New Tet
25th August 2009, 01:43
[Transcribed by myself in 1998 from "Russia in Transition" by Isaac Deutscher. The names are linked to wikipedia entries]
...Consider only how Khrushchev's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev) character sketch of Stalin, drawn haphazardly yet extremely vividly, must affect Communists brought up in the Stalin cult. There they see him now, the "Father of the Peoples," immured as he was in the Kremlin, refusing over the last twenty-five years of his life to have a look at a Soviet village-at the new collectivized village; refusing to step down into a factory and face workers; refusing even to cast a glance at the army of which he was the Generalissimo, let alone to visit the front; spending his life in a half-real and half-fictitious world of statistics and mendacious propaganda films; planning unleviable taxes; tracing front-lines and lines of offensives on a globe on his desk; seeing enemies creeping at him from every nook and cranny; treating the members of his own Politburo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo) as his contemptible lackeys, denying a Voroshilov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kliment_Voroshilov) admission to sessions, slamming the door in Andreyev's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Andreyevich_Andreyev) face, or upbraiding Molotov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov) and Mikoyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastas_Ivanovich_Mikoyan); "choking" his interlocutors morally and physically"; pulling the wires behind the great purge trials; personally checking and signing 383 black lists with the names of thousands of doomed party members; ordering judges and N.K.V.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD) men to torture the victims of the purges and to extract confessions; "planning" the deportations of entire peoples and raging impotently at the size of the Ukrainian people too large to be deported; growing sick with envy at Zhukov's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhukov) military fame; "shaking his little finger" at Tito (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito) and waiting for Tito's imminent fall; surrounded by dense clouds of incense and, like an opium eater, craving for more; inserting in his own hand passages of praise to his own "genius"-and to his own modesty into his official adulatory biography and into history text books; himself designing huge, monstrously ugly, elephantine monuments to himself; and himself writing his own name into the new national anthem which was to replace the Internationale. Thus did Khrushchev expose before his party the huge, grim, whimsical, morbid, human monster before whom the Communist world lay prostrate in the course of a quarter of a century.
And yet Khrushchev adds that "Stalin was convinced that all this was necessary for the defense of the interests of the working class against the plotting of the enemies and against the attack of the imperialist camp." When he surmised that even those who stood closest to him did not share his phobias and suspicions, Stalin wrung his hands in despair: "What will you do without me?" he growled. "You are all blind like chicken!" "He saw this," Khrushchev assures the congress again, "from the position of the interest of the working class... of socialism and communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot...In this lies the whole tragedy!"
Yet the mainspring of the tragedy remains hidden from Khrushchev. His whole speech is full of the denunciation of the hero cult; yet it is nothing but inverted hero cult. Its one and only theme is the power, the superhuman power, of the usurper who "placed himself above the party and above the masses." In passage after passage Khrushchev argues that all the evil from which the Communist Party, the Soviet people, and the international labor movement have suffered for so long sprang from this one "individual." And then he tells us in quite as many passages: that it is utterly wrong to imagine that one man could exercise so much influence on history, for the real makers of Soviet history have been the masses, the people, and the "militant Bolshevik Party" bred and inspired by Lenin.
Where then was that "militant party" when Stalin "placed himself above it"? Where was its militancy and its Leninist spirit? Why and how could the despot impose his will on the masses? And why did "our heroic people" submit so passively?
All these questions, which have so close a bearing on the Marxist Weltanschauung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltanschauung), Khrushchev leaves unanswered.
Yet, if one agrees that history is made not by demigods but by masses and special classes one has still to explain the rise of this particular demigod; and one can explain it only from the condition of Soviet society, the interests of the Bolshevik Party, and the state of mind of its leadership. But no sooner have we descended with Khrushchev to this depth of recent Soviet history than his lamp is blown out, and we are once again enveloped by dark and impenetrable fumes...
--Isaac Deutscher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Deutscher), "Khrushchev on Stalin", 1956.
...Consider only how Khrushchev's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev) character sketch of Stalin, drawn haphazardly yet extremely vividly, must affect Communists brought up in the Stalin cult. There they see him now, the "Father of the Peoples," immured as he was in the Kremlin, refusing over the last twenty-five years of his life to have a look at a Soviet village-at the new collectivized village; refusing to step down into a factory and face workers; refusing even to cast a glance at the army of which he was the Generalissimo, let alone to visit the front; spending his life in a half-real and half-fictitious world of statistics and mendacious propaganda films; planning unleviable taxes; tracing front-lines and lines of offensives on a globe on his desk; seeing enemies creeping at him from every nook and cranny; treating the members of his own Politburo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo) as his contemptible lackeys, denying a Voroshilov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kliment_Voroshilov) admission to sessions, slamming the door in Andreyev's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Andreyevich_Andreyev) face, or upbraiding Molotov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov) and Mikoyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastas_Ivanovich_Mikoyan); "choking" his interlocutors morally and physically"; pulling the wires behind the great purge trials; personally checking and signing 383 black lists with the names of thousands of doomed party members; ordering judges and N.K.V.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD) men to torture the victims of the purges and to extract confessions; "planning" the deportations of entire peoples and raging impotently at the size of the Ukrainian people too large to be deported; growing sick with envy at Zhukov's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhukov) military fame; "shaking his little finger" at Tito (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito) and waiting for Tito's imminent fall; surrounded by dense clouds of incense and, like an opium eater, craving for more; inserting in his own hand passages of praise to his own "genius"-and to his own modesty into his official adulatory biography and into history text books; himself designing huge, monstrously ugly, elephantine monuments to himself; and himself writing his own name into the new national anthem which was to replace the Internationale. Thus did Khrushchev expose before his party the huge, grim, whimsical, morbid, human monster before whom the Communist world lay prostrate in the course of a quarter of a century.
And yet Khrushchev adds that "Stalin was convinced that all this was necessary for the defense of the interests of the working class against the plotting of the enemies and against the attack of the imperialist camp." When he surmised that even those who stood closest to him did not share his phobias and suspicions, Stalin wrung his hands in despair: "What will you do without me?" he growled. "You are all blind like chicken!" "He saw this," Khrushchev assures the congress again, "from the position of the interest of the working class... of socialism and communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot...In this lies the whole tragedy!"
Yet the mainspring of the tragedy remains hidden from Khrushchev. His whole speech is full of the denunciation of the hero cult; yet it is nothing but inverted hero cult. Its one and only theme is the power, the superhuman power, of the usurper who "placed himself above the party and above the masses." In passage after passage Khrushchev argues that all the evil from which the Communist Party, the Soviet people, and the international labor movement have suffered for so long sprang from this one "individual." And then he tells us in quite as many passages: that it is utterly wrong to imagine that one man could exercise so much influence on history, for the real makers of Soviet history have been the masses, the people, and the "militant Bolshevik Party" bred and inspired by Lenin.
Where then was that "militant party" when Stalin "placed himself above it"? Where was its militancy and its Leninist spirit? Why and how could the despot impose his will on the masses? And why did "our heroic people" submit so passively?
All these questions, which have so close a bearing on the Marxist Weltanschauung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltanschauung), Khrushchev leaves unanswered.
Yet, if one agrees that history is made not by demigods but by masses and special classes one has still to explain the rise of this particular demigod; and one can explain it only from the condition of Soviet society, the interests of the Bolshevik Party, and the state of mind of its leadership. But no sooner have we descended with Khrushchev to this depth of recent Soviet history than his lamp is blown out, and we are once again enveloped by dark and impenetrable fumes...
--Isaac Deutscher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Deutscher), "Khrushchev on Stalin", 1956.