Russia: I Can Be Mistaken

The drama of destalinization moved into the theater last week. A new Moscow play pitted a Stalin-trained secret police heavy (“Give me this Leontyev, and in two weeks he will crack like a nut”) against a clean-cut hero cop who ringingly denounces the Stalinists: “They are not tormented by their conscience. They never had any.”

Khrushchev himself continued his campaign against the “personality cult” when at a Kiev meeting his agricultural policies were openly criticized by an agronomist and he replied breezily that orders must not be obeyed unthinkingly: “I can be mistaken.” But there were signs that the anti-Stalinist drive was having dangerous side effects. Central Committee Secretary Leonid Ilyichev took pains to warn a convention of 2,700 party propagandists that anti-Stalinism must not lead to questioning the Marxist-Leninist system itself or to opposing the right kind of leadership.

As for the Red Chinese, they were growing even more outspoken against Khrushchev; in Hong Kong the pro-Communist newspaper Ching Po found him even worse than Chiang Kaishek: “He decks himself out in satellites, spaceships and supernuclear bombs. He resorts to pinning the ‘personality cult’ label on the two leaders [Stalin and Hoxha], thereby subjecting himself to ridicule by the Western bloc.”