“Leaders come and go but the people remain.
Only the people are immortal”
These were Stalin’s words, addressing the Soviet metal workers, in October, 1937. In late February, 1953, Stalin was gone and the people remained. His place in history was in their hands.
In Moscow, women stood in snow around the loud-speakers, red-eyed. The Associated Press cabled the comment of a young house-wife:
“Can one imagine the steppe without its wide expanse?
The Volga without water?
Russia without Stalin?”
The AP correspondent heard the news in his auto; tears ran down his chauffeur’s cheeks. “Excuse it,” he said. “He was a man … that time he led the battle for Moscow from a hut near the front.” Somewhat later came news that prisoners in a convict camp in the east exulted, shouting that, with the “Old One” dead, freedom drew near. Stalin had built himself into all the life of Russia; he had been an essential part of its achievements and its evils for nearly thirty years.
Around the world, nations and individuals hastened to classify themselves by their attitudes. Peking newspapers were black-bordered. Flags flew at half-mast in France by order of the Ministry of Defense; the National Assembly stood in homage as Herriot saluted “the leader … who participated in our liberation from the Nazis.” In Wall Street, the stock market dropped a billion dollars; it recovered in two days. Harry Truman photographed himself for history by saying: “I am always sorry to hear of the passing of an acquaintance.”
Much American comment was less courteous. “Stalin’s ticket to hell is validated… The best we can hope is an internal war for the succession,” was the pious comment of the Los Angeles Times. President Eisenhower moved to implement this brutal aspiration. After official condolences which headlines stressed as “only official,” the administration was announced to be “preparing an aggressive effort to exploit the Soviet’s situation—to use all tools of propaganda, and more, to encourage strife within Russia and split off its satellites.”[10] American troops in Korea used the five minutes silence observed throughout the Communist world to “launch a big barrage.”
Western Europe was shocked by America’s reaction. Europeans, whatever their politics, respected the mourning of a great people for a leader who, more than any other, brought Europe to its joint victory over the Nazis. One recalled, by contrast with America’s attitude, how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death was met by Moscow. Molotov went at once to the American Embassy at two in the morning and surprised Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith by his open grief. Even the hotel waiters served Americans with shocked sympathy, all mourning the man whose world vision had sought, with Stalin, a stable world peace. Stalin’s death gave a chance for America, by showing courtesy, to heal old wounds. But Washington’s attitude showed malevolence.
All agreed—the mourners and those who insulted them—that Stalin was important. Even the Los Angeles Times found it necessary to give five pages daily for several days to details of his illness and death. In 1924, they would not have given five lines. I know, for I wrote for Hearst’s International Magazine in April, 1924, the first article on Stalin ever published in America. “Stalin has no government post,” I wrote, “but as far as Lenin has any successor, it will be Stalin.” I had been told this by Russian Communists. The words sank into a well in America; nobody cared. But now, twenty-nine years later, Howard K. Smith said from Europe: “Stalin did more to change the world in the first half of this century than any other man who lived in it.” Let that stand as his worldwide epitaph.
He built up Russia to a great power, to the world’s first socialist state. Thus, he also speeded and helped give form to the rising nationalist movements in Asia, especially in China, and to the movements for a “welfare state” in the West. “He altered the West’s whole attitude to the workingman,” H. K. Smith noted. For all ideas of government planning, of “New Deal” in the USA and “welfare state” in Britain, arose in competition with Russia’s Five-Year Planning, to keep the 1929 world economic crisis from producing revolution.
Thus, in all lands, whether for him or against him, Stalin created history.
In later years, people in the USSR, looking back at their mourning over Stalin’s death, thought they recalled that the grief had been accompanied by a feeling that Russia had come to the end of an epoch and a new time was beginning in which many things would be different—especially, that lite would be freer than under the “old man.” Whether they really recall it or only transfer backward their present thinking, it was true. An epoch had ended; Stalin had to go with it. Always the people’s life moves forward by deaths of individuals whose job is done. Moses saw the promised land but was not allowed to enter. Stalin predicted the future but could not have led it. He had too much history on his back.
I do not think anyone can read his last work on Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, and think that Stalin’s intellect had grown senile. Details of the analysis may be attacked, but it was a forecast by a man who saw the world clearly and as a whole. He saw that the years in which he built socialism in one country were ended; that socialism was abroad now among one-third of the earth’s people; that this changed all the questions and all the answers.
His intellect grasped this, but the rest of him could not come through. The rigidity of age, which comes to all, was upon him. Despite his keen glance into a different future, his instincts and habits remained in the era of “capitalist encirclement,” when isolation and suspicion were his first defense. These habits had hardened; with age and power he had grown more suspicious, more dictatorial, more convinced that opposition to his lightest word was counter-revolution. Some people will diagnose this as paranoia; I do not think the term correct. I would say rather: “Power corrupts; no man in our time—or perhaps in any time—has held such power so long as Stalin.” His time had come to go, while yet his brain was keen and his nation moving forward, before the tests came which a new era would impose on a character no longer flexible. For the signs were ominous—that fantastic doctors’ plot and the credence he apparently gave it, was like a return to the madness of 1937.
These were the reasons why the Soviet people, even in mourning their leader, knew that their time had come to pass beyond him into a new age.
In less than a month after Stalin’s death, the “peace offensives” which the world had learned co expect as routine from Moscow, increased until more than one American newspaper called them “the peace blitz.” There seemed to be an all-out drive by both Moscow and Peking to compose their differences with the West. On March 22, the Moscow Radio repeated several times: “All outstanding issues &hellip can be settled by peaceful means.” On March 28, Moscow proclaimed wide amnesty for prisoners throughout the USSR. On Match 29, Peking offered to exchange sick and wounded prisoners in Korea on practically America’s terms. Two days later, Peking offered to settle the entire prisoner of war issue on terms close to the Indian Plan, which the U.N. had already accepted. Within three days appeared three other conciliatory headlines: “Russians Yield on Disarmament,” “Molotov Pledges Aid to Korean Truce,” and “Russia Extends Good Will to Germany,” a story of eased traffic tensions. This was climaxed, April 4, by the news “Moscow Releases Nine Doctors; Declares Them Innocent.”
By this time the blind, the deaf and the dumb knew that something was happening in Moscow. When had any government ever admitted: “Those confessions we announced some months ago were framed?” “There is a feeling in Washington that the Russian peace offensive is the most significant event since the second world war,” declared Newsweek.
On August 8, 1953, Moscow announced that the USSR had the H-Bomb. American radio programs went wild with hour-on-the-hour descriptions of how the Russians would come to annihilate our cities, “probably over the pole,” and “it might be tomorrow dawn.” The Pentagon talked preventive war: “We cannot permit Russia to stockpile H-Bombs,” and: “We must have action” to “stop Russia’s arms-drive within the year.” But Moscow calmly changed some tank factories to tractor works, renewed diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia and cut the cost of consumer goods for the sixth time. To the capitalist world this steady calm was more frightening than the H-Bomb; for it was based on the fact that Russia’s output of consumer goods per capita had already passed that of Italy and was approaching that of France.”[11]
Peace continued to gain through 1954 by the signing of the Indo-China Truce in a Geneva Conference which China attended and which Dulles tried to prevent. At the year’s end, however, Washington’s War Party had some successes that worried the world. The agreement to re-arm Germany, which most of Europe feared, was finally pushed through the French and Italian parliaments by American pressure. NATO announced that its future strategy would be based on atomic weapons; all Europe saw in this the inevitable doom of Europe in any future war, whichever side might win. Finally, in the last days of January, 1955, the U.S. Congress gave President Eisenhower the green light to make any kind of war he chose against China. With power to destroy the world left to one man’s discretion, it seemed that our planet might be rushing into its final war.
Moscow reacted with the most effective “Peace Drive” it had ever unleashed. This began with the swift conclusion of the Austrian Peace Treaty, whidi had been ten years delayed by disagreements between East and West. In early April, the Austrian Chancellor was invited to Moscow; in a week he returned with a treaty in which Russia made so many concessions that, despite some dismay in Washington, all the Powers signed on May 15. The Soviet’s chief demand was that Austria remain neutral in any East-West dispute; this the Austrians were pleased to do. The same month, Moscow made another “disarmament offer,” based this time on a previous Anglo-French proposal. It didn’t succeed; Washington turned it down.
The Russians didn’t stop with Austria. Premier Bulganin and Party Secretary Khrushchev next made a trip to Belgrade, where they apologized rather excessively to Tito for the unhappy break with Yugoslavia. By this unusual, but cheerful, loss of face, the Soviets gained, in a highly strategic position in southeast Europe, another neutral state, whose friendship was likely to grow. By late spring of 1955, it was clear that Moscow was building a neutral belt across Europe which could act to prevent border provocations between East and West. Pressures within Germany grew to achieve German unity, not by re-arming but by a similar neutrality.
In these same months of April and May, 1955, the representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, and unanimously adopted a program for mutual aid. For the first time in history, the representatives of 1,400,000,000 people, the long submerged majority of humanity, gained a voice. Here came great neutralist states—India, Burma, Indonesia—on whose initiative the conference was undertaken. Here came feudal Arab states, jungle peoples of Africa, industrial Japan and sundry small states on Washington’s pay-roll, trying to stir friction by attacking Communists. Here came, also, the Communist Chou En-lai, prime minister of China, who refused to get angry, but said: “I did not come to quarrel; I came for the success of all the people here.” Due to his statesmanship and that of India’s Nehru, all these very diverse peoples unanimously agreed: 1) to trade with each other and give economic aid to each other; 2) to exchange information and students; 3) to work for a universal membership in the United Nations; 4) to oppose the production, experimentation or use of the A-Bomb and H-Bomb.
The Soviet Union was not invited to Bandung; it was an Asian-African show. But the Soviet Big Chiefs, after their visit to Tito, flew off to India, Burma and Afghanistan, and were very well received. The crowds that met them in Calcutta were larger than had come out even for Gandhi’s funeral. The Indians liked the Russian informality. They liked it when Bulganin, finding the garlands they hung on him too heavy, tossed some on the necks of his hosts. They liked it when Khrushchev grabbed a peasant’s sickle and showed that he, too, could reap. They especially liked it that distinguished foreigners adopted Gandhi caps and the Indian style of greeting, hands folded as if in prayer, instead of the Western handshake. “Why has no Westerner done this before?” they asked. The answer seemed clear. No Westerner had seen Indians as equals or copied in courtesy their manners in their own land. The Russians seemed to do it naturally.
The trip resulted in various trade treaties and in a joint declaration signed by Nehru and the Russians, which declared that China must have its “rightful place” in the United Nations and its “rights to Formosa”; that A- and H-Bombs should be “unconditionally prohibited”; that the road to peace lay “not in military alliances but in economic and cultural interchange.” By that signing, coming after the Bandung declaration, two-thirds of the human race were recorded for those views.
The drive for these policies was so effective that the chief issue of the British elections that spring became: “Has Eden done enough to keep us out of thermonuclear war?” To help Eden win the election, and also because of the torrent of letters Eisenhower was getting, the United States finally agreed to Four-Power Summit talks, which Washington had refused for ten years. They were set for July, 1955, in Geneva.
Meantime, the United Nations held its Tenth Anniversary Session in San Francisco at the end o£ June. What was planned as a routine birthday, became a world peace rally through three pressures. The demand of the world’s people for survival in an atomic age was focused on the U.N. The Bandung Conference, with a larger membership than the U.N., still sought its aims through U.N. channels. Lastly, the USSR sent its foreign minister, Molotov, with a delegation of eighty people. The importance Moscow thus saw in the session made Washington also take it seriously. Both Dulles and Eisenhower went; the presence of all these chiefs led to a discussion of the Geneva plans.
Suddenly, the press which had insisted that the Big Four meeting had nothing to do with the United Nations, noted that the world’s hopes and prayers surrounded the coming Summit Conference through the U.N. speeches. Washington’s tendency to bypass the U.N. was thus turned backward; technical preparation for the Geneva meeting was put in U.N. hands. The United Nations’ prestige reached an all-time high, not through its own achievements but through the hopes of the world, channeled by Molotov and the Bandung nations.
At last, for the first time in ten years, the Big Chiefs met in Geneva in late July. Friendly talk between Eisenhower and Bulganin sent startled hope around the earth. “The cold war is buried,” exulted the Journal de Geneva. “It is a mortal blow to the cold war,” del Vayo in The Nation, agreed.
Dulles summed it up cynically to a reporter: “Well, we didn’t give much away.” Bulganin summed it up historically to the Soviet Congress: “It relaxed international tensions … marked a turning-point in our relations with the West.” Columbia Broadcasting System summed it up factually: “Geneva settled nothing … was never intended to settle anything. … They only agreed to try to agree. Nevertheless, it may identify a new period for history.” All these summings-up were true. Neither side “gave anything away.” But both sides for the first time in years discussed policies in polite words. Both recognized openly that their policies could not be attained through thermonuclear war, since this would destroy both nations. Both sides were thus, at least for the time, committed to seek their aims through other means.
Thus, the Cold War collapsed. It had been based on the Atom Bomb monopoly in America’s hands; it had begun with the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima. But the advance of the USSR in economic power and in A- and H-bombs, the rise of a new China allied to the Soviets, and the rise of the neutral block in Asia, brought the Cold War, after ten years, to its ending. The recognition at the Summit of the atomic stalemate removed the weapon of the Cold War.
Moscow proclaimed faith in the Cold War’s end by giving the Porkhala naval base back to Finland, on the ground that it was no longer needed, and by cutting at once 640,000 men from the armed forces, and another 1,200,000 men in early 1956. Washington made no similar announcement, but the big military programs of NATO and SEATO withered from within. Everywhere, it began to be admitted that economic, rather than military competition, was the order of the new day.
In February, 1956, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR met to assess the new period in history. Khrushchev’s keynote report listed an impressive summary of Soviet gains. Industrial output had grown 85 percent in five years; it had been multiplied twentyfold since 1928, when Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan began. Agriculture was not satisfactory; its shortages had, however, been met by the call to patriots to open virgin lands in Kazakstan and Siberia. This calling of volunteers to develop the common wealth had come down from Lenin’s day; it still worked.
Correspondents noted that Khrushchev spoke as if Communism were an accepted “law of history.” Soviet leaders were not interested in overthrowing capitalism; to them it was already on its way out. They were concerned with making socialism work smoothly, raising living standards quickly, developing worldwide ties that could make peace secure. Items in the next Five-Year Plan included a 30 percent rise in real wages, a drop in working hours to a seven-hour day or a forty-hour week, free tuition, not only in elementary schools but through secondary schools and universities. Government would be somewhat decentralized. Already, in Azerbaidjan, the big oil industry was 80 percent owned by Azerbaidjan, instead of by the central government. Most important of all was the curbing of the political police, the steady widening of civil rights.
Most significant for the world was the estimate of the new world situation. It was declared that the period of building socialism in one country was ended, that it was replaced by a world system of socialist states, containing one-third of mankind. Through friendship of this socialist system with the neutral bloc, a “Peace Zone” could be formed, including two-thirds of the earth’s people, strong enough to hold the peace of the world. Wars were therefore declared “no longer inevitable.” A basic tenet of Marxism that capitalism inevitably produces war, was not denied. It was amended by the statement that the non-capitalist world might now be strong enough to prevent wars, if its strength was intelligently and flexibly applied.
It was furthermore stated that in the change from capitalism, socialism would not necessarily follow the path that Russia had taken. Each nation would find its own path and some perhaps through parliamentary forms. The thesis that socialism arose through armed uprising of workers was not denied; it was outgrown. New ways became possible because of the strength of socialism on a world scale. This thesis stated only what had already happened. None of the new socialist states had followed the Russian road. In East Europe, socialism had come through coalition governments. In China also, the Communists had had a coalition with Chiang Kai-shek, and when he broke it by launching civil war against them, they had won by coalition with the anti-Chiang forces, including even the “national capitalists.”
The recognition of these changes brought also recognition of the fact that the Stalin Era was over, that Stalinism, so long imposed as absolute, was the strategy of a past epoch and the time had come for new strategy and new ways. With this went an analysis and criticism of the past era, in which many speakers at the Congress joined.
Most of this criticism was restrained and useful. Foreign policy, it was held, had been too rigid and isolationist. The break with Yugoslavia had been a bad mistake. The role of neutral nations had not been properly appreciated. Some speakers criticized the conduct of the war. The most searching criticism concerned the arbitrary power of the political police which had condemned thousands of innocent people and trampled “Soviet democratic rights.” Blame for the evils was placed on “the cult of the individual,” i.e., the deification of Stalin, which, especially in the later years, had allowed one-man decisions to rule unchecked.
Thus far, the criticism, if surprising, was unsensational. But at the end of the Congress, Khrushchev made an off-record speech to delegates only. It was not released to the press; Khrushchev himself declared that it must not be. It was clearly a burst of emotion, caused perhaps by the recent perusal of die thousands of cases of injustice which had been reviewed in the previous three years. Months later, the U.S. State Department released what purports to be, and probably is, part of this off-record speech. The Soviet government neither denied it nor officially claimed it. From this one assumes that it contained too much fact to be denied, hut that it was not sufficiently balanced to be released as an official statement.
Throughout this book, I have used Khrushchev’s off-record speech as an exposé of great evils and have considered various parts of it in their proper places. I have not used it as final authority, for the evidence is not all in, nor has it been fully evaluated in relation to the conditions and time. It is not even clear whether Stalin ever knew of all the excesses which Khrushchev attributes to him by implication. One must take into account the fact that the State Department published it to discredit the Soviet Union, and that the document has had, very widely, that effect. I cannot take it as the final voice of the Soviet Union, since neither the Soviet government nor Khrushchev issued it as such.
No voice today can be final about the Stalin era. Stalin is one of those who are judged by long history, the character of whose work grows clearer as it recedes from view. What we know, at least, is that he set out in 1928 to build socialism in one country, a backward peasant land surrounded by a world of foes. When he began, Russia was peasant, illiterate: when he finished, it was the world’s second industrial power. Twice over he thus built it, once before the Hitler invasion and again upon ihe war’s ruin. That stands to his credit forever: he engineered that job.
He engineered ruthlessly, for he was born in a ruthless land and endured ruthlessness from childhood. He engineered suspiciously, for he had been five times exiled and must have been often betrayed. He condoned, and even authorized, outrageous acts of the political police against innocent people, but so far no evidence is produced that he consciously framed them. The outrages seem rather to have come from complex causes, among which were Stalin’s tendency to suspicion and the Central Committee’s tendency to rubber-stamp what Stalin said. Despite these crimes against individuals, evidence does not lack that Stalin’s assertion that “people” are the most precious element in any nation, was no hypocrisy. His days were spent in the careful removal of obstacles that hindered the valid dreams of workers, peasants, engineers, who, but for his insight, would have remained frustrated and obscure but who, through his understanding, became leaders in farming, industry, aviation.
As the war drew on, as his age grew and his power, as the strain grew also of a struggle that was for the world’s future, Stalin, it is said, became more dictatorial, relying on himself alone. Yet “the cult of personality,” now blamed for all past evils, is a flaw in the worshipper no less than in the worshipped. When all that can be said against Stalin is piled and counted, I doubt whether anything less than the terrific drive he imposed on the USSR from 1928 onw’ard, could ever have built a socialist state in that land. Looking back, one can see how the other leaders—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin—led towards destruction. None of them had, I think, as Stalin had, either the insight into the people’s needs, or the guts and will that were needed.
Through all the early years, many of the ablest Marxists, inside and outside Russia, said it couldn’t be done. Russians said to me in the early thirties: “It is too bad for the world that the first socialism is built in our dark land. If you Americans did it, or even those industrious Germans, it might be a proper job. But we, dark people, what socialism shall we build?”
Stalin said: “Build, or be crushed in ten years by foreign invaders.”
They built, and it stood when the foreign invasion came. So, Stalin proved right, but those doubters were partly right, also. For the socialism thus built was never the socialism men dreamed, the socialism of freedom and plenty for all; it was speckled by many flaws. How far those flaws derive from Stalin’s personality, how far from the dark Russian past, how far from the Nazi fifth column and the forty-year threat of war—this will be a theme for future historians and all will differ in apportioning blame.
On one thing, they will not differ. As far as any individual may claim the events he led, Lenin made the Russian Revolution, Stalin built the world’s first socialist country. Its faults can be corrected now.
To correct the faults of the USSR itself is not the serious problem; it can be done by an aroused people and by reasonably intelligent and devoted officials. The constitutional forms exist; so does the wealth and the will. The faults that Stalin left in the Soviet bloc in East Europe are more serious. When recent headlines shouted “Revolt in Poland,” “Civil War in Hungary,” our Western experts gleefully saw the “end of Moscow’s authority.” The governments in Warsaw and Budapest replied that their friendship with the USSR was “unbreakable,” that all they wanted was “sovereignty,” “equality.” What are these words? They have waited far too long—the time is late.
What “sovereignty” has any nation in today’s world? What “equality” has a nation the size of Poland in a bilateral argument with the USSR’s 200,000,000 people, holding one sixth of the world? These terms must be defined. They have been defined again and again in history; but always they must be re-defined in new conditions. Now they must be defined in a socialist sense. Unless this is done and quickly, then all protestations of “friendship” are hollow. Friendships between nations change; allies drift apart. Can anyone doubt this who looks at the past ten years?
This is the job that has waited since 1945, especially since 1950, and urgently since 1953 when Stalin died. Stalin did not solve it; his mind, set in the grooves of “socialism in one country,” could not create in terms of a socialist one-third of mankind. Khrushchev has not solved it; for the moment he has made it worse. His apologies to Tito, his attacks on Stalin, have released all the separatist tendencies in East Europe. These tendencies are strong, but so also are the tendencies toward union of socialist states. The forms of that union in diversity are still to be devised.
Let me illustrate by an anecdote. Ten years ago, I met a Czech in Moscow; he had come to make an economic treaty with the USSR. I asked him what truth there was in the American claim that Moscow exploited the East European lands. He replied: “When we deal with the chiefs of Soviet industry, they bargain for their prices and we bargain for ours. They are tough bargainers. But if they press too hard, then Gottwald takes it up with Stalin for a ‘political settlement’ and says the terms will ruin us. … Then Stalin gives us help.”
Stalin’s personal concessions to Gottwald were no substitute for economic planning! In the USSR, the state railways and the coal mines do not see eye-to-eye on the price of coal. Agencies exist to settle it: the State Planning Board, the Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party. What Planning Board exists for the Soviet Bloc? What Supreme Soviet? What Communist International, since the Cominform dissolved? Are bilateral pacts between a “sovereign” Poland and an “equal” USSR enough? Has the Warsaw Pact the necessary teeth?
Who will devise the ideological base and the practical forms to reconcile the need of Poles for freedom and their equal need for union with a socialist bloc that is strong to help? Will it be done by a man, or a woman, or a committee? Will it be done by a Russian, a Pole or a Czech? I think it will not be a Russian, for the Russians already have a big job to continue in their own land, a job whose roots are deep in “the Stalin Era.” It might be a Chinese—so far, Liu Shao-chi has done the best job on the theory of nationalism and internationalism. It might be the Italian, Togliatti, who has done perhaps the freshest and most creative thinking on the problems of independent paths to Socialism, and on new structures and new political forms to meet the new conditions of a new era. But I also think it might be a Czech, from a land that has endured the many assaults of all great powers in the cock-pit of Europe, while preserving both its love of freedom and its cooperative sense.
Whoever devises the forms of the new Socialist inter-relation of states, whether he be Russian, Chinese or Czech, will be Stalin’s successor in history, engineer of a new era. More than that, he will have laid not only the framework of socialist unity-in-diversity, but also the foundations of that world government which must someday be.