THE TWENTIETH CPSU CONGRESS: THE ANTI-STALIN BOMBSHELL
No event turned out to be more devastating for the legacy of Stalinism than the “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956 to the Twentieth CPSU Congress. The reasons Khrushchev undertook the unprecendented attack against the previously adored leader were many: First, he wanted to delegitimize his adversaries in the Soviet party’s Politburo, whose association with Stalin had been more thoroughgoing and compromising than his own (Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, Kliment Voroshilov); second, the demolition of Stalin’s myth was bound to restore the communist party’s prerogatives as the true repository of political power—in other words, to ensure the institutional dignity of the party oligarchy jeopardized by Stalin’s personal despotism; third, by proclaiming the “return to true Leninism” as the new official line, Khrushchev could secure his own image as the restorer of socialist legality and the protector of the bureaucracy against secret police terror; and fourth, the “secret speech” (its existence was not mentioned in the official record of the Congress, and the Soviet media published it first in 1989) permitted Khrushchev to single out his enemies within both the Soviet elite and the world communist movement (including some leaders of communist countries, primarily China’s Mao Zedong) as incorrigible dogmatics, unable to keep pace with changes in the contemporary world.
The delegations of the “brotherly” parties were immediately informed about the dynamite in Khrushchev’s “secret speech.” They too were compelled to admit that the “bourgeois propaganda” indictment of Stalin’s rule of terror had been correct: Khrushchev documented the amplitude of Stalin’s destruction of the Bolshevik elite, his criminal propensities, and his direct implication in the establishment of the terrorist system. The impact of the revelations, which became public several months later when the New York Times obtained a copy of the speech and published its complete text, cannot be exaggerated. As Leszek Kolakowski pointed out, it was indeed a most traumatizing experience for thousands upon thousands of militants educated in the cult of Stalin to learn from world communism’s most authoritative voice that “he who had been the leader of progressive humanity, the inspiration of the world, the father of the Soviet people, the master of science and learning, the supreme military genius, and altogether the greatest genius in history was in reality a paranoiac torturer, a mass murderer, and a military ignoramus who had brought the Soviet state to the verge of disaster.”17 But it was precisely the emphasis on Stalin’s disturbed psychology that made Khrushchev’s speech extremely tenuous and unconvincing. By insisting on the personal roots of terror, Khrushchev tried to conceal its social and institutional origins. Because he may have realized subconsciously that it required a one-party system, ruled with an iron fist by a phalanx of illuminated zealots convinced of the universal truth of their dogmas, for such atrocities to take place, Khrushchev saw no point in digging deeper than Stalin’s personal responsibility. The system had to be preserved, and any attempt to question its legitimacy was the most dangerous of heresies. Instead of dwelling upon the structural conditions that had made possible the ascent of a psychopath to absolute power, instead of focusing on the Leninist premises of Stalinism, Khrushchev did his best to exonerate both Lenin and the Bolshevik “Old Guard.”
In Khrushchev’s speech, Beria appeared as the embodiment of universal evil and Stalin as a gullible pawn manipulated by this amoral adventurer. The party, Khrushchev claimed, had been decimated as a result of Beria’s vicious intrigues and Stalin’s morbid suspiciousness. He did not ask, however, why the party elite had not reacted to that destructive course and had sheepishly acquiesced in its own annihilation. Also missing was a strategic proposal for an internal structure to prevent the rise of such sadistic monsters to the party’s pinnacle. The communists gave the population no assurances that the Stalinist aberrations would not repeat themselves in the future. Moreover, the most disturbing and ominous of Khrushchev’s silences dealt with the fate of the noncommunist victims of Stalinism. There was no remorse in the “secret speech” with regard to the millions of peasants exterminated during the government-induced famine of the early 1930s, no word about the persecution of religion and of the democratic political parties, no regrets for destruction of the national elites in the Sovietized republics. In the same vein, Khrushchev made sure to identify the year 1934, when Stalin engineered the assassination of his Politburo colleague and presumed rival, Sergei Kirov, as the beginning of the disaster.
In other words, the catastrophe of Stalinism, according to Khrushchev’s self-serving interpretation, began at the moment Stalin decided to launch his attack against the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. What Khrushchev deplored was not the Jacobin logic of terror but its “distorted” application against the faithful servants of the communist ideal. This was the main fallacy of Khrushchevism: the deceptive effort to rescue Leninism from any association with Stalinist lawlessness and to rehabilitate only those victims of the Stalinist terror who had unflinchingly served the Bolshevik party and its leader. There was no way, with that logic, to go further and analyze the show trials of the 1930s or reconsider the preposterous charges raised against Stalin’s opponents of the Bolshevik “Old Guard.” Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, and Bukharin were still pilloried as adversaries of the party, and Stalin was even praised for his relentless struggle against those alleged conspirators. The ideological euphemism for the whole system of lies, corruption, mass murder, and universal fear was the “cult of personality.” If only Stalin had been more modest and humane, the whole system would have looked different. Moreover, Khrushchev argued, Stalin’s personal intentions had been above suspicion. The late leader had always been a devout communist whose means, and not ends, had to be condemned. Khrushchev admitted that the crimes took place “during Stalin’s life under his leadership and with his concurrence.” At the same time, however, the “secret speech” hastened to grant the deceased tyrant a strange alibi by pointing to his presumed commitment to revolutionary values:
Stalin was convinced that this was necessary for the defense of the interests of the working classes against the plotting of enemies and against the attack of the imperialist class. He saw this from the position of the interest of the working class, of the interest of the victory of socialism and communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered this should be done in the interest of the party, of the working masses, in the name of the defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy.18
Regardless of Khrushchev’s disclaimers and rationalizations, the “secret speech” legitimized the revolt against Stalinist institutions and values. The Soviet Union tried to save as much as possible of its ideological myths, but the wave of liberalization swept irresistibly through the satellite countries. The most dynamic examples in discovering a new sense of autonomy and in attempts to relinquish the frozen Stalinist carcass turned out to be Hungary and Poland. Profound effects from the Soviet Congress also were felt in all the other bloc countries, where the party intelligentsia became increasingly radicalized and critical of the past abuses.
THE POLISH CRISIS OF 1956
The Polish communist leader Boleslaw Bierut, overwhelmed by the revelations of the Twentieth Congress, died in March 1956. What followed was a tremendous struggle for power among different factions within the party elite. To understand the characteristics of communism in Poland, it is necessary to refer to the political and intellectual origins of the party’s formation, as well as to its tribulations under Stalin. Initially, the clandestine Polish Communist Party was one of the least regimented of the East European Leninist parties. Stalin strongly resented the veteran leaders of Polish communism and engineered their extermination during the Great Purge. In 1938 the Polish Communist Party was dissolved by a decree of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which accused the Polish party of being a nest of spies and agents-provocateurs for the Polish secret police. Th
at was a serious blow by Stalin against a political group that had already suffered the psychological consequences of its underground status: suspicion, sectarianism, and lack of political imagination.
One of the main reasons for Stalin’s dislike of Polish communism, as Isaac Deutscher once pointed out, had to do with the never completely abandoned tradition of Luxemburgism. The luminaries of Polish communism had been formed in the radical socialist tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and had little reason either to respect or to love Stalin, although they considered the Soviet Union the symbol for their best hopes. At the same time, one should keep in mind that the Polish Communist Party had been ruthlessly Bolshevized in the late 1920s and early 1930s and that its militants had accepted the Comintern’s verdict without even a gesture of protest. Isaac Deutscher correctly raised the following questions about the effects of Stalinism on the Polish communist elite:
How did it happen, we must ask, that a Party which had to its credit decades of underground struggle and a long (seventy years long!) and proud Marxist tradition, submitted meekly to this horrible outrage—without a protest, without making any attempt to defend its martyred leaders and fighters, without even trying to vindicate its honor, and without declaring that in spite of the death sentence Stalin had passed on it, it would live on and fight on? How could this happen? We must be fully aware of the moral corrosion to which Stalinism had for so many years exposed Polish Communism in order to understand its complete collapse under the blow.19
It was during World War II that the Polish Communist Party reemerged as a political force active in the anti-Nazi resistance. The party’s main leader was Wladyslaw Gomulka, who after the liberation of the country became General Secretary of the Polish Communist Party. But Gomulka was eventually ousted by the more powerful Muscovite faction headed by Boleslaw Bierut, Hilary Minc, and Jakub Berman. He spent the years of the intense Stalinist terror in Poland under house arrest.
Among the salient characteristics of the Polish political culture in the first decade of communist rule were the persistence of nationalism, the weakness of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the political authority of the Catholic Church.20 Despite the permanent ideological warfare waged by the communists against the Church, Catholicism continued to be a magnetizing force for the Poles. As de-Stalinization developed in the Soviet Union, the Polish communist elite started to split between those favorable to liberalization and the fundamentalists for whom there was no need to renounce any of the traditional dogmas. Gomulka had been released from his forced residence in 1954, and the charges against his alleged “nationalist” deviation were forgotten. In 1955 Poland became the ground for heated intellectual debates in which old-fashioned conceptions were drastically criticized by increasingly bold intellectuals. Intellectuals were exhilarated by the revelations of the Twentieth CPSU Congress. By 1956 more than two hundred discussion clubs were unabashedly examining the thorniest issues of the country’s past and present. Indeed, the resurgence of interest in public opinion revived the besieged Polish civil society.
Like their peers in Hungary, Polish intellectuals searched for a new principle of socialism. Their critique of the ruling elite was rooted not in nostalgia for the old regime but rather in the belief that the true values of socialism had been forgotten by communist bureaucrats interested only in the perpetuation and expansion of their power. The insurgent intellectuals exposed the calamitous moral and psychological consequences of the dictatorship and called for the humanization of the existing order. Their approach, however, was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. They wanted to change the system from within and pinned their hopes on the presumably more open-minded faction of the party leadership. The publication in 1955 of the communist writer Adam Wazyk’s “Poem for Adults” unleashed a fierce political and literary battle between the liberals and the conservatives. Wazyk denounced the party leadership’s lack of sensitivity to the abysmal living standards of the working class, the absence of a fair legal system, and the all-pervasive lie as an indelible characteristic of the everyday life in Stalinized Poland:
There are people overworked,
there are people from Nowa Huta
who have never been to a theatre,
there are Polish apples which Polish children cannot reach,
there are boys forced to lie,
there are girls forced to lie,
there are old wives turned away from their homes by their husbands,
there are the weary dying of tired hearts,
there are people slandered, spat upon
there are people stripped in the streets by common bandits,
for whom the authorities still seek a legal definition,
there are people who wait for documents, there are people who wait for justice,
there are people who wait very long.
After that merciless indictment of the established order, Wazyk spelled out the principal demands of Poland’s rising civil society. For him, and for his colleagues who had long believed in the Marxist creed, the solution could not come from outside the communist party. His requests were therefore addressed to an unknown enlightened leader who could eventually take over and restore the dignity of true socialism. The following lines of the poem contain the whole ethos of revisionism as an attempt to correct the evils of the system without renouncing its most important institution, the communist party itself:
We make demands on this earth,
for the people who are overlooked, for keys to open doors,
for rooms with windows,
for walls which do not rot,
for hatred of little documents,
for holy human time,
for safe homecoming,
for a simple distinction between words and deeds.
We make demands on this earth,
for which we did not throw dice,
for which a million perished in battle:
for a clear truth,
for the bread of freedom,
for burning reason,
for burning reason.
We demand this every day.
We demand through the party.21
Wazyk’s cri de coeur managed to antagonize the communist ideologues, who reacted in a most offended way. The poem was singled out by the party’s official daily Trybuna Ludu as an example of “childish hysteria.” But, as the writer Stanislaw Baranczak pointed out, it was precisely the adoption of such a “childish” perspective of moral indignation that made Wazyk’s writing particularly gripping and seditious: “The reason Wazyk’s poem proved so offensive was that the poet behaved like a child throwing a fit when reality does not correspond to his expectations. Wazyk offended everybody by acting like a spiteful child, by vomiting in the literary salon of 1955 and completely disregarding the rules of either anti-thaw or pro-thaw savoir-vivre.”22 The disquieting tone of Wazyk’s poem turned out to be a premonition of events soon to take place.
The self-confidence of Poland’s communist ruling class was shattered at the moment of the Twentieth CPSU Congress. The old idols and sacred values were torn apart, and the need for an autonomous Polish way to socialism was reasserted. The meaning of the resurgence was unequivocal: It signified a resolute break with the Stalinist conception of the leading role of the party apparatus. To disseminate their unorthodox views, intellectuals decided to go into the factories and talk to the industrial workers. Polish political and intellectual life was thus increasingly polarized between the Stalinist nostalgies and the partisans of change. Domesticism, or the temptation to emphasize the distinctive peculiarities of the Polish road to socialism, was fighting a moribund version of Stalinist pseudo-internationalism. The calls for rapid transformation of the existing order did not, however, transcend the boundaries of the system. The Polish opposition of 1956 was still convinced of the inner perfectibility of the communist system. Changes, therefore, were to be gradual, without cataclysmic collisions or violent conflicts between rulers and ruled. The events in Poznan in June 1956, when a
working-class riot was crushed with army support, contradicted the belief that those “corrections” could take place in a peaceful and quiet way.
The chasm between reformers and dogmatics further widened, making Gomulka’s return to power a pressing condition for the party’s very survival. Because of his persecution under the Bierut regime, Gomulka enjoyed popularity and could clean the party’s tarnished image. The basic source of division within the ruling group was the attitude toward the future of Polish-Soviet relations. It was mandatory for liberals, and even more so for revisionist intellectuals, to establish full equality in relations between Poland and the USSR. As the liberals tended to radicalize, the conservatives hardened their positions and resorted to strong anti-intellectual, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic slogans. In October 1956 the crisis within the top party hierarchy had reached an explosive point. Gomulka’s return to the head of the Central Committee was demanded both by the party’s rank-and-file and by nonparty pressure groups. At the same time there were demands for the immediate removal of Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky from his position as Poland’s Minister of Defense (his appointment to that job had been one of Stalin’s most outrageous gestures for humiliating the Polish national pride). Edward Ochab, a veteran communist who had succeeded Boleslaw Bierut as the party leader in March 1956, decided to step down and endorsed Wladyslaw Gomulka’s candidacy during a tempestuous Central Committee meeting on October 19. The meeting was attended also by an uninvited Soviet delegation comprising Nikita Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Lazar Kaganovich, who had arrived suddenly in Warsaw to watch and, if possible, to influence the course of events. In spite of the Soviet reservations, Gomulka was triumphantly elected First Secretary of the party and announced the establishment of the “Polish way to socialism.” The new leader insisted on the need for autonomy in domestic policy and reassured the Soviets that Poland would remain a loyal ally within the Warsaw Pact. Unlike Tito, for whom Yugoslavia had to play a special role in world affairs as a neutral country, Gomulka deliberately limited his quest for international autonomy. He was convinced that Poland’s alliance with Moscow was indispensable for the country’s integrity, especially in the light of potential West German territorial claims.
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