The Body Snatchers

The concluding days of Moscow's 22nd Party Congress were surrounded by a strange air of magic and the supernatural. The long list of speakers ritually cursing Stalin's memory was joined by frail, elderly Darya Lazurkina, who, as a fresh-eyed girl in 1902, had been a devoted pupil of Lenin. She was also one of the multitude of Reds purged by Stalin in 1937, and last week Darya told 5,000 rapt delegates that she had survived 19 1/2 years of prison, labor camp and exile only because "I always had Lenin in my heart and asked him what to do." In the tones of a Delphic priestess, Darya continued: "Yesterday I consulted Lenin again, and he seemed to stand before me as if alive, and said, 'It is unpleasant for me to lie next to Stalin, who caused the party so much harm.' "

The delegates--all followers of dialectical materialism, all sworn enemies of "superstition" and the supernatural--respectfully listened to the message from the spirit world. Even the Georgians, who had been so proud of their native son that when Stalin was first criticized in 1956 they had erupted in protest riots, now joined in his condemnation.

Simple Stone. That night, while Moscow slept, a motorcade of Jeeps, troop carriers and armored cars sped into floodlit Red Square and drew up before the massive red-and-black marble Mausoleum containing the mummified corpses of Lenin and Stalin.* As detachments of fur-capped policemen sealed off the approaches to the square, soldiers descended into the deep crypt, emerged bearing the rigid body of Stalin, clad in a generalissimo's uniform agleam with medals.

In the Kremlin equivalent of a third-class funeral, the body was buried behind the Mausoleum in a cemetery reserved for faintly dubious or dimly famous Red heroes--the folksy ex-President of Russia, Mikhail Kalinin, the ardent Stalinist Andrei Zhdanov, the founder of the secret police. Felix Dzerzhinsky, and U.S. Comrade John Reed. Capping the whole macabre comedy, a vase with twelve white chrysanthemums was placed on the new grave of the man who had just been certified over and over again as a mass murderer.

Promised Monuments. Having reduced the attractions available in the Red Square mausoleum--one of Moscow's top tourist centers--Khrushchev hastened to make up for the loss. He inaugurated a huge, brand-new, Rodin-style statue of Karl Marx, and promised yet another monument--to Stalin's victims. Khrushchev evidently hoped that he had succeeded in laying Stalin's ghost once and for all; that it would no longer roam the Soviet land with a clanking of chains reminiscent of Lubianka prison, or eerie moans recalling the falsely accused thousands who died in Arctic mines and labor camps. Soviet newspapers covered Stalin's move with identical four-line reports buried on the back page.

But the fantastic event--the posthumous revenge on a man who for years had been a demigod--could not be passed over that lightly. For most Russians, the Party Congress and the reburial brought the first solid evidence of Stalin's disgrace, and they talked about it with remarkable freedom. Mingling with the crowd in Red Square on a drizzly afternoon, TIME Correspondent Edmund Stevens listened to the restless, wondering voices.

What About Trotsky? A man in a cloth cap wanted to know why it was necessary to move Stalin's body after all these years. A Red army colonel replied that Stalin could not be left next to Lenin after the public recital of his crimes. "Don't give me that!'' cried the cloth cap. "Don't tell me they didn't know about those things before. They knew plenty. Hasn't Khrushchev been in the Politburo since 1939?" "Agreed," said the colonel. "But only in the past few years has all this evidence been available. The files are enormous, and it takes time to comb through them.''

Near by a student was arguing with a delegate to the Congress about Khrushchev's proposed rehabilitation of certain of Stalin's victims. "What about Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev and the other old-timers who worked with Lenin? Isn't it almost certain that they were also framed?" A voice in the crowd put in: "What about Trotsky?" The uneasy delegate answered: "I doubt very much that he will be rehabilitated--the others, perhaps, but not Trotsky."

Near the Kremlin wall, a middle-aged civilian and a young man with glasses were deep in foreign policy. "The press says we had to resume testing because the Americans are planning to attack us," said the young man. "If that's so, why didn't they attack us back in 1946, when they had the atom bomb but we didn't?" The middle-aged man said that the U.S. was not prepared then. "If they weren't prepared then, what makes you think they're prepared now?" asked the youth. "We can't be sure of the answer," the man replied. "We've got to protect ourselves." To the listeners, the young man said, "It's a dangerous business. What do you know about fallout? What do any of us know? Personally, I don't believe anyone would be crazy enough to start a nuclear war."

Around these groups were other knots of debaters, arguing the merits of everything from music and literature to art and the cult of personality. Talkers and listeners both were so intent that they did not seem to mind, or even notice, when the drizzle turned into a steady rain.

Roomy Tomb. What seemed to be coming under question in Russia last week was the system itself. Unless Khrushchev is prepared again to silence his people, he must give believable answers to the two most trenchant questions about Communism: How could it allow a man like Stalin to seize complete control, and how can it prevent the rise of another Stalin? Khrushchev is trying to show that Stalin's tyranny was the result of one man's villainous character; the Russian people may wonder whether, in essence, it was not really the inevitable result of Communism.

Whatever the doubts and questions, by week's end the roomy tomb on Red Square was once more open to the public, but with Stalin's name as well as his body expunged from sight.

* Before Stalin was removed, this is how the pair looked.

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