RUSSIA: The New Line

“Communists of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your Stalinist chains.” This was the message that Russia’s new rulers flashed to the faithful last week, from the most important Russian Communist Party Congress in years. With mechanical unanimity and “stormy applause” the 1,355 delegates to the 20th Congress voted da on the new line and adjourned. Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev did not even have to make a closing speech, explained the chairman, because everybody had agreed with him. The new line:

¶ War with capitalism is no longer inevitable, but the “world-transforming, complete triumph of Communism” still is.

¶ Communist triumph can be achieved in some states “by parliamentary means” instead of civil wars. Therefore, rally into popular fronts with the Socialists to “capture” parliaments. This is the line Communist Tito, sometime heretic, has been preaching from Yugoslavia; he promptly wired his “comradely greetings.”

¶ At home full speed ahead on heavy industry and armament; all out on collectivization of agriculture, whatever the cost.

Smashed Idol. In Communist shop-logic, every affirmative has in it the seed of its own negative, and every zig its zag, so there were many experts to say that nothing had in fact changed. It was true that Russia’s new masters had only reviled the old tyrant in order to perpetuate his tyranny. But there was a new face in Russia, and a new song on its lips. The old song of Stalin’s was a menacing basso proclaiming a defiant people encircled by a hostile world; now a mellower baritone pleasingly rendered, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”

To put forward this new impression, it was necessary first to smash an old idol. Overnight the world saw the myth of modern Communism’s demigod junked, and the great man’s works and ways dismissed as “20 years of dictatorship and lies.” The very name of Stalin all but disappeared from the press. On Army Day his picture was missing from its place of honor beside Lenin’s in Moscow’s Central Army Theater. “Svetlana’s Breath,” the bestselling perfume named for Stalin’s daughter, vanished from the perfume counter in Moscow’s Hotel National.

Further deglorification would present awkward problems: whether to remove Stalin’s body from its conspicuous place beside Lenin’s in Red Square, whether to rename Stalingrad, Stalino, Stalinsk, Stalinogorsk, Stalinir and Stalinabad. It was a measure of the Kremlin’s cynical knowledge of Stalin’s unpopularity (and their own) that within three years after the death of the man whose wisdom, genius and love they had sycophantly proclaimed from every loudspeaker, they could carelessly traduce his name without fear of rioting in the streets from the masses who were said to love him so.

Rewriting the Past. At the Congress, Nikita Khrushchev, clearly the nearest to being the new “one man,” led the other bosses in condemning “the cult of the one man” and playing up the “Leninist” principle of “collective leadership” (TIME, Feb. 27). But in the long hours of speeches that followed there were interesting variations.

Ex-Premier Malenkov dutifully praised the collective leadership that corrected his error in favoring consumer goods over heavy industry. Foreign Minister Molotov again retracted his statement that the Soviet Union had only begun to achieve Socialism, and was grateful to the Central Committee for showing him how “ossified” his foreign policy had been.

Delivering the most outspoken attack on Stalinist distortions of the past, First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, the clever Armenian economist, singled out the name of an all-but-forgotten Stalin victim named Kossior as an example of the kind of injustice done by one-man leaders. What made his name significant was that Kossior, a Ukrainian leader who lost out in the late ’30s, was purged so that Nikita Khrushchev could get his job. The new collective leaders are not above such instructive hints to one another.

The rewriting of party history was still to come in the satellites. As one of the first acts of revision, the Hungarian Communist Eugene Varga last week wrote a laudatory article for Pravda on Bela Kun, the famous Hungarian revolutionary who ran a Soviet in Budapest for 133 bloody days in 1919. Varga did not mention that after he himself denounced Bela Kun as a “Trotskyite wrecker,” the old revolutionary disappeared in Russia, never to be heard from again.

Restyling the Future. With regimented unity, the Congress delegates approved the new bosses’ nominations for the powerful Central Committee—53 of the 133 names were new, many of them Khrushchev proteges. Among those promoted: Diplomat Andrei (Stony-Face the Younger) Gromyko and Police Boss Ivan Serov.

The new foreign policy line (also approved by unanimous da) has been shaping up since the visit of Khrushchev, Bulganin and Mikoyan to Belgrade last spring. It aims as aggressively as ever at subjecting the world to Communism, but without Stalin’s rigid preachments about the “inevitability” of violence: his successors are out to make Communists look more peaceful and disarming to the neutrals of Asia and the uncommitted Arab world. (India’s Nehru has already pronounced Moscow’s changes “welcomed in every way.”) By their acceptance of peaceful change, moreover, Khrushchev & Co. hope to make time with Socialists in France and Italy. They may succeed with a new generation, but older Socialists are likely to ask why not a Popular Front on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and where are the Russian, Polish, Czech and Rumanian Socialist leaders of yesteryear?

All this adds up to a Soviet offensive whose purpose is to cement a world bloc of nations on the base of a common hostility to the capitalist U.S. Its leaders, marking out the whole grey world of neutral nations inside their “zone of peace,” claim 1.5 billion people—almost two-thirds of humanity—on their side, and boldly redefine the opponents of Communism as an isolated, retreating minority. To the Asian nations they offer the comradeship of backwardness, the fraternity of poverty, the communality of agricultural nations seeking to industrialize themselves, and sympathetic stirring of old resentments against their colonial pasts. Against this new campaign, a vast outpouring of Western dollars to Asia will not be enough. The free world now confronts an old enemy in a new guise and a new place, and it will have to find new responses.