DENUNCIATION OF STALIN

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27929, 28 March 1956, Page 13

DENUNCIATION OF STALIN

“Desperate Attempt To Keep Power”

WASHINGTON, March 26. Mr Nikolai Khokhlov, a former Soviet intelligence officer, said that the Russian leadeis’ denunciation of Stalin is a desperate attempt to retain their power. A indicated the revolution had already begun. Mr Khokhlov, who defected to the West in 1954 r.fte’- 13 years in the Soviet intelligence service, gave this advice in an inter iew published today by the magazine. “U.S. News and World Report.” The twentieth .ongress of the Soviet Communist Party in February, he said, “openly and publicly confirmed that dictatorship cannot exist any longer in the Soviet Union. Without publicly saying so. it actually confessed the complete bankruptcy of the Soviet system.”

Some of Stalin s actions and his system of one-man rule were openly criticised by some oviet leaders at that congress. Reports reaching the West since then have said that Mr Khrushchev. the Communist Party secretary, himself denounced *he former dictator as a murderer and a ruler who hurt the Soviet Union.

Mr Khokhlov d scounted the suggestion that the attack on Stalin meant that the present leaders were secure in their posts, saying: “If they were really strong, they could simply have reformed the Government, started a new kind of regime, and explained it all by saying that conditions had changed, and so the Government was changing. They would not have felt it necessary to go to all that trouble of blaming Stalin.”