Socialism Unbound by Stephen Eric Bronner

Author:Stephen Eric Bronner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science/History and Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Breaking the Chains

A new leadership composed of Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrentii Beria, Georgei Malenkov, and Viacheslav Molotov appeared ready to begin the post-Stalinist transition. It seemed clear to all involved that the USSR required a different approach to power in the 1950s. It could no longer be ruled on the basis of terror—thus the elimination of Beria, the former head of the secret police and biographer of Stalin. It would have to distance itself from the old administration and its inefficiency—thus the elimination of Malenkov. It would need a new and more principled foreign policy—thus the elimination of Molotov, an architect of the pact with Nazi Germany. Khrushchev was not identified with any of these institutions and policies in quite the same way. A man who had risen under Stalin, and participated in his crimes, he called for reestablishing the primacy of the party and the power of the Central Committee.133 This indeed lay behind the secret Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 in which Stalin’s crimes were partially revealed.134

The congress signaled a more liberal attitude towards cultural expression and placed restrictions on the terror apparatus. It condemned the “cult of the personality” and marked an attempt to restore the principles of leadership associated with Lenin. Camps were dismantled, political prisoners freed, and political officials were given some degree of security regarding their positions and their lives. The more rigid forms of conformity and censorship were relaxed. Uncensored writings of atrocities and blunders associated with the recent past were circulated and Khrushchev personally intervened to assure the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In keeping with State and Revolution, moreover, Khrushchev sought to mitigate the alienation of ordinary citizens by introducing new forms of participation associated with what is now understood as civil society.135 Leninism would be reinvigorated in order to overcome the legacy of Stalinism.

Reasserting the primacy of the party and the vision of a “full scale construction of communism” had led Khrushchev in 1961, while visiting the United States, to claim “We will bury you!” A bureaucratic party and increased production, however, could not change the meager prospects of international revolution. Leninism was never viable as an establishmentarian doctrine and its privileging of the party-state was a standing impediment to the liberal rule of law. The new freedom was, in a sense, as arbitrary as the old terror. The extent to which dissidents could dissent was never made explicit and Khrushchev was in line with Lenin’s way of thinking when he sent troops to suppress the anticommunist uprising of 1956 in Hungary. Leninism had helped pave the way for totalitarianism and, if a critical engagement with its authoritarian implications was never undertaken, there were also limits to the constraints that could be imposed on what Sartre had appropriately termed the “ghost of Stalin.”

The new leadership was itself implicated in the crimes of the old regime. But the limits of reform did not merely derive from their fears. The public sphere of the nation and the myth of the party stood in danger of being wrecked through a full disclosure of the past.

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