The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

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THIRTY-THIRD YEAR OF PUBLICATION

THE CRIMES OF

THE STALIN ERA SPECIAL REPORT TO THE 20TH CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION

By NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union

ANNOTATED ESPECIALLY FOR THIS EDITION

By BORIS I. NICOIAEVSKY Formerly of the Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow

Introduction Deutscher concluded his controversial biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 1949, by classing the Soviet ruler as a “great revolutionary despot” like Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was a historical verdict which many, as unfamiliar with Stalin as they were with Cromwell and Napoleon, accepted. A few months ago, Stalin’s successor and former “close comrade-in-arms,” Nikita Khrushchev, provided the evidence to place Stalin in a class by himself, beyond Caligula, Philip II of Spain and perhaps even Adolf Hitler. Khrushchev’s indictment is a healthy antidote to 30 years of pro-Stalinist apologetics; at the same time, it does less than justice to Stalin’s predecessors and successors. To understand the d.ctatorship of Stalin, as it is described by Khrushchev, one must also understand the dictatorship of Lenin and of Khrushchev and his colleagues. The Communist party came to power in Russia by force, overthrowing an eight-month democratic regime which had made Russia (in Lenin’s own words) “the freest country in the world.” The coup d’etat of November 7, 1917, actually led by Leon Trotsky, was quickly followed by repression of democratic parties and institutions. In December 1917, the Communist terror apparatus, known as the Cheka, was set up, and it has continued to function ever since—under the successive names of OGPU, NKYD and MVD-MGB. Nevertheless, three weeks after the Communist coup, 36 million Russians voted in free elections for an All-Russian Constituent Assembly, gave only a fourth of their votes to the Communists and a clear majority to the agrarian, demo­ cratic Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their associates dispersed the Assembly by force on January 19, 1918. For more than two years, Russia was engulfed by civil war, which crushed the democrats and socialists and ended as a battle between Communists and reactionary militarists. Trotsky’s Red Army was victorious, despite spo­ radic foreign intervention, but the Communist regime continued to meet r . I saac

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with opposition in factories and villages. Many of the Lenin-Trotsky measures antagonized even veteran Communists. At the start of 1921, outbreaks of unrest among Petrograd workers followed peasant revolts in Tambov and elsewhere; an influential group of Communists called the Workers’ Opposi­ tion demanded factory self-management and an end to centralized militariza­ tion of the workers; finally, the sailors of Kronstadt naval base, who had carried Lenin to power in 1917, revolted and demanded democratic free­ doms. At the 10th Communist Party Congress, meeting in March 1921, Lenin prescribed an economic carrot and a political stick: He proclaimed his New Economic Policy, which restored free trade in the villages and permitted free enterprise elsewhere, but crushed the Kronstadt rebellion and the Workers’ Opposition. Kronstadt was physically annihilated under the command of Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former Tsarist officer who had turned Communist; the Workers’ Opposition—and future Communist dissidents as well—were curbed by new decrees forbidding the formation of any groups critical of the general line of the Party Central Committee, and forbidding agitation against that general line even by leading Communists. It was, then, in an established one-party dictatorship that Joseph Stalin began his rise to autocratic power when he became General Secretary of the Party in 1922. The next six years, in which the various Communist “collective leaders” maneuvered for supreme leadership, were years of economic recov­ ery, relatively mild compared with what was to come, but they were years of dictatorship nonetheless. Only a Soviet citizen of the 1950s could regard them as the “good old days.” By the time Lenin died, after several previous strokes, in January 1924, a troika or triumvirate was ruling Russia, consisting of Stalin, Leo Kamenev, head of the Moscow Party organization, and Gregory Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd party and of the Communist International. Trotsky had already been successfully elbowed out of the way; his program of concentrated indus­ trialization and forced collectivization of agriculture seemed too radical and repressive for most party members. Consolidating his control of the Party apparatus, Stalin next defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev, who joined Trotsky in what became known as the “Left Opposition.” Stalin was aided in this by Nikolai Bukharin, theoretician and editor of Pravda, Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Soviet Premier, and Mikhail Tomsky, head of the Soviet trade unions; these men. who favored a cooperative approach to the peasantry and a parallel growth of light and heavy industry, became known as the “Right Opposition” when Stalin turned on them in 1928-29 and introduced Trotsky’s old program as official Soviet policy. In the collectivization, industrialization and famines of 1929-33, it is esti­ mated that 5 to 10 million Russians died and another 10 million were sent to forced labor under Stalin’s slogan of “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”