The Cause of Murder

The four men who were hanged or shot in Budapest last week were not executed in punishment for their crimes, real or fancied. They were killed to alert the Communist world to a major Russian policy decision--a decision so important that Nikita Khrushchev felt obliged to summon four of his principal ambassadors (including ever-smiling Mikhail Menshikov, busy-bee Washington partygoer and TV performer) back to Moscow for conferences, and to call an extraordinary meeting of the 130-man Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.

No one outside Russia could be sure just what political forces were at play in last week's Central Committee meeting; they could only judge by results. But there were many tipsters, ax grinders and self-appointed experts who have long professed to know.

In recent months informed sources in Belgrade and Warsaw have been proclaiming the existence of a "Stalinist" challenge to Khrushchev, allegedly headed by Theoretician Mikhail Suslov. Suslov, a grim-lipped fellow adept at writing manifestoes, may indeed be swimming in trouble instead of in the Black Sea, where Khrushchev said he was. But the evidence that he is the kind of man, or has the party strength, to offer an effective power challenge to Khrushchev is thin indeed.

Warsaw went farthest with this thesis. Over a Warsaw dateline the New York Times recently headlined that the Suslov "faction" had challenged Khrushchev's authority in May, and that Red China's Mao Tse-tung had weighed in on Suslov's side. At the bottom of all of these reports was the conviction--assiduously spread by Nehru and Tito--that Khrushchev was a "liberal" who should be encouraged because he was trying to fight more illiberal forces at home. It was a theory that Khrushchev obviously had no objection to encouraging. But it is a significant fact that by last week the authors of these ingenious explanations had either abandoned them or altered them out of all recognition.

Angered by persistent Peking attacks on his policy of "national Communism," Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito abandoned his former view of the Chinese Reds as a moderating influence on the Kremlin, last week implicitly accused Mao & Co. of being warmongers who boasted that "if 300 million [Chinese] were killed, 300 million would still remain." Gone, too, was Tito's old confidence in Khrushchev as the Kremlin's apostle of liberalism. The bitter new theory is that Khrushchev himself ordered the execution of Nagy and Maleter as a blow against Tito.

The Bubbling Pot. To confirm this thesis, Russia's Czechoslovak stooges all last week were ominously baying that Imre Nagy (rhymes with dodge) had spent the last days of the Hungarian revolt "plotting in the Yugoslav embassy" in Budapest. But the fact seemed to be that Tito, like Nagy and Maleter, was not the real focus of Russian wrath but merely the symbol of a problem that has bedeviled the Soviets ever since the death of Stalin.

Beginning with the East German revolt of June 17, 1953--and the Russians, who set great store by anniversaries, announced the Budapest executions on the fifth anniversary last week of that first satellite uprising--Russia's eastern European empire has been in a continual state of ferment, sometimes bubbling below the surface, sometimes , boiling over into open defiance. Convinced that Stalinist rigidity could not keep the lid on this pot forever, Stalin's successors tried to master the situation by easing up Moscow's pressure on the satellites. In one of history's most humiliating about-faces, Nikita Khrushchev weepingly repudiated Stalinism, paid court to Tito and gave gingerly acceptance to the doctrine of "many roads to socialism." In time, China's Mao Tse-tung followed the Russian lead, proclaimed the wildly un-Marxist doctrine, "Let all flowers bloom."

But liberalization did not achieve any of the objectives that Khrushchev had in mind. The carefully fostered image of a new, "reasonable" Russia weakened but did not fragment the Western alliance, nor did it win the Soviets any significant amount of new ground in the soft spots of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It did not even persuade the cagey Tito to sign up again for full membership in "the camp of socialism."

Worse yet, liberalism proved to have a momentum its authors had not bargained for. To their dismay, the Soviets discovered that the gift of a little freedom simply whetted their subjects' appetite for more. One result: bloody revolution in Hungary. Another: the rise to power in Poland of "National Communist" Wladyslaw Gomulka, who accepted aid from the U.S., reached a modus vivendi with the Vatican, and ruled with the toleration of restive Poles, who did not wish another Budapest.

Even in Red China, where the tiny measure of freedom proffered was hastily snatched back, Mao's government has found itself obliged, according to British intelligence, to "displace" more heretical senior officials in the past six months than in the preceding 8 1/2 years of Communist rule.

"Broken & Bitter." To pragmatic Nikita Khrushchev, what all this meant was that liberalization was a failure and that it was time to revert to a hard line with the satellites. He may have been pushed to this conclusion, but on the record of his career of reversing himself, he was capable of reaching it on his own. In true Communist fashion he chose to serve notice of his decision not in a proclamation but in action--the execution of Nagy, Maleter & Co. Nor did anyone in the Communist world miss the point. Poland's Gomulka, described by his associates as "broken and bitter," saw no one for hours after the news reached Warsaw.

The brutal reversion to a hard line, the declaration of war against those who wave "the pirate flag of national Communism" may have come from a secure sense of devil-may-care strength, but more likely it reflected the size of the crisis that the Russians have to cope with in Eastern Europe, and that China has to cope with among its own desperate population. There might be disagreements in the Kremlin over the means chosen, but there was no sign that any group in the Kremlin openly disagreed with the objective. And there was no sign that Khrushchev had for the moment any cause to fear a serious challenge to his authority.

Last week, on the eve of the meeting at which he presumably spelled out his new policy, Khrushchev airily sent three of his own, hand-picked Central Committee members--as if their votes were not needed--off to a congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. It was significant, too, that the sole publicly announced policy decision taken by the Central Committee was the abolition of the "compulsory deliveries" that Russia's collective farms have hitherto been obliged to make to the state, though other forms of forced sale remain. This was a pet Khrushchev project.

For Export Only. A week before announcing the execution of Nagy and Maleter, Khrushchev had jovially gone out of his way to ridicule rumors of a purge inside Russia (TIME, June 23). He had casually accounted for the whereabouts of the purged Malenkov and Bulganin and the missing Suslov. Another purge victim, ex-Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov, last week turned up conspicuously at the ballet in Moscow.

All of these gestures, just before announcing the executions, may have been designed by Khrushchev to reassure the Central Committeemen that while terror might be necessary to keep the lesser breeds of Eastern Europe in line, he had no intention of reinflicting such methods on the Soviet hierarchy. There is only one major flaw in this design--a flaw that Khrushchev may recognize from his experience as a lackey to Stalin. A policy of calculated terror has one thing in common with a policy of calculated liberalization. Once started, it is almost impossible to keep it within limited confines.

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