HIDDEN CONFLICT IN THE PARTY CONGRESS

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27916, 13 March 1956, Page 12

HIDDEN CONFLICT IN THE PARTY CONGRESS

RUSSIA'S NEW REVOLUTION—I

[By ISAAC DEUTSCHER]

The twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party was from beginning to end a repudiation of Stalin’s autocracy, and the idea of the single leader at large. This alone makes it an event of extraordinary importance. There was something parodoxical in the circumstance that Khrushchev presided over this spectacle, for it was in i.lalenkov’s heyday that the Stalin cult was in fact undermined. Khrushchev s rise was accompanied by vague attempts to restore the Stalinist orthodo. v and by moves which appeared to be designed to put Khrushchev into Stalin's vacant post. These moves have apparently come to nothing. If Khrushchev did indeed .aspire to become the party’s sole leader, then the collective leadership has so far kept him in his place. He spo- e to the congress with the voice of the Central Committee, but not as the Central Committee’s master. And if it had been his intention to stem the tide of anti-Stalinism. then that tide has proved stronger and has carried him with it some way. The break with Stalinism is now apparent in almost every field of Soviet domestic policy, not merely in the denunciation of the leader cult. It is a deep and radical break, especially in social policy. In a quarter of a century Stalin indefatigably fostered social inequality. He furiously and incessantly fought the “egaliterian heresy” and enforced a system of salaries and wages under which those who earned much could easily earn more and more, while those who earned little had few chances of improving their lot. He was a ruthless guardian of the privileges of the bureaucracy, the managerial groups, and the elite of skilled workers. Social Policy Reversed Consequently, when Khrushchev announced at the congress that the Central Committee proposed to raise the wages and pensions of the lower-paid workers and to cut some of the higher salaries and pensions, he proclaimed a truly sensational reversal of Stalin's social policy. To the mass of the Soviet people this was probably more startling and welcome than even the renunciation of the leader cult. The same is true of the abolition of all school fees for secondary and academic education. For the first time for more than 30 years the rulers of the Soviet Union have now practiea.lv attacked social inequality; and in this most Soviet citizens certainly see an effective guarantee of a progressive democratisation of their regime. Nothing was perhaps more characteristic of the new climate oi opinion than what Khrushchev said at the congress about the degradation of the political police and th i contempt with, which this once dreaded institution was surrounded. Khrushchev even found it necessary to warn his audience that they should not carry their hostility towards the security services too far. Voroshilov, the President of the U.S.S.R., announced that the work on the new criminal code, the promulgation of which was promised in 1953 but repeatedly delayed, was all last completed; that the whole judiciary had been reorganised to ensure “the rule of the law”; and that a new labour code would now be prepared. Together with Stalin's permanent purges and permanent terror, his Draconian labour discipline is thus receding into the past. Forced Labour Camps Closed

At the same time something which was unthinkable only a short time ago has happened: most of the illfamed concentration camps and forced labour camps have been closed without much ado. Many of their inmates have been rehabilitated and given complete freedom. Those not rehabilitated have been allowed to live and work as free men in prescribed areas of settlement. Thus the regime appears to have freed itself at last from (he most prodigious of its abuses and to have thrown off its heaviest load of shame. AH these measures have done much to consolidate the post-Stalin regime and to give it a greater measure of popularity and stability than even party leaders expected. No wonder that they addressed the congress in a mood of genuine confidence and unconcealed relief. The congress responded in the same mood. Yet the oppressive weight of the Stalin era is still felt, and the regime is still far from being the “proletarian democracy” it claims to be. The proceedings of the congress itself testify to that. The congress adopted its resolutions by unanimous vote in accordance with the Stalinist custom which has nothing to do with the Leninist practice now allegedly revived. No open controversy or direct clash of opinion disturbed the smooth flow of the “monolithic ’’debate. Not one of a hundred or so speakers dared to criticise Khrushchev or any other leader on any single point.

Change in Party Regime The change in the inner partv regime consists in the fact that major decisions of policy are now taken not by Khrushchev alone, and not even by the 11 members of the Presidium, but by the Central Committee, which has about 125 members (or 250 if alternate members are included). Inside that body free debate has been restored: and the differences of opinion are resolved by majority'vote. Under Lenin, differences in Central -Committee were not, as a rule, kept secret from the party; and the rank and file freely expressed their own views. This is not the case at present. The Central Committee does not air its differences publicly or in the hearing of the whole party. Only at its higher levels does the party appear now to be managed more or less in the Leninist fashion; but it is still, by and large. ,n the Stalinist manner, though less harshly, that the lower ranks are ruled. This can be only a transitional state or affairs. In the long run the partv cannot remain -half-free, half-slave " The higher ranks will either have to share their newly-won freedom with the lower ranks or they themselves must lose it to a new dictator. In demonstrating hostility towards the un-Marxist leader cult” the congress was anxious to bar the road to a new dictator, whoever he might be. The Rift I have said that the congress witnfsse ,j no open dirert controversy. I should now add that one definite and tundamental controversy did develop at the congress, but it was conducted obliquely in hints and by implication so that only the initiated could follow It. The chief antagonists in that conMflcoyan. Were Khrushchev and Their speeches reflected two different, and in part, sharply connicting trends of opinion. The question over which they divided was this: how much of the Stalinist orthodoxy should the party throw overboard and how much should it preserve? On the answer depend, up to a point the methods of government the party regime, and. last but not least, the country’s spiritual climate. The question has its critical implica I lions. It may be dangerous for the ruling group to try to preserve too much of Stalinism; but it may be equally dangerous to repudiate too much of it. or to do so too abruptly.' The issue is further complicated by' the fact that all the present leaders have been Stalin’s accomplices in one degree or another. Khrushchev’s attitude in this matter j

is one of great caution, not to sa timidity. He has ceased to glorify Stalin. He alludes to Stalin’s vice? and arbitrariness: and he doos this all the more sincerely because he himself i suffered from them in Stalin’s last year. Khrushchev’s career and perhaps even life hung then by a thread But Khrushchev has not. so far. gone beyond allusions, although these are clear enough for anyone to grasp their meaning. He desperately avoids repudiating his dead master explicitly. When he castigates the leader cult, he never mentions Stalin’s name. He is afraid of the emotional reaction I against Stalinism which runs high in the party and in the nation: and he does not wish to encourage that reaction by debunking the dictator’s memory. Beria the Scapegoat He has offered the country a scapegoat for all of Stalin’s misdeeds. That scapegoat is Beria. Yet too many people in the Soviet Union remember that Beria became chief of the political police only towards the end of 1938. and that the great purges, the mass deportations, and the worst outbursts of terror had occurred earlier. He is afraid of “too *much" liberalism, “too much” egalitarianism, and “too many Utopian illusions.” Tough and practical administrator that he it, he looks askance at the party intellectuals who pose too many embarrassing questions and are too anxious to know or to tell the whole truth about the Stalin era. To Khrushchev’s mind they threaten to awaken too many sleeping dogs at once, the sleeping dogs of Trotskyism, Bukharinisni. bourgeois nationalism, etc. —all the heresies which the party canon has condemned and which he. Khrushchev, has no wish to exonerate. Khrushchev’s strongest ally is Kagenovich, who represents the same frame of mind and is even less inclined to renounce the Stalinist canon. They both yield to the new spirit of the time only reluctantly, step by step, fighting all the time Stalinism’s rearguard battle. Militant Anti-Stalinism Mikoyan has come out as the mouthpiece of militant anti-Stalinism. He has been the first and so far the only leader to repudiate Stalin explicitly. He has been the first to say that Stalin's theoretical pronouncement! • which at the previous congress Mikoyan himself had no choice but to hail as the revelations of genius) were so much trash. It is not on Beria that Mikoyan heaps abuse. Instead he told the congress that the evil against which the party was now fighting had taken root long before they knew Beria, in the early years of the Stalin era. perhaps even at its very beginning. While Khrushchev inveighed against Trotzkyists and Bukharinists and other “enemies of the people.” Mikoyan protested against slandering the leaders I of the revolution and of the Red Army as enemies of the people. He mentioned, as an example, Antonov-Ovsc-enko. This was not “a minor and obscure figure,” as some commentators have said. Antonov-Ovseenko was one of the chief leaders of the Bolshevik insurrection of October. 1917; he led then the Red Guards in the storm on the Winter Palace. the scat of the Kerensky government, and he arrested that government. He was one of the first three Commissars of War before Trotzky was placed at the head of the Red Army. He was Trotzky's devoted friend and one of the chiefs Trotz *yist Opposition in the 1920 s. Later he gave up the struggle and surrendered to Stalin, only to perish in the great purges. I knew Antonov-Ovsqenko personally, and I can say that he retained to the end the highest respect and affection for Trotzky. Revision of the Great Trials? Mikoyan, to leave no doubt as to what he meant when he spoke up in defence of this man. denounced roundly the whole “school of law” and the judiciary established since Lenin's death, the “school of law” and the Judiciary which were headed bv Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor in the purge trials of 1936-38. His speech amounted, therefore, to a demand for a revision of those trials and. virtually J?!* a rehabilitation of the Trotzky Zinoviev. Kamenev. Bukharin, k ’ Rakov sky. and others. Moreover, when Mikoyan urged the Congress to wage a “merciless struggle against bureaucratic centralism, and for a full reinstatement of Lenin’s “democratic centralism.” he consciously borrowed these terms, as well as many other ideas and formulae, from none other than Trotzky, who coined them. And it was in an almost ?!? a * ra S t . < ; rist ical ’Y Trotzky ist manner that Mikoyan hinted at. Lenin’s testament. that lost document, unknown to the new Soviet generation, in whicih Lenin had advised the party “to remove Stalin” from the post of General Secretary. Mikoyan’s speech is a remarkable political and human document, if only because he himself had been an ardent Stalinist at least since 1922, long before Khrushchev and Kaganovich loined the Stalinist faction. But while Khrushchev and Kaganovich owed their careers entirely to Stalin, he had ris £ n , ? n the rartv in Lenin’s days, and his mind had been formed In Lenin s school. His speech was something of an old Leninist's recantation V le P ai *t he had nlayed in helping btalin to his ascendancy. It was not a recantation in the familiar Stalinist style. but a genuine, restrained, and only implicit confession of grim and grave errors committed during a lifetime. It was. however, also a confession of Communist faith and of a desire to undo some of the still rampant evils of Stalinism. <World Copyright Reserved.)