World view

1956: Turning point for Russia - and the World

by Prof. Dr. Türkkaya Ataöv

This year - or to be more accurate, the 25th of February 2006 - is the 50th anniversary of a very important event in Russian and world history. It was on this very significant and important day in 1956, exactly half a century ago, that the process of de-Stalinization was officially announced during the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress. This event helped to remove that semi-god Georgian from the Communist pantheon, thereby changing the course of world history.

At the time, the man and woman in the street - not only in the Soviet Union, but also all over the world - failed to realise the significance of this milestone. Those born on that decisive day are now fifty years old, too young to remember the official announcement and acknowledge its significance. I was then a doctorate student in international relations at the Maxwell Graduate School of Syracuse University in New York, USA. My professor (W.W. Kulski) was of Polish descent and happened to have headed the official Polish Delegation negotiating his country’s treaty with Britain just before the Nazi German attack on September 1st, 1939.  He was the choicest diplomat of his native land and had informed me (and some others) of this de-Stalinization speech, which had been delivered in a closed session and which was only to be made public officially as late as 1989.

The person who had delivered this speech was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971), the (first) General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. He was born in a village, the son of a miner, and worked as a shepherd, locksmith and mechanic, without having the opportunity to learn how to read and write, until he was 25 years of age. He joined the party a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, but in 1939 became a full member of the Politburo, which actually ruled the whole country. He was promoted to first secretary only six months after the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. The liberalization that he expressed in his secret speech to the Party Congress, a striking six-hour marathon, came three years later.

Dramatic ”fabrication”

I was startled by the fury and impulsive reaction of the person at the Four Continent Bookstore in New York, the only shop selling Soviet material, when I asked him for the full text of the “secret speech.” He replied that no such speech had been made and that the whole thing was a fabrication built on news that appeared in a Bulgarian paper. But we knew then that Khrushchev had denounced the Stalin-era atrocities and mistakes, and removed him from the pedestal which he had occupied during his lifetime, when he was venerated alongside the three founding fathers of the movement (Marx, Engels, Lenin), and regarded as equally important.

It was indeed a turning point in Soviet history. The Gulags, the Soviet labour camps, and prisons that housed many political prisoners (and criminals), were emptied out and the monolithic Communist block began to break down. The country gradually allowed foreign visitors to enter, and the dissident movement began. During the years of 1948 and 1953 we had already begun to witness certain developments which portended new challenges to the unity of the movement. The Yugoslavs under Tito proved that Moscow could be unable to reduce a party to obedience. Stalin’s prediction, made during the war-time Allied conference at Yalta, that if he “moved his little finger, there would be no Tito” never materialized. Moreover, the year 1949 brought Mao’s Communist Party, which had been outside the direct influence of the USSR since the early 1930s, to power in such a potentially great country as China.

Khrushchev had arrived at the de-Stalinization decision without first consulting the foreign party leaders, who were taken aback by his choice. Party leaders, who had established their authority mainly on the claim of being Stalin’s disciples were now informed  by the number one ruler in Moscow that their leader was a semi-failure and a total monster. The Congress speech divided the Communist movement everywhere.

The speech had important repercussions at home and abroad. Internally, a cultural “thaw” laid the groundwork first for artistic, and then for political dissent. Ilya G. Ehrenburg (1891-1967), perhaps then best known to Western readers as a Soviet war correspondent and novelist, reflected the discontent of the new generation in his controversial book entitled “The Thaw”. This move toward a Soviet humanism came from a novelist previously known for his zealous conformity to the official policy of the hour. The children of those who had been purged during Stalin’s life-time learned from Khrushchev that their fathers had not been agents or spies of foreign bourgeois imperialists after all. Stalin had committed mass murders, in addition to blunders during the war. His agricultural policy had also been a failure.

Brezhnev, Luxemburg, Hungary

I was the first Turkish scholar to officially spend my two sabbatical years (1970-72) doing research in the Ruıssian/Soviet archives and libraries. It was around the period when  Soviet rule was at its best. I enjoyed considerable freedom, which even extended to mockery of L. I. Brezhnev’s speech at the 24th Party Congress in front of friends at the Academy of Sciences. But some colleagues related stories about the appalling episodes that had occured in the Stalin period.

Although Khrushchev denounced the former atrocities, he attributed them exclusively to the man himself. In fact, such a grandiose misadventure could hardly stem merely from the whims of a single individual. There had to be something wrong with the whole official attitude. This was persuasively analyzed by the leading Marxist thinker and activist, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) in her little known, but important book in German: ‘The Russian Revolution’. The book appeared only a year after the Bolshevik seizure of power. In it, she prophetically wrote: “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of the party – however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently...” This small book represents Luxemburg’s most comprehensive evaluation of the accomplishments and limitations of the regime and her most elaborate defence of the need for revolutionary democracy immediately after the seizure of power and in the ensuing periods.

Khrushchev had sought to save Communism, not to destroy it. But when some native Georgians sprang to Stalin’s defence, some demonstrators were killed in clashes with the  police. Stalin’s remains, placed next to Lenin’s mummy, could only be removed from the monumental mausoleum five years later. A strike in the Polish city of Poznan was forcefully repressed, leaving some dead, their bodies laying on the ground. The slogan that prompted the Hungarian, and later the Czechoslovak, uprising was “Freedom from fear” – these too would be crushed. Khrushchev provoked a pro-Stalinist coup attempt that nearly ousted him in 1957. In the event, his power was taken away seven years later. His exit, nevertheless, proved bloodless, and the transfer of power was peaceful.

Guilt – and the present

Kruschev’s speech might have been motivated, in part, by a sense of guilt at his own complicity. On one occasion, when a Congress member quietly left a little note on his table asking “Why didn’t you raise your voice then?”, he repeatedly inquired as to who had written that question but received no answer, whereupon he appropriately remarked, “I was keeping quiet then, just like you are now.” He saw himself as a reformer and wanted to end the terror that he had himself witnessed to help create a better Communist system. But his radical response to the Hungarian uprising was typically Stalinist, as if he were afraid of his own ideas about freedom.

I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation at the New York Public Library when Khrushchev paid a visit to the United States. I saw him leaving the nearby U.N. building after having made threatening gestures in the General Assembly hall. He said that the children of the Americans would be Communists. His great grand-daughter, Nina L. Khrushcheva is now teaching international relations at the New School for Social Research in New York. She believes that a degree of authoritarian nostalgia exists amongst certain Russian people. Stalin’s photos are a prominent feature of almost every anniversary; public criticism of him is out of vogue. People in many quarters feel that the winds are blowing round again. M. S. Gorbachov, who considers himself to be Khrushchev’s successor, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the epoch-making speech in his private foundation. In any case, whatever Russia became after the 20th Party Congress, it was never Stalin’s Russia. Neither the latter’s inevitable demise, nor the disintegration of the Soviet Union four decades later signifies the bankruptcy of the socialist theory, but only the failure of the so-called “Stalinist model.” It is worth remembering that Khrushchev was the man who put an end to that era half a century ago.                                             

( DIPLOMAT  -  May 2006  -  Ankara )