to make use of criticism and self-criticism for all sorts of ... anti-party assertions [and are] repeating the hackneyed, slanderous inventions of the foreign reactionary propaganda."

Pravda attacked a number of local party officials and Scientists Avalov, Orlov, Nesterov and Shchedrin for "slanderous statements directed against the party's policy and its Leninist foundations." Singled out for his "provocative, antiparty" attitude was Economist L. D. Yaroshenko, whom Stalin himself denounced for "Bukharinism."

Thus the present "collective leadership" indicated that not only were there deviationists at work in Russia, but showed itself almost as nervous about them as Stalin had been about Bukharin (whom he had executed). Warned Pravda:

"The party has never tolerated and will not tolerate petty bourgeois licentiousness . . . The party cannot permit the freedom of discussing problems to be interpreted as freedom to propagate views alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism."

Well might free discussion worry the Communist leaders; when they talked of Stalin's great crime, the obvious question to them was, "Where were you?" and the only answer was, "We were afraid." Such a confession of cowardice, and the implied admission of complicity in Stalin's crimes, hardly enhanced their claims to be leaders of men.

The Great Rewrite. One of the chief side effects of the Great Rewrite of history is the rehabilitation of former "Titoist criminals," dead or alive. Among last week's subjects for party absolution was Traicho Rostov, a Bulgarian Communist who had shocked his judges and been hissed in court when he denied having made the 32,000-word "confession" of traitorous acts presented at his trial in 1949. Last week it seemed that Rostov, who had been duly hanged, was really innocent all along.

In Poland ex-Deputy Prime Minister Wladyslaw Gomulka, arrested at the height of the anti-Tito campaign but never brought to trial, was released from prison along with dozens of other postwar Polish Communist leaders. "This does not mean," said Party Secretary Edward Ochab, "that the party subsequently approves of his political opinions. We admit, however, that his arrest was unjustified." Ochab followed through with a slashing attack on the "cunning sophistry" of Stalin, whom "we regarded as the model of revolutionary virtue."

The speed with which the curtain of murderous secrecy was being torn from past Communist pretension was making fools of foreign Communist leaders. In Rome Palmiro Togliatti, facing a lethargic Italian Communist National Council meeting, swept his arms towards a picture of Stalin hanging on a marble column, shouted: "They say we have dethroned a saint. I say to them we have never had saints ... He has conquered his place in history ... as builder and defender of Socialist society."

In Red China there was a belated and cautious reappraisal of Stalin. The former great leader, said the People's Dally, was "conceited and not circumspect," his thinking "subjective and one-sided." He carried the "extermination of counterrevolutionaries to excess" and showed "lack of necessary vigilance'' on the eve of World War II. Reprinted in Soviet newspapers, this criticism was the first public statement in Russia (as distinct from party briefings) of Stalin's guilty incompetency in World War II.

Visiting Stockholm last week, aging (71) Hungarian Communist George Lukacs added a grim footnote to Pravda's recent belated praise of Bela Run, famed leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution of 1919. Bela Run, whose fate has been one of the mysteries of international Communism, was secretly tried and executed by Stalin's order in 1938, said Lukacs. Wiped out with Bela Run, he added, were a hundred other Hungarian Communists and "the entire Polish Communist leadership" numbering several hundred men. According to approving George Lukacs: "The Russians are now going to rehabilitate their victims in enormous numbers, dead or alive . . . Every single case must be reviewed," a job likely to take "quite some time because their number is staggering."

In Communism's strange and dark world, unmasking yesterday's lie does not establish the truth of today's correction. More is involved in this great upheaval than a pious desire to redress the memory of dead comrades. The outside world can only guess at what conflict of motives inside the Kremlin drives its leaders to a reckless unraveling of the past, but does know that it is a dangerous game--the kind that usually calls for victims.

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