Design for K

Foreign Communists everywhere, in their hour of distress, are crying for a "true Marxist analysis" of First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's sensational speech (TIME, June 11) at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. Last week they got the beginnings of one from Marxist Pietro Nenni, leader of the Italian Red Socialist Party. It struck with shattering force into the foundations of the "back to Lenin" movement which Khrushchev, Tito et al. are promoting as a substitute for Stalinism.

In a lengthy article in his party journal Hondo Operaio, Nenni called the Khrushchev speech "the gravest and most dramatic document in the Communist literature of the world." Through most of his article Nenni refers to Khrushchev as "K," as though he were a symbolic figure in a Kafka fantasy. "From the revelations of K," says Nenni, "we learn that the guest of the Kremlin appears to have been practically a maniac who, like the figure of the dictator in which Charlie Chaplin portrayed Hitler, 'drew plans on a map of the world.' K cannot contain his laughter at and contempt for Stalin's military genius. Of the historical and military films of Stalin he says that 'they make us sick.' The snag is that on those films, on those books, on those poems there was organized the most vast propaganda hoax in the memory of the world."

Unjustified Terror. Nenni sees "one of the main results of the K report to be the fact that the polemic on the cult of personality no longer makes sense." Why? Because it lacks "any historical reconstruction of the moment in which all power was transferred to Stalin." In Nenni's eyes, K is obviously a crude apparatchick incapable of making a proper "Marxist analysis." Asking how and why Stalin grabbed his despotic power, Nenni dismisses Khrushchev's explanation that Khrushchev and his gang "saw these problems in a different way at different times." Says Nenni: "This answer may be valid in a strictly personal sense. It is not valid for the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. It is not valid for the Politburo . . . They had been placed in posts of responsibility precisely for this purpose, precisely to face difficult situations." Then Nenni comes to the point: "The massacres disclosed by Khrushchev involve responsibilities that were not Stalin's alone, but of the whole directive apparatus. Terror, in conditions of time and place not justified by necessity, was the price paid for the suppression of all democratic life inside the party and the state." Like Khrushchev, Nenni feels that at the time of the 1917 Revolution terror was justified: "It is a fact that the October Revolution would not have gone beyond the phase of civil war . . . if the proletariat had not shown indomitable will and the ability to take control of the apparatus of power of the Czarist state, to smash it, and to provide a substitute." But here Nenni runs into the dilemma of all Marxists: Once terror is accepted as a legitimate arm of government, how is it brought under control? The whole trouble, admits Nenni sadly, stems directly from the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Democratic Necessity. As a self-appointed latter-day master of Socialism and theory, Nenni has his own solution for the future of Marxism. It is not that of Khrushchev, whose Leninist slogans for reform within the 'Soviet party Nenni scathingly describes as."fine declarations which, when Stalin was alive, were made a hundred times by Stalin." Nor does he think much of Khrushchev's vaunted collective leadership. "If in the collective direction . . . there is progress compared to personal direction there is nevertheless no guarantee of democratic life."

With a superior air Nenni makes a superior rationalization: "Now the whole problem of Soviet society and of the popular democracies that have followed in its footsteps is reduced to the necessity for internal democratization, for the circulation of ideas, in a word, for political liberty. It is substantially a question of [permitting] free political initiative of the citizen, without there hanging over his head the accusation of being an enemy of the people, a deviationist or a saboteur every time he tries to give weight to his own personal and independent valuation of the path to be followed."

Having demolished K, and cast doubt on the sincerity of the Soviet leadership, Nenni then proceeds as if the Communists were all suddenly reformed characters. He sees a "tendency in Moscow to assume toward the other Communist parties in the world a position of detachment." He finds that the Tito-Khrushchev declaration "sanctions the principle of the multiplicity of the Socialist experiments" and gives "liberty of action on the basis of . . . their respective degrees of development." In the end, getting back into line, Nenni calls for the "consolidation of Socialism" in the march towards a common goal.

Contempt Returned. The force and violence of Nenni's criticism was a clear indication of how deeply Khrushchev's secret speech has shattered the loyalty and discipline of Communists and fellow travelers in the outside world. In Nenni's voice, as in Togliatti's, in Thorez' and in Howard Fast's, was a whining complaint that they had not been kept informed. French Communists last week insisted that they still have not got the full Khrushchev text, and publicly proclaimed their embarrassment at having to depend on the "bourgeois press" to learn the truth about Stalin. Did they fear that they were about to be left behind in some gigantic Russian maneuver to work with bigger game--the genuine Socialist parties? More probably, Khrushchev in his famous speech had responded to a desperate internal situation in the Russian leadership, and in doing so had left foreign Communists to get out of their difficulties as best they could.

Either way, Khrushchev plainly demonstrated a contempt for foreign Communist leaders. The most remarkable characteristic of their agonizing responses is a feeling--most conspicuous in Nenni--of contempt returned: of men who fancy themselves skilled Marxist dialecticians, who think Khrushchev botched everything by a heedless attack on Stalin. The Togliattis and Thorezes and Nennis have been in party leadership longer than Khrushchev and think themselves better able to confront "difficult situations." Implicit in their speeches and writings is a holding back, an awaiting of further developments. Wrote Nenni last week: "It is difficult to say where a crisis so profound as that stated by the 20th Congress . . . may lead, as now we only see the first manifestation." What other manifestations are in store? The clever Nenni seemed to be suggesting that the situation in Moscow may be fluid enough to wash away the bungling K.

If this is true, the disregarded foreign leaders of Communism, past masters at the art of foreseeing and accommodating themselves to Moscow's changes, may prove themselves smarter than Tito, who conferred his blessing on the Khrushchev regime too cheaply and too soon.

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