Whenever there is a tremor and a turn at the top of the Communist world, ritual requires that the losers be brought forth to confess their errors, praise their vanquishers and—possibly—face the consequences. So far Khrushchev has decreed that Old Bolshies need not die, but just fade away. But the acrid gun smell of the past lurks around the Kremlin, and last week Nikita Khrushchev invoked another ritual of the Stalinist era: the public recantation, admitting to mistakes so that the boss may escape the rap for them.
A stooped and paunchy but still very recognizable figure, the man with the white goatee and the riverboat gambler’s eyes stepped onto the speaker’s platform at Moscow’s Central Committee meeting. Ex-Premier Nikolai Bulganin, still a Central Committee member though banished to the chairmanship of an obscure regional economic council in the north Caucasus, spoke his cringing words on the fourth day of debate:
“All that Comrade Khrushchev said in his report about the antiparty group and about me is true.” They had “criminally” opposed, delayed and impeded a farm program of “genius.” Bulganin gave devastating little thumbnail sketches of his colleagues disgraced and banished—Molotov, “isolated from life and from the Soviet people, knowing nothing of industry and agriculture”; Kaganovich. “a phrasemaker who interfered with party work with his long, involved speeches”; Malenkov, “an intriguer capable of all vileness.”
Even more groveling was his account of himself: “Before the June 1957 [showdown] I was not with the antiparty group on the question of reorganizing industrial management and the question of developing the virgin lands. I spoke and fought for the party line. But sad as it is for me, the fact remains that in 1957, when the antiparty activity of Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Shepilov was in full swing, I joined them. As chairman of the council of ministers at the time, I was not only their accomplice but their nominal leader. The antiparty group met and plotted in my office. If therefore I once behaved correctly, I subsequently shared with them all the antiparty filth.”
Bulganin said that at the end he had voted right, i.e., to uphold Khrushchev’s leadership. But “I accepted all subsequent [demotions] as deserved by me and necessary to the party. I have sincerely confessed my mistakes. I have asked the Central Committee to get me back on the party rails. I ask only that it let me fullfill the duties which have been entrusted to me, the duties of chairman of the Stavropol economic council, and I shall endeavor without sparing my energies to remove from myself this spot of shame.”
And with that the onetime Premier of Russia, and Nikita Khrushchev’s onetime convivial traveling companion, shuffled back to his seat and the brightest fate he could hope for—oblivion.
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