"THIS STALIN. THIS DEMIGOD!"

Wanganui Chronicle, 23 December 1949, Page 5

"THIS STALIN. THIS DEMIGOD!"

Purple Patch Praise For The Head Of The Soviet Republics

LONDON, Dee. 22 (Rec. 9 pm).—One of the chief reasons for an intensive Russian campaign to deify Stalin, according to the “Daily Telegraph’s” Berlin correspondent, is to provide a counterblast to a spread of Titoism in Russian satellite countries. Another reason is to establish

Stalin firmly as the greatest figure in the Communist heirarehy and so simplify inevitable conflicts about succession to him when he dies.

The lengths to which adulation of the Russian dictator are being carried are startling. The well-known Russian musician and cemmentaor, Prokoviev, recently broadcast the following: “Stalin, I say to the universe. Just Stalin, and I need say no more. Everything is included in that tremendous name. Everything; the party, the country, the town, love immortal ' —everything.” “The Communist organ "Pravda,” as far back as 1936, published the following extravagant tribute, and is repeating it today: “Oh great Stalin, oh leader of the people, you who created man, you who populated the earth, you who made the centuries young, you who made the springtime flower.” Another typical tribute comes from “Zemlia Russkaya,” a book published by the Young Communist League. It runs: “Stalin.! Here in the Kremlin his presence touches us at every step. We w’alk on stones which he may have trod only quite recently. Let us fall on our knees and kiss these holy footprints! W. N. Ewer, in the British Labour Party’s official organ, the "Daily Herald,” says “Very carefully and very thoroughly the great Stalin legend has been created. Today, Josee Vissarionovitch Djugashvili is no longer simply head of the Soviet Government and of the Bolshevik Party. He is chief of all people of the world.’ He is 'piaster of wisdom.’ He is ‘unfathomable, omniscient, inflallible.’ In all things he is a demigod. This is a new faith! It has no connection with Communism. “It would have bewildered and disgusted Marx and Lenin. But, it is the orthodoxy of the whole Soviet Empire and to question it is both heresy and treason.” Isaac Deutscher says, in the Manchester "Guardian.” The latest and newest element of the Stalin legend is still forming itself before our eyes. It speaks ot Stalin as the initiator and protector of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Here the legend has reached its most critical and dangerous test. The young revolutionary regimes outside Russia are forced to repeat all the acts of unconditional surrender to the superman which the Soviet regime has gone through. The initiator and protector of the peoples' democracies appears only too conspicuously in the role of their conqueror. He seems to be doing to a Socialist revolution what Napoleon once did to a bougeqis revolution. He reduced it to his own puppet.” Malcolm Muggeridge says, in the "Daily Telegraph.“lt is an ironical circumstance —one among many—that the Russian revolution was, in its beginnings, opposed to any form of personal adulation, paticularly w’hen couched in'quasi-religious terms. One can readily imagine Lenin's comments upon an appeal to kiss his successors’ "holy footprints”—an appeal which must have irresistibly recalled in its most obnoxious form the Tzarism be set out to abolish. Comrades nowadays cannot allow themselves the luxury of such comments. Their positions, and even their lives, depend upon their swelling the adulatory chorus." —Special N.Z.P.A. Correspondent.