Unhappy Birthday

Twenty years ago last week, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin turned 70, and the Soviet Union celebrated with a birthday party to end all birthday parties. Factory workers and farm hands promised to double, triple and quadruple their production norms as a present to their leader. The Italian Communists sent an Alfa Romeo sports car to the Kremlin, while the French party dispatched a chromium-plated racing bicycle. For the next eight months, Pravda's pages had room for little except birthday greetings.

Four years later Stalin died, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev accused him of "intolerance, brutality and abuse of power." In 1962, Khrushchev ordered the publication of a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that described the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule as one vast slave-labor camp. Stalin's statues, as numerous as trees in the Siberian taiga, were hewed down, and the city of Stalingrad became Volgograd.

Apprehensions and Rumors. This year Russians looked forward to Stalin's 90th birthday with none of the fabricated ardor of 1949, but with some apprehension. Dissidents warned that this decennial might be made the occasion for a full-scale rehabilitation of Stalin, and some feared that this would be accompanied by an increase in repression. They pointed to the gradual refurbishing of the dictator's image as a wartime leader, particularly in such military memoirs as Marshal Georgy Zhukov's. They also noted that the growing movement for civil rights and for increased intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union has led to the arrest and trial of writers and religious dissenters, the harsh treatment of some minorities and cruel treatment of political prisoners.

At noon on the frosty morning of Dec. 21, a group of 20 men and women gathered in Red Square to protest in case any pro-Stalin demonstration was held at the dictator's grave, which is now marked only by a simple marble slab. There was no demonstration, but Stalinism was commemorated in another fashion. One of the leading associates of the dissenting group. Economist Viktor Krasin, was arrested the night before as a "parasite" and sentenced to five years of exile without a formal trial. Afterward, one of the dissidents noted: "Today it is different from Stalin's time. Then nobody knew if he would be arrested. Today, you can keep your ideas to yourself and preserve your integrity. To be arrested, you must be active--and in the open."

The dissidents' worst fears were unfounded. In its birthday editorial, Pravda criticized Stalin for "diverging from the Leninist principles of collective leadership," which resulted in "unfounded reprisals against prominent party, state and military figures." Shorn of its jargon, the statement means that the present collective leadership is not at all tempted to return to the principal feature of Stalinism: absolute one-man rule, reinforced by mass police terror. The men in the Kremlin well know that the Stalinist system would devour those who set it in motion again, as it once devoured tens of thousands of Stalin's colleagues. If Stalin's role as a World War II military leader is being upgraded, the object often is to correct the historical record by balancing the earlier attacks on him. Moreover, while dissenters have been put down, the methods used by today's leaders are not comparable to Stalin's mass terror.

Lavish Homage. Perhaps the only Spot in the Soviet Union where Stalin's anniversary was marked with joy was his birthplace, the squalid little Georgian town of Gori. There, obdurate Georgians, proud of a native son's fame (or infamy), paid him lavish homage. TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud found policemen posted along all the roads to Gori on December 21, stopping all but residents of the town to prevent Georgian jubilation from becoming an unseemly public spectacle.

Admitted the next day, Cloud learned that most of Gori's 15,000 citizens had swarmed into the town square, which is dominated by what may be one of the last statues of Stalin still standing in the Soviet Union. There they feasted, listened to speeches in praise of their departed kinsman and toasted his memory. "You know how it is," a Red Army veteran said. "When someone is alive, he's great. When he dies, they say he never existed. Stalin existed. If he hadn't, there would be Germans in Moscow today."

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