Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin in better times (at least for Stalin).
1,233 words
To be men! That is the Stalinist law! . . .
We must learn from Stalin
his sincere intensity
his concrete clarity . . . .
Stalin is the noon,
the maturity of man and the peoples.
Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride . . .
— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Stalin”[1]
Stalin was no longer “the noon” by 1970. The Swedish Academy that year awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose personal experience with Stalinism as reflected in his monumental writings was not so much an occasion of pride. But the next year Left-wing Stalinists were back in vogue, and the Academy awarded the prize to none other than Pablo Neruda, who had penned his nauseating “Ode” shortly after the tyrant’s death in 1953.
It’s worthwhile to note that the Nobel committee chair, Anders Österling, had some initial misgivings about Neruda’s Left-wing politics and his Stalin sycophancy, but was finally persuaded that the Chilean was more deserving of the prize than W.H. Auden, Patrick White, André Malraux, and Eugenio Montale — all of whom were short-listed that year as candidates.
Ezra Pound, whose poetry and legacy dwarfs that of Neruda, was never awarded the Nobel Prize because . . . Well . . . “Österling had previously spoken out against the candidacy of Ezra Pound because he ‘propagates ideas of a nature that is definitely contrary to the spirit of the Nobel prize.’”
The Soviet Union and the Communist International’s (Comintern) official line was relentlessly anti-fascist throughout the early and mid-1930s. The Popular Front of the Comintern called for collaboration by all parties on the Left to combat the threat of fascism, as represented most menacingly by Hitler. On August 23, 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, making the Soviet Union and the Third Reich — which heretofore had been ferocious ideological antagonists — comrades, so to speak. Within a week the Wehrmacht had begun punching its way through western Poland, giving the shell-shocked Poles their first taste of what German rule would feel like.
The signatures on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had also turned on the green light for Stalin to send in the Red Army from the east. After his invasion he dispatched his Gestapo-esque People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) to round up thousands of Poles on the eastern side of the country, ship them in cattle cars to the Gulags, and eventually murder 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Wood in the western parts of Belorussia and Ukraine in 1940. The Poles in 1939, having been encouraged by the Brits — who themselves had nothing with which to back up their commitment to defend the country — to play hardball with Hitler paid the price for their folly and were trapped in a crushing vise of terror, murder, and annihilation.
The Hitler-Stalin pact was, to say the least, extremely disillusioning on the highest scale and devastating to the morale of many true-believing Communists, particularly those in the West who had rallied to Stalin and the USSR because they had seemed as if they were the bulwark against fascism and Hitler. After that it was hard not to conclude that Stalin’s much vaunted anti-fascism had always been cynical posturing and a cover for his opportunism. In reality, the best definition of a “fascist” was “Stalin’s enemy du jour.”
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Stalin continued to disillusion the faithful even after his death. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev stood before his Communist colleagues at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow and denounced his former boss, mentor, and the god of the entire Communist world for his crimes. The facade of the greatest genius in history was now showing some cracks.
To be sure, Stalin’s wily successor was selective in his denunciations. He had to be, since he himself had long been a loyal Stalin lieutenant, and over the years had diligently carried out many of the General Secretary’s lethal initiatives. A survivor of many high-level Party purges, he was stained from head to toe with Ukrainian blood from the 1930s. But Stalin was three years dead by then, and in embalmed repose next to Lenin, and thus the time had come for Khrushchev to take his mentor to task for his creation of the Stalinist “Cult of Personality” and the shabby treatment of his fellow Bolsheviks, many of whom had been framed, defamed, shot, or thrown into the Gulag.
Khrushchev, however, needed to walk a fine line in all of this. To try to take Stalin down completely would have been suicidal for him, since those he was addressing either had long been complicit in Stalin’s dirty deeds, or at the least were the beneficiaries of his system of terror. In fact, Khrushchev was undertaking the very unenviable — some might say impossible — task of trying to extract and expunge Stalin’s long-erected cult of personality from the edifice of Stalinism itself. Moreover, Khrushchev himself was Stalinist to the core, not averse to applying whatever amount of coercion and deceit was sufficient to maintain power. He still believed in the Soviet system that Lenin and Stalin had put in place and the Communist promise of triumph over capitalism, and he would never doubt the Bolsheviks’ exclusive entitlement to total power, crushing those who ever attempted to challenge it.
Stalin’s successors presided over a one-party police state that was still relentlessly Stalinist in its dishonesty, ruthlessness, and jealousy of power. The Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs would all come to know this soon, to their sorrow. Khrushchev’s daring and myth-shattering exorcism was in reality a desperate attempt to square a circle, to double down and load up all the blame for the decades-long Soviet practice of political murder and slavery entirely on Stalin, who was now safely dead, and so purify and legitimize the Party.
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Khrushchev’s speech was a secret one — for the ears of Party members only. The truth — or rather the fractured, self-serving version of it that Khrushchev had conjured up for this occasion — was only meant for his colleagues. It could not be shared with the vast numbers of Russians whose family members had been Stalin’s victims. It was all highly ironic, and the secret was too much to contain. This, too, sent shock waves through the Communist world. Eight months later, the Hungarians tried to throw off their Stalinist masters. In the West, disillusionment with Communism ran high, with defections of the faithful becoming widespread. The Communist Party of Great Britain[2] lost a quarter of its membership in the two years following Khrushchev’s speech.
All in all, Khrushchev’s speech was itself an amazing gesture: an attempt at redemption, a vintage work of Bolshevik deceit. As he stood among Stalin’s accomplices, he made the Communist Party itself out to be a victim of Stalin. Perhaps in some respects he was right. No one, not even the wielders of power and the upholders of Communist authority, could live in a system that was so coercive, cynical, and corrupt and not fall in some way a victim to it.
There is a lesson in this for today. At some point, dishonesty, cynicism, and corruption in a ruling class rise to a level that makes all of its pretenses to legitimacy a sham. Are we there yet?
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Notes
[1] You have to search to find an unexpurgated copy of the “ Ode” that doesn’t omit the most servile lines. It’s also not included in many editions of his collected poems.
[2] Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, translated by Javier Guerrero (Barcelona: Ediciones B.S.A, 2009), 442.
14 comments
Back when Ike sent troops with bayonets to walk colored kids into White schools, everyone should have realized there was no legitimacy and it was all a sham. Too many, living soft lives in Pale enclaves, still refuse to see through the sham. One day, they won’t be able to ignore what I’d guess the majority of readers here picked up a long time ago.
One point we have to give the commies, they kept their countries White. They are the last bastions of European people. For now.
Not Russia. The Soviet identity included millions of non-Whites.
Yes Stephen. We’ve been there for quite some time. Great read as always.
First of all — just to put things in context — let me say that Hitler was a fuzzy kitten compared to Stalin. Just the plain, clear (if not verifiable) numbers, Stalin is responsible for somewhere between 50 million to 100 million deaths of his own people, though Russians were not the great bookkeepers as were the Germans; and they could not possibly have counted all the pregnant women and old babuskas who froze to death alongside the roads in the forced marches during winter, or starved to death or were raped to death in the gulags, and so on. Not to mention the men.
Hitler was a piker compared to Stalin.
Marx/Lenin/Socialism/Communism and Stalin together have caused ore misery to the living and more deaths in supposedly civilized European countries than any other group on Earth — well maybe the communist Mao in China may have killed more, who knows.
But we are talking of supp0sedly white Europeans here — Stalin assuredly killed more of them — our own people.
I first read about Communism in 1984 – 1987 while I worked at the University of Washington in Seattle, and as an employee, was given one free class per quarter, and since it was the height of the Cold War, I chose to study /Russian History to see what the fuss was about. Luckily, I had two fine professors who were probably anti-socialists but never preached to the class, just gave us the facts. The facts are still with me, though, in my lofty age now, the details have slipped somewhat. However, just in reading this post by Mr. Foster, it is all coming back.
And if you really want the details –and if you are up to it — read Alexander Solzhenitsyn — all three volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago”:
Vol. I — 660 pages
Vol, II — 712 ”
Vol. III — 558 ”
Solzhenitsyn was directly in Stalin’s prisons for 8 years of up close and personal experience, and thank heavens he survived to bring us the accurate truth.
And — this is a horrible thing of me to say, but maybe the Jews who arrived in the cattle cars at German camps and were herded immediately to the ‘Chambers’, had the better outcome.
Finally, may I say that it was the study of Russian history, and especially the years of Stalin’s horrific reign, that has landed me at CC.
Thanks for this. I’m glad you came to C-C.
It’s worth looking into the ‘Chambers’ too. CODOH.com is a good place to start. Discussion of this subject is illegal in most of Europe and Canada. The pall of historical censorship is spreading.
The Left has been guilty of astronomically more evil and atrocities than the Right. There is no comparison when reviewing the historical record. And the Left is inherently evil, whereas the Right has only occasionally gone too far in its pursuit of otherwise righteous goals. But, sadly, this is why the Left has mostly won. The Right usually fights cleanly; the Left always fights dirty. The day is fast approaching when the Right will either have to become less morally sanitary, or face the extinction of itself and the final defeat of the causes for which it has fought.
Stalin died before the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” pogrom could be launched. Had events been otherwise, I’d wager that the ‘wily Caucasian’ would join Uncle Wolf in the deepest tier of historiography ignominy.
Considering the US, I don’t remember the source but what the writer said was that the Soviet Union didn’t end in 1991. Rather it moved from Moscow to Washington DC. It strikes me as if this might be true.
Know your history. . . It seems it’s all happening again in the USSA.
Also, some of you might remember this site: http://www.culturecritique.com. It’s back online after a long hiatus.
https://www.culturecritique.com/archive-1/politics/it-s-okay-to-be-angry-now-use-it/
I don’t think the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact made Germany and the Soviet Union comrades, unless you think the US – Soviet treaties SALT-1 and SALT-2 to reduce nuclear arms made the US and USSR comrades. It was like many other treaties signed between countries to avoid conflict. If either country had done what the US did with South America and declared their own version of the Monroe Doctrine, that would have led immediately to war. I have seen one of Germany’s Joseph Goebbels fierce speeches in 1937 condemning the USSR. He said they were raping nuns, murdering priests and burning down churches. The speech was four years after the Holodomor, that killed millions of Ukrainians. While Germany was condemning the USSR, the “allies” were friendly with it.
I think the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was primarily desired by Germany and was meant to keep the Russians from attacking Germany if Germany attacked Poland to take back the land stolen from them at the end of WW I. Hitler made every attempt to resolve the disagreement peacefully, and the English made this impossible when they informed Poland that they would intervene on Poland’s side in any war Poland had with Germany, and only with Germany, not the USSR. Eight days after the treaty was signed, Germany attacked Poland. Hitler was attempting to peacefully resolve things right up to the moment he gave up and finally ordered the attack on Poland. The Poles refused to talk to the Germans, so Germany had to ask the English to pass on any messages. Germany took back Danzig and freed the other Germans under Polish occupation within a few weeks. The British and French immediately declared war on Germany and the USSR stayed out of things until the summer of 1941 when Germany pre-emptively struck the USSR as they had moved huge numbers of forces closer to Germany in preparation for an attack.
The German General and historian Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof presented a fascinating lecture on his book The War That Had Many Fathers (with English subtitles), including a discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRpsfJmtPNg&t=1126s
you think the US – Soviet treaties SALT-1 and SALT-2 to reduce nuclear arms made the US and USSR comrades
Well, the Soviet Union was created, financed and supported, with money, technologies and food, by the West, especially by the US. Untill 1991, and even then the US did not want the collapse of the SU. So the US and USSR were comrades, moreover, the SU was the Golem of the West. Antony Sutton has explained this in his books.
The US was definitely the communists close friend in WW II. If that was still the case after 1945, there would have been no need for SALT I and SALT II, but this completely redirects the conversation away from my original statement that Germany was the most critical of the USSR and the Molotov-Ribbetrop Pact did not make Germany and the USSR allies or comrades.
The US delivered high precision bearings for guiding systems for Soviet missiles in the end of 1960’s. Most of Soviet weaponry would not exist without exported (not stolen, but legally bought) Western technologies. The Cold War (at least after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962) was just an imitation. The anti-Russian sanctions of today are imitation (fake) too, the Russian missiles have 40% of Western electronics.
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