The Turning Point

The history of the Soviet Union had a crucial turning point where the interweaving of ideology and power reached a crisis. It is worth dwelling on it at length.

Stalin left his successors a paradoxical and baleful legacy.

But how were they to do this? In a country where many people lived with a small suitcase permanently packed, in case they should be arrested and separated forever from home and family, anxiety and distrust were at a very high level, from which not even the very highest officials were exempt. To fears about physical safety were added the daily pressures of living in crowded apartments and dealing with con­stant though unpredictable shortages of food, clothes, and other supplies.

In these circumstances, members of the ruling party Presidium, though they declared themselves a “collective leadership,” agonized and fought among them­selves over how to deal with the situation, and above all with the terrible legacy of Stalin's massive crimes. On one matter they were all agreed: they arrested the de facto head of the security police, Lavrentii Beria, secretly tried him for “violation of the norms of party life,” and had him shot. In that way they removed the individual most likely to become a second Stalin.

At the same time, the Presidium downgraded the security police (now renamed KGB), reduced its staff, and brought it under Central Committee control. In the effort to reduce the operation of terror, they introduced the concept of “socialist legality,” and abolished vague legal concepts such as “enemy of the people” and “ter­rorist intentions,” which could be exploited to convict almost anyone. Law courts were instructed to observe stricter procedures, for example by declining to convict on the evidence of confession alone.^[2738]

That was not enough, though. The question remained: How far should the leaders reveal Stalin's crimes to a wider public, explain them, and cleanse themselves of complicity? In 1955 a Central Committee investigation was launched to obtain more facts, and it came up with the horrifying revelation that in 1937-1938 alone, 1,548,366 people had been arrested for “anti-Soviet activity” and 681,692 of them had been shot.^[2739] Even Stalin's colleagues, though they had signed death sentences alongside him, had probably not hitherto realized the full extent of his enormities. Now, on the eve of the twentieth party congress in February 1956, the first to be held without Stalin, they had to decide how much to reveal about his “cult of personality” and how to present it. Total concealment was dangerous, Anastas Mikoian argued. “If we don't reveal this and someone else does, without waiting for a further con­gress, everyone will be justified in holding us fully responsible for the past crimes.” On the other hand, if they delivered an honest report, Mikoian urged, people would understand and forgive them, knowing what pressure they had worked under.^[2740] He was proposing something halfway to a “truth and reconciliation commission.”

His colleagues considered him too optimistic.

Only subsequently was a written version of the report compiled and distributed to party committees. (As a result, we still do not know exactly what Khrushchev actually told his audience.) Nothing was published in the newspapers (hence the term “secret speech”). The discussions which followed at the local level showed that party members were dissatisfied both with the content of the report and with the way in which it had been delivered. They raised the crucial issues of how such ter­rible mistakes and crimes had become possible, who was guilty, and what measures should now be taken to prevent any repetition. In Leningrad one scholar, a party member since 1920, wrote to the Central Committee denying that Stalin alone was responsible and declared, “We must consider the historical fact of autocracy (edinovlastie) in the Soviet system a great tragedy for us Communists and for the mass of people.... It is not enough to listen to the report and then leave, hanging one's head.” He urged an open tribunal to reveal and judge Stalin's crimes, followed by broad discussion about how to prevent their recurrence.^[2743]

Khrushchev hoped he had achieved closure on the subject, while at the same time diverting blame from himself and at least some of his closest colleagues.

Repercussions in the “outer empire,” the Warsaw Pact countries, were even more dramatic. The populations there were still discontented at the way they had been forcibly Sovietized after World War II. In Poland engineering workers went on strike to demand an end to Soviet occupation of their country and the freeing of Cardinal Wyszynski, leader of the Catholic Church, currently under arrest. The Polish United Workers Party^[2746] Central Committee held an emergency meeting. Khrushchev flew in uninvited and eventually hammered out a compromise agree­ment under which Poland would be given a modicum of latitude to determine its own form of socialism, on the condition it remained a member of the Warsaw Pact. Most of agriculture, local services, and retail trade remained in private hands, the Catholic Church gained the right to conduct religious tuition in schools, and lim­ited representation of a Catholic political party (Znak) in the Sejm (parliament) was permitted.

In Hungary events took a much more abrupt and tragic turn. Imre Nagy, who came in as prime minister, acceded to the demands of huge worker and student demonstrations. He abolished press censorship, proclaimed a multiparty system with genuine elections, and announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) there was no equivalent upheaval. Discontent was measured by the increasing number of people who fled the country through four-power occupied Berlin, many of them young and well-qualified. In 1961 the GDR authorities erected a wall along the boundary of Berlin's Soviet sector in order to prevent further flight.

Another attempt at reformed socialism, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, was also cut short by a Soviet invasion, even though the new party leader, Alexander Dubcek, tried to remain loyal to the Soviet Union and had no intention of quit­ting the Warsaw Pact. The “Brezhnev doctrine,” enunciated to legitimize the invasion, stated that, once a country had made its “socialist choice,” its brethren from other socialist countries could not allow it to slip back into capitalism. This doctrine flowed naturally from the Cold War confrontation with the United States, and from the ideological axiom that history was uni-directional and was being guided by the CPSU. The attempt to enforce the Brezhnev doc­trine in Afghanistan in 1979-1988 led to an attritional guerrilla war which undermined the cohesion of the armed forces and the Soviet population's faith in their leaders.