The Heart of the Matter

Voice: How did you stand it? Why didn't you kill him?

Khrushchev: What could we do? There was a reign of terror. You just had to look at him the wrong way and you lost your head.

This exchange, which took place during Nikita Khrushchev's historic speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party last February, was deliberately leaked to Western newsmen in Moscow a fortnight later. As a statement of official responsibility during the Stalinist terror, it got to the heart of the matter. But only last week was the Kremlin ready to let the Russian people in on the dialogue -and then only on part of it.

Khrushchev's speech has yet to see public print in Russia.' Abroad, the Communist leaders have had to face disturbed and disillusioned followers familiar with the text of Khrushchev's terrible indictment of Stalin as released by the U.S. State Department. They have had to say that Khrushchev's excuse for complicity in the crimes of Stalin -his own cowardice -is not good enough (TIME, July 2).

In the New York Daily Worker, U.S. Communist Leader Eugene Dennis (long an industrious Stalin bootlicker) put the accusation more mildly than the French and Italian Communists: "Why did these things happen? Were they inevitable? Are they inherent in socialism, in Communist philosophy?" And of the current leadership he inquired: "Did some of them try to bring about changes before the last three years? Could the past evils have been checked earlier? How big and serious are the changes now under way?"

On the Wall. Last week Moscow's Pravda startled its readers by reprinting Dennis' article. It added a footnote explaining that Dennis was commenting on "material which the U.S. State Department has published in the press, calling it Comrade Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress." Spread through three pages of Pravda, pasted on wall newspapers, it was the first official public acknowledgment in Russia of the existence of the speech and the juicy issues it raised. In this backhanded way, though not yet in possession of Khrushchev's chilling facts and figures, Russians could in passing learn much from Dennis ("Nothing can justify the use of tortures and rigged trials, large-scale deportations, provocative and chauvinist actions as in the case of Yugoslavia, the persecution of Jewish doctors . . .").

Only Communist Party members in Russia had been given an inkling of all this earlier. At cell and district meetings couriers from the Central Committee have appeared with a copy of the speech. Short excerpts have been read, which members have been warned not to write down, and the courier has then returned with his precious document. Gradually, from an initial sense of shock, party members have been brought to a state of high hope and expectancy for the future. Last week the Central Committee evidently thought that the time had come to extend its propaganda drive to take in nonparty Russians, and had chosen this oblique way to do it.

In the Future. The questions raised by Dennis were undoubtedly those that would also occur to Russians. Perhaps the Central Committee felt that it could safely risk the questions because it had an answer. Was there a time coming when it would say, in effect: "Acting with extreme party vigilance, we did, in fact, remove Stalin"? Next week the Supreme Soviet will meet and undoubtedly more will be heard then. Presumably to prepare their people for what is to come, Russian papers last week for the first time published Lenin's famous suppressed political testament (known to the outside world since 1926) which warned against Stalin as "rude and capricious."

And so the heirs of Stalin continued their systematic task of tarring Stalin's memory, hoping thereby to justify future allegiance to themselves by showing how determined they were to change all that. Yet nagging questions would remain. If they participated in all of Stalin's crimes when he was alive only out of fear, why did they stand around his bier after he was dead, praising him as the "Great Leader and Continuer of Lenin"?

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