RUSSIA: Unconcealed Weapons

In Moscow last week the world’s No. 1Communist gave world Communism its new line: coexist capitalism to death.

Some 1,350 delegates from Communist Parties in 55 countries assembled in Moscow’s Great Kremlin Palace to sit on straight wooden seats through long hours of speeches, to acquiesce in what they were told, and to applaud methodically.

In the very first session, even their dutiful applause came in for criticism. As First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and the other big shots entered by a side door, they were greeted by a noisy standing ovation. Khrushchev strode to the microphone to say, “The Presidium has requested that the delegates not applaud every time we enter. Behave in the Communist way and show you are masters of this congress!”

The incident struck the dominant note for the 20th Communist Party Congress: Khrushchev acting the boss and instructing everyone to act as if there were no such thing as a boss.

In this first party congress since the death of Stalin, the men who sycophantically sang Stalin’s praise alive now scorned him dead. Chunky, jug-eared Khrushchev set the tone for this as for everything else when, in a perfunctory tribute to comrades who had died since the last congress, he disdainfully lumped together in one sentence “J. V. Stalin, Klement Gottwald and Kyuichi Tokuda.” Stalin’s theories about Communism were also cavalierly rewritten.

Milk & Honey. “War is not fatalistically inevitable,” proclaimed Khrushchev, blandly dismissing one of Lenin’s most insistent themes. The first task of the Communist Parties, said Khrushchev, is “to pursue steadfastly the Leninist policy of peaceful coexistence between different states, irrespective of their social systems.” Added Khrushchev disarmingly: “This is not a tactical move but a fundamental principle.” But coexistence. Soviet style, is only a means to an end—”the world-transforming . . . complete triumph of Communism.”

At the 19th Party Congress 3½ years earlier, Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s own choice for party leadership, had also enunciated the principle of coexistence, but had coupled it with forensic saber-rattling about the “brutal fascist regime” in Washington. Last week Khrushchev was all milk and honey.

In his lengthy keynote speech he chided the U.S. for “trying to bury the Geneva spirit,” and spoke of the need for “establishing firm, friendly relations between the two biggest powers in the world, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. We propose this with good intentions, without having a knife behind our backs.”

The knives with which Khrushchev proposed to carve up the non-Communist countries were, however, soon juggled before his Kremlin audience openly and with skill. In his right hand he held that blunt old carver, the economic decline of the West, and in his left, a shining new instrument with an edge: “Cooperation, sweeping aside mutual recriminations, with those circles of the socialist movement who have views on the forms of transition to socialism different from ours.” A characteristic feature of the bad old Stalin era (except for the brief popular-front period in 1936) was the unremitting quarrel—more skull-cleaving than hairsplitting—between the Communists and the parliamentary Socialist Parties.

Now, said Khrushchev, “we sincerely greet these Social Democrats and are willing to do everything necessary to unite our efforts . . . Important successes have been won by the French and Italian working class in parliamentary elections. The question arises whether it is possible to goover to socialism by using parliamentary means. No such course was open to the Russian Bolsheviks . . .* Since then, however, the historical situation has undergone radical changes which make possible a new approach. The mighty camp of socialism, with its 900 million members, is growing and gaining in strength. In these circumstances, the working class, by rallying round itself the toiling peasants, the intelligentsia, all the patriotic forces . . . is in a position to capture a stable majority in Parliament and to transform the latter from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people’s will.”

Thus, at one stroke, Khrushchev cut through a century of Marxist dogma which holds that the transition to socialism can only be accomplished by active revolution. Actually, Khrushchev’s words were of course a pretended shift away from violence, designed to appeal to the neutralist Asian nations and the uncommitted Arab states as much as to the Western socialists.

“Certain Distrust.” In that part of his seven-hour speech dealing with internal affairs, Khrushchev made no effort to conceal how far the Soviet Union itself is from the classless socialist Utopia.

“Some comrades have begun to manifest a certain distrust for the workers of the state security agencies.” After 38 years the “wage system is still disordered and muddled,” and food distribution so bad that “some towns are still insufficiently supplied with such foods as meat, milk, butter . . . and even potatoes.” Without revealing what hours the Soviet worker now works, Khrushchev promised him a seven-hour day six days a week, or an eight-hour day five days a week, in 1957. Bureaucracy is still an “intolerable evil,” and “there are still individuals who do no useful work . . . and functionaries in leading posts who must be counted among the ‘busy idlers.’ ” There is “an unbelievable lack of centralization.” Transport is backward, “railroad service lagging,” and “last year about half of all our motor trucks were standing idle, and half of the time those operating were running empty.”

Khrushchev abolished high-school and university fees, but called for a stepped-up “polytechnization” of normal schools, i.e., “introducing more pupils to factory and farm work.” In the same breath, citing the czarist parallel of special schools, the Corps of Pages and the Cadet Corps, he announced a plan for select boarding schools in pleasant, healthy surroundings, at which children of the party elite would be instructed by “engineers of souls.”

Word for Word. Khrushchev made one promise meant for everybody: “We are in a position to promote rapidly the production of both the means of production and consumer goods.” This was word for word the assertion Malenkov had made before his ouster from the premiership in February 1955, presumably for making so naive and untenable a promise.

“We would not have had many of the shortcomings which we are now struggling with,” said Khrushchev, “if, in its time, an atmosphere of self-satisfaction, attempts to embellish the actual state of things, had not prevailed in certain individual links of the party.” The individual link Khrushchev obviously had in mind was his predecessor, the prematurely optimistic Georgy Malenkov.

Khrushchev laid down the basis of the new leadership: “The leading core is not a group of men bound by personal relations or mutual advantage, but a working collective of leaders whose relations are based on ideas and principles permitting neither mutual forgiveness nor personal antagonism.” To spell out his theory, Khrushchev announced that a new party program was being drafted, and that the old party history (attributed to Stalin) would be replaced by a new history “based on facts.” Describing the function of “Bolshevik criticism” in the new setup, Khrushchev revealed that there had already been a minor purge of “certain workers of the Central Committee who had not justified the high trust placed in them.”

Just how the new party history would be rewritten was laid down by mercurial Anastas Mikoyan, Soviet First Deputy Premier (obviously a high favorite, while Malenkov’s and Molotov’s stars wane). For 20 years under Stalin, said Mikoyan, criticizing him by name, “we have had . . . no collective leadership. [Instead] the cult of personality flourished, which had already been condemned by Marx and Lenin and could not fail to exert an extremely negative influence on the situation in the party.” Mikoyan then scored a few of the negative influences: Stalin’s so-called party history “does not satisfy us because it does not shed any light on the events of the last 20 years. Several events of the civil war of 1918-20 are explained by the alleged treacherous activity of individual party leaders of that time who were unjustly declared enemies of the people” (i.e., a suggestion that a whole cluster of Communist heretics might now become heroes). “Certain ossified forms of our diplomacy” under Stalin have also been discarded, said Mikoyan.

But it was in his remarks on capitalism that Mikoyan showed most clearly that, despite all their bluster and show of confidence, Khrushchev & Co. were having a hard time reconciling the world as it is with the world as their scriptures said it would be. Stalin had said that once the U.S., Britain and France were cut off from the Communist countries by the cold war, “the extent of production in these countries will shrink . . . This can hardly help us and is hardly correct. This view does not explain the complex and contradictory phenomena in contemporary capitalism and the factor of the growth of capitalist production in many countries since the war . . . We are not studying sufficiently deeply facts and figures. We frequently limit ourselves, for purposes of propaganda, to picking out individual facts about the symptoms of an approaching crisis—the impoverishment of the workers—but fail to provide an all-round evaluation of the happenings in life abroad.”

Confident, cocky Khrushchev caught the world’s headlines. But beneath the repeated assertions that the rest of the world was going to fall peacefully to them was a recognition that the Russian Communists were managing their own affairs badly, and their own “objective” textbooks and “scientific” prophecies about the rest of the world were proving false.

* Khrushchev’s theory is not new in Marxist dialectics; what is new is its elevation to party dogma. Stalin once told British Laborite Harold Laski: “There are two roads to socialism . . . The Russian road was shorter, but more difficult, and involved bloodshed . . . The parliamentary method involves no bloodshed, but it is a longer process. In Britain it is possible . . . to sound the opinion of every responsible person in the country as to whether he wants socialism or not, but in Russia in the early days, there was a very low level of culture, and the peasants, who were a great problem, did not even want to hear about socialism.”