Page:The Crimes of the Stalin Era (Khrushchev, tr. Nicolaevsky).djvu/5

 confessions, made all sorts of promises of new "legality," and began colonizing the Party, the Government and the satellites with his supporters. The Czech and German workers' uprisings of June 1953, however, served as pretext for his overthrow and execution. Malenkov lingered on, bolstered by vague promises of more consumer goods, until February 1955, when Khrushchev nominated Bulganin to succeed him as Premier.

Most of the Kremlin's moves since the death of Stalin have been attempts to streamline and rationalize his paranoid tyranny, to make it operate efficiently in a complex political and economic system ruling a third of the world's population. The 20th Party Congress, first under the new regime and only the third such gathering since 1934, was an attempt to legitimize and consolidate the "collective leadership," but it took place against a background of fierce maneuvering among the collective leaders. On the first day of the Moscow Congress, Khrushchev delivered the traditional Secretary's report, an all-day address which contained only two non-committal references to Stalin. Two days later, however, Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier and veteran trade wizard, rose and denounced Stalin on several counts; he named several Old Bolsheviks who had "wrongly been named" enemies of the people by Stalin. Among the hundreds whom he could have mentioned, he singled out—purposely, it seemed—several from whose deaths Khrushchev personally had profited. A week later, in a dramatic, closed two-day session, Khrushchev delivered the speech which startled humanity. Not its least interesting aspect is Khrushchev's succession of sly references connecting his present associates to Stalin and Beria: Malenkov at Stalin's right hand in the mishandling of the war, Kaganovich and Mikoyan "present" at the initial promotion of Beria, and so on.

Most significant, however, is the paradoxical dualism that runs through Khrushchev's address from start to finish: While Stalin's crimes against his Communist associates are vividly spelled out and deplored, his infinitely greater crimes against the Russian people are applauded in the name of "socialist construction." Khrushchev's "anti-Stalin" speech reaffirms the basic Stalinist policy line explicitly and implicitly, although now it is affirmed in Lenin's name.

This line includes a one-party dictatorship dominated by a self-perpetuating ruling clique at its center, responsible neither to a popular legislature nor to freely-chosen party bodies; an economy concentrated on war industry and the promotion of international Communist power, to the virtual exclusion of citizens' needs for food, clothing and housing; a system of justice still marked by kangaroo courts, forced labor on a vast scale, and secret executions; industry and trade directed from Moscow by Party bureaucrats acting through autocratic managers; a working class shorn of basic rights to the redress of grievances through collective bargaining or strikes, impoverished physically Rh