Back to Heel

"It would be wrong," declared the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. last week, "to close one's eyes to the fact that certain of our friends abroad have not got to the bottom of the question of the personality cult." When it comes to getting to the bottom of something, nobody can beat the Kremlin's leaders. Down they went in their hip boots, sloshing around in a swamp of doubletalk, and throwing little bits of misinformation behind them, like cracker crumbs, for those who tried to follow them. But they were not very helpful guides for those who anxiously sought answers to the questions implicit in Khrushchev's historic attack on Stalin at the 20th Party Congress (TIME, June 11).

Moscow's long silence had been desperately hard on Western Communist leaders who, unlike their Russian masters, cannot rely on police terror and a controlled press to maintain discipline among the rank and file. Left to their own devices, men like Italy's Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the biggest Communist Party (2,130,000 members) outside the Iron Curtain, had begun to make their own explanations, and to talk recklessly of "polycentrism," i.e., independent policies for each of the world's Communist parties. Togliatti echoed publicly the unsatisfied questions of his own disillusioned followers: How could a tyrant like Stalin come to power under the Communist system? Why had the Kremlin leaders who now denounced Stalin tolerated his tyranny?

Making Explanations. What Togliatti demanded was a "Marxist" explanation of Stalinism, i.e., an explanation of particular events in terms of vast, impersonal historic forces. One such explanation--and the obvious one--for Stalin's rise to arbitrary power is the absence of checks and balances in the Communist system. Unable to concede this, Moscow's Central Committee offered an explanation which explained nothing: "The development of the personality cult was to an enormous extent contributed to by some individual traits of J. V. Stalin."

Firmly repudiating Togliatti's suggestion that Russia's present leaders were "co-responsible" with Stalin, the Central Committee advanced for the first time the unsubstantiated claim that there had in fact been a staunch "Leninist core" of the Central Committee and that on occasion it opposed Stalin's arbitrary use of power. "There were certain periods, for instance during the war years when the individual acts of Stalin were sharply restricted . . . Members of the Central Committee and also outstanding Soviet war commanders took over certain sectors of activity in the rear, and at the front made independent decisions."

Who's a Coward? "It might be asked," noted the resolution, "why these people did not take an open stand against Stalin and remove him from leadership." The answer, said the Central Committee, flatly contradicting Khrushchev's earlier admission that Stalin's subordinates were afraid to risk their necks, was not "that there was a lack of personal courage." It was, rather, that:

P: "The success of Socialist construction and the consolidation of the U.S.S.R. were attributed to Stalin . . . Anyone who had acted in that situation against Stalin would not have received support from the people."

P: "Such a stand would have been regarded as . . .a blow against the unity of the party and the whole state."

P: "The successes which . . . the Soviet Union attained . . . created an atmosphere in which individual mistakes and shortcomings seemed less important."

P: "Many wrong actions of Stalin, especially as regards the violation of Soviet law, became known only after his death."

Coming from the old Stalin gang, who had prospered under him, executed his will and shared his guilt, this explanation was feeble indeed. In the light of the searching and troubled questions asked by Togliatti, France's Thorez and other party leaders abroad, it was in fact so intellectually weak as to be insulting. Worse yet, from Togliatti's point of view, the resolution contained the first public rebuke he had ever received from Moscow. Snapped the Central Committee: "One cannot in particular agree with Comrade Togliatti when he asks whether Soviet society has not reached 'certain forms of degeneration.' There are no foundations for such a question."

But one thing it did do was to show who was boss. Responding to the whistle like a well-trained dog, Moscow-wise Palmiro Togliatti promptly came to heel. He voiced "unreserved approval" of "the line followed by the Soviet comrades in the construction of a socialist society." Then, to get a little better reading on just what the line was, he dispatched to Moscow a team of three top Italian Communists. In France, party leaders announced that they were satisfied with the explanation too. For the present at least, all the brave talk of polycentrism and individual thinking was at an end. Or supposed to be.

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