21st CONGRESS Stalinist Die-Hards And Mao Tse-Tung

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28805, 28 January 1959, Page 11

21st CONGRESS Stalinist Die-Hards And Mao Tse-Tung

IBy ISAAC DEUTSCHERJ LONDON, January 17.—The “dialectally contradictory” and ambiguous outcome of all the recent struggles showed itself strikingly in the December sessions of the Central Committee and of the Supreme Soviet, which were convened in preparation for the Congress. An immense amount of new legislation was placed before these two bodies. Nearly all of it has been designed to demonstrate that the break with Stalinism is continuing, is deepening, and is spreading to ever new spheres of Soviet life.

The new Seven-Year Plan does not aim only at approaching the level of American industry. Its special feature is the new emphasis on the need for the “harmonious** development of producer and consumer industries; and this has necessitated some slowing down in the rate of the over-all development The plan makes important concessions to consumer interests. It also marks a further departure from Stalin's anti-egalitarian policy: it provides for a steady narrowing of the gap between high and low incomes; and for a shortening of working hours in industry, and the gradual introduction, within the coming decade, of a working week of 30-35 hours. School Reform

In apparent contrast to this egalitarian trend is Khrushchev’s school reform, also passed in December, which partly curtails universal secondary education. The truth is that the Soviet educational system has, in its unparalleled growth, run ahead of the social system as a whole and has outrun the nation’s resources. Every year millions of young people, their secondary education completed, knock at the doors of the universities and are turned away. The universities, where expansion cannot possibly keep pace with expansion in secondary education, have been unable to accommodate so many candidates; and the rush of the young to the universities has threatened to starve industry of manpower. Khrushchev is now chasing the mass of Soviet youth from the university gate to the factory bench: and he is anxious to stop the rush to the universities at an earlier stage - at the secondary school. But he has met with widespread, and more than usually articulate, opposition; and he has had to compromise. He has increased this year’s

budgetary grants for education by as much as 5Q per cent., declared that the retrenchment in secondary education is only temporary or denied that there has been any retrenchment; and he has had to dwell on the egalitarian character of the polytechnical school where theoretical education is to be combined with productive labour. New Criminal Code

The principle of de-Stalinisation. however, has been most strongly in evidence in the new Criminal Code, which its sponsor introduced to the Supreme Soviet as an act of legislation designed to “liquidate the shameful heritage of the past.” The Code has been under debate foi many years; and it is the resultant of conflicting viewpoints. It does not go as far as the most liberal of Soviet jurists had expected, but it does go a very long way towards transforming a police state into a state “ruled by the law.” The Code deprives th' political police of the powers to sentence, imprison, and deport citizens. No-one is to be sentenced otherwise than by a normal court in open trial. Penalties are reduced.

Guilt by association, the “category” of the “enemy of the people.” the co-responsibility of the defendant’s relatives, the penalty of the deprivation of citizenship, and many similar features of the old Code are abolished. No defendant must be charged with “terrorism’* unless there is prima facie evidence of an actual attempt at political assassination.

Under such a Code it would have been impossible for Stalin ever to produce his uni vers concentrationnaire, to stage any of his great purges and the Moscow trials, and even to deport Trotsky. As if to stress the meaning of the Code, General Serov, the grim old

policeman, has been replaced, as Chief of State Security,, by the former Comsomol leader Shelepin. “Ghosts of Great Purges”

Yet—and here is the greatest paradox—the ghosts of the great purges seemed to be crowding back into the Central Committee’s conference hall in December, when Bulganin made his confession of guilt, denouncing Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, and extolling Khrushchev’s infallibility; and when the Central Committee rejected his confession as hypocritical and inadequate, and Rudenko, Vishinsky’s successor as State Prosecutor, spoke about the “crimes of the anti-party group.” The spectacle was staged in order to bring pressure to bear on Molotov and his associates and to make them appear before the 21st Congress in sackcloth and ashes, with confessions similar to those that Stalin’s adversaries were once forced to make. We were back if not in 1936, the year nf the Zinoviev trial, then at least in 1930-34.

Why does Khrushchev need these confessions? and will Molotov and his friends make them? Khrushchev’s purpose is to break their morale and expose their weakness; but until now they have evidently not yet “laid down arms.” From their retreats they have continued their “factional activity.” trying to rally their followers and attacking Khrushchev’s policies. Khrushchev feels that his armour is not without chinks and that he cannot afford to ignore the attacks. He has not made his position easier by promulgating the new Criminal Code. Tn order to chastise his adversaries in Stalin’s manner, he would have to tear up that Code—otherwise his hands will be tied. Will he dare to tear it up? What the Stalinist die-hards are fighting may be only a rearguard battle, historically; but for the time being their strength is by no means negligible. We have seen that to keep them at bay Khrushchev has had to press on with his anti-Stalinist reforms but also to try to steal Molotov’s thunder, to strike at the revolutionists, to break with Tito, to acquiesce in the execution of Nagy, and so on. As long as he rides from success to success, this may be enough. The Stalinist diehards cannot come back.

Sputniks, industrial records, and bumper harvests (obtained

mostly from “virgin soils”) have bolstered his prestige. But he may run into trouble if he fails in any of his daring reforms—if the fat years in farming are followed by lean ones, if the peasants, emboldened by his concessions, raise their demands (as they have been doing here and there), if the workers’ discontent with the still desperate shortage of housing grows more acute and vocal, or if once again something goes wrong in Eastern Europe. Of all these possibilities, on which Molotov and his associates bank, none is perhaps more real than that of a setback in farming. Khrushchev has staked much on the success of his slogan “Catch up with American per capita production of meat.” Meantime the advance in farming, though considerable, has been far slower than he expected it to be; and a setback might jeopardise the industrial targets of the SevenYear Plan and most of his social policies. Encouragement from Mao However, all this does not account fully for the timing and the ferocity of the attacks on the “anti-party group.” What has raised Khrushchev’s ire and alarmed him is the circumstance that the Stalinist die-hards appear to enjoy a measure of encouragement from Mao Tse-tung or his entourage. (Molotov has probably found his Embassy in Mongolia a convenient vantage point for establishing close contact with Peking; and this may explain the rumours about his tr- nsfer to the Hague, where he would be cut off from both his Soviet following and his Chinese well-wishers. The reasons which have enduced the Chinese leadership to make the somersault from the antiStalinism of the “hundred flowers” to their present dogmatism, and which prompt them to favour Khrushchev’s adversaries, cannot be gone into here. Mao may be lending support to Molotov from motives either of principle or merely of tactics. However that may be, his role is no less curious and self-con-tradictory than ■ Krushchev’s: his very defence of the Stalinist diehard leads him to criticize the near-Stalinist manner in which Khrushchev deals with them and to uphold against him the principle of collective leadership. This is a decisive factor in the present tension between Peking and Moscow, a tension the symptoms of which are unmistakable. When

Khrushchev denounces Mao’s Peoples’ Communes as “reactionary” to the American Senator Humphrey, and when Mikoyan does the same and speaks of Chinese “hotheads” to Wall Street bankers, relations between Moscow and Peking are in a very critical state indeed. “Notice of Reprisals” Mao cannot fail to protest to Khrushchev against so flagrant a violation of accepted ru.es of comradeship; and Khrushchev’s and Mikpyan’s strictures are meant to serve notice of the reprisals with which they may retort to Mao’s intervention in the internal Soviet struggle. At this very moment the exchange of some fairly vehement message is probably going on between Moscow and Peking. Nothing may be said about this during the open proceedings of the 21st Congress; but the topic will certainly be thrashed out in secret session.

The omens point towards a breach between Moscow and Peking which would, of course, be far more momentous than any rupture between Moscow Belgrade has ever been or could be. Precisely because of this. Khrushchev and Mao may still shrink from bringing the conflict into the open; and if they are, nevertheless, driven to take the fateful step, they must then strive to keep relations between their governments, and their military alliance, as little affected as possible by the controversey between the parties. The anxiety to keep apart these two aspects of Soviet-Chinese relations, may indeed have led Mao, deeply involved as he is in the ideological differences, to resign as head of state and to confine himself to his role as the party’s leader. But will it be possible to keep the two aspects apart? And, regardless oi this, the open division of international Communism into three distinct wings: the Titoist “revisionist right.” the Maorist left or “ulraleft” and the Khrushchevite “centre,” would finally destroy the “Monolithic” character of the entire movement.

Can Moscow risk such a division? It may take some time before we learn what, if any, is the answer of the 21st Congress to this question. But this, undoubtedly, is the gravest issue, at once, domestic and international, by which the Congress is confronted. —(Copyright Reserved)