Some Reflections on ‘Khrushchev Lied’
by Grover Furr
Vijay Singh
After the publication of ‘Khrushchev
Lied’ in English in India the book has been translated
into various Indian languages. The following represents
the introduction to the Malayalam language edition.
The closed speech given by Nikita
Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in
1956 had multiple ramifications. It derailed the
understanding of the role of Stalin in Soviet and world
history, it helped to weaken the international communist
movement, it stymied the development of socialism and
communism in the Soviet Union, and it weakened the
developing national liberation movements. Theoretically,
politically and ideologically it reversed Marxism-Leninism
on a range of questions. The devastating effects of the
closed speech and the 20th Congress of the CPSU
had both immediate and long term
effects. They led to the end of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and socialism in the USSR and the failure to
progress to carrying out the functions of the dictatorship
of the proletariat in most of the people’s democracies in
Europe and Asia. No party leader or party in the democratic
camp came out in the defence of
Stalin and Marxism-Leninism in 1956. The parties which were
to initiate the polemics on the line of the international
communist movement gave their support to the theses of
Khrushchev for a number of years. Inside the Soviet Union,
Molotov and Kaganovich were
allied to the Khrushchev group from 1953 onwards, despite
their differences on a number of questions, until their
exclusion from the CPSU in June 1957. Mass demonstrations in
the period of deStalinisation
took place in the Soviet Union as revealed in the
manifestations in Georgia (1956), Novocherkassk, Russia
(1962) and Sumgait, Azerbaijan (1963) which left hundreds dead in the period
1956-1963. Khrushchev
removed 70% of the Stalinist Central Committee in the 1950s,
another 50% were later removed. Similarly
he changed the composition of the
Central Committees of the Communist Parties of the
republics, as well as regional parties, city and district
party committees by the same amount, multiple times.
Outside the resistance in
the Soviet Union the closed speech was countered across the
world. In the USA the ‘Turning Point’ publication brought
out by the Communist League stood up against the revisionist
and opportunist attacks of Khrushchev from 1956 itself. In
Ireland, Neil Goold in April,
1956 gave his sharp criticism of the opportunist closed speech. In
India important criticisms of the 20th Congress
were written by Abdul Momin, Parimal
Dasgupta and Moni Guha in the aftermath of the closed
speech.
The obvious parallels of the
closed speech of Khrushchev with the historical views of the
left opposition of Trotsky (as also of Titoism in
Yugoslavia) were commented upon early on. In many quarters the
closed speech was seen, speciously, as a validation of the
criticisms made by Trotsky of the Soviet Union and its
leadership. After 1956 Trotskyism as a political trend,
which hitherto been exiguous, now began its rapid expansion
in the intelligentsia in western countries such as Britain.
The Soviet
intervention of Czechoslovakia, as well as the distribution
of questionable Leninist ‘last texts’, played cardinal roles
in this process. In France,
the year 1968 witnessed the bizarre theoretical marriage
of Trotskyism, Anarchism with Maoism (Bettelheim et al). The
intelligentsia turned against Marxism-Leninism. In
Britain, France and other imperialist powers the onslaught
of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the ideological alliance with
the trend of the left opposition dealt crushing blows to
the Marxist-Leninism tradition. The revolutionary
Marxist-Leninist forces such as those of Albania were able
to only partly challenge the hegemony of the new
imperialist ideology.
The links between Trotsky
and Khrushchev were not merely political, theoretical and
ideological. The memoirs of Kaganovich
reveal that in 1923 and 1924, Khrushchev had been a member
of the Trotskyist opposition. At the end of 1924 he ‘realised’ his error and admitted it.
He requested Kaganovich to
shift his area of work so that he could make a break from
his earlier political links. After consulting Stalin, Kaganovich had transferred him to
new areas of work. Khrushchev, argues Kaganovich,
later conducted good work against the deviation of the right
opposition. He was later promoted as the secretary of the
Moscow Committee.
Kaganovich gave the background
to this:
I remember
when I consulted Comrade Stalin on this issue, I told him
that Khrushchev was a good Party worker and about the
Trotskyite past of Khrushchev in 1923-1924. Comrade Stalin
asked, 'And did he overcome these mistakes?' I replied, 'Not
only has he overcome them but he has been actively
struggling against them'. 'Well then' - Stalin said —
'promote him, especially when he is a good party worker'. I
remember when I was later on dining with him at his home,
Stalin asked his wife,' Nadya, is this the same Khrushchev
from the Industrial Academy of whom you said that he is a
good Party Worker?' — 'Yes', — she answered — 'Indeed it is
he' Later Comrade Khrushchev was asked to come to the
Secretariat meeting of the Central Committee where Comrade
Stalin said, 'As far as your error of the past is concerned,
you talk about it at the time of the elections in the
Conference, and Comrade Kaganovich
will say that the Central Committee knows about this and has
faith in Comrade Khrushchev'. And that is what was done. (https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv5n1/khrushch.htm)
Commenting on the activities of
Khrushchev in his years of power based on his experiences,
and after reading the memoirs of the former Soviet leader, Kaganovich argued that:
it turned out that
Khrushchev did not prove to be a simple chameleon, but a
'recidivist' of Trotskyism.
The closed
speech of Khrushchev and the 20th Congress of the
CPSU were clearly starting points of modern revisionism, the
restoration of capitalism and the liquidation of the
majority of the people’s democracies.
In
‘Khrushchev Lied’, Grover Furr has performed an enormous
task for all working people by demolishing the content of
the closed speech. Furr takes up sixty
one assertions made by Khrushchev and establishes
their falsity on the basis of the printed documents derived
from the Soviet archives which were opened up after the fall
of the Soviet Union.
Some
instances of Furr’s exposures give a picture of the breadth
of the book.
Khrushchev
claimed Stalin did not act by persuasion and cooperation but
by imposition of his views. Those who did not accept his
positions were removed from the political collective and
then morally and physically annihilated.
Furr cites
the opinion of Marshal Zhukov which contradicts this. Zhukov affirmed
that that Stalin changed his opinion when confronted with
informed opinion.
Khrushchev
implied that Kirov had been killed on the orders of Stalin.
Furr correctly points out that Kirov was a staunch supporter
of Stalin and that no post-Stalinist commission of inquiry
conducted under Khrushchev and Gorbachev was able to
establish any link between the death of Kirov and the NKVD.
Khrushchev
held Stalin to be responsible for the mass repressions of
the late 1930s. But Furr points out the role of Khrushchev
himself and Ezhov in these
events. Earlier Yagoda had
initiated repressions as a member of the right opposition. While Stalin favoured eliminating the supporters
of Trotskyism from the party he wished to do this not by
mass repression but dealing with oppositionists
individually. The stellar example of this it may be pointed
out was that of Khrushchev himself who as we pointed out had
been a member of the Trotskyist opposition in 1923-4. In
another example we may note the example of the economist
L.A. Leontyev who had been a
member of the Trotskyist opposition as is recorded on his
party card.
A major
charge made by Khrushchev was that Stalin was not prepared
for the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. This is clearly
incorrect as one of the motives for rapid industrialisation and collectivisation, which was opposed
by the Trotskyist and Bukharinist
opposition, was to secure the long-term defence of the Soviet Union from
imperialist intrusion. Had the 5 year plans not taken place,
which laid the basis for the military industry, it is
difficult to see the Soviet Union surviving a German
blitzkrieg. Given the refusal of Britain and France to ally
with the Soviet Union against Hitler, the Soviet leader, to
secure the position of the Soviet Union, supported the
signing of the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany which
gave a temporal and territorial relief to the socialist
state.
Khrushchev
condemned Stalin for not accepting information of an
impending German attack from various informants. However
multiple warnings from several sources reached the desk of
Stalin for different dates in May and June 1941. Stalin
successfully avoided provoking the Germans from attack by
not engaging in troop movements in that period. Thus Khrushchev’s charge that Stalin
ignored warnings was a false one. Khrushchev indulged in
gross mendacity in his charge that Stalin was demoralised after the German attack
and unable to take any action in the first says of the war.
Grover Furr refutes this by pointing to the evidence in the
logbook of the visitors to Stalin’s office, the Diary of
Dimitrov as well as works of the critics of Stalin such as Volkogonov and Sudoplatov
which clearly establish the active role played by Stalin in
the early days of the war. Khrushchev further attacked
Stalin in the closed speech for military incompetence, not
just the charge that the leader engaged in planning
operations on a globe. Yet this was refuted by the memoirs
of the leading Marshals such as Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Golovanov.
Grover Furr
has performed a magnificent job in refuting the lies of
Khrushchev in the closed speech. Critics in India such as
Anil Ranjimwale of the CPI were
cut to the quick by the book. Supporters of the 4th
International in India too have negatively reacted to the
publication of this book. This to be expected as Grover Furr
has struck at the very root of modern revisionism and
Trotskyism. It should be noted that the critics,
internationally, of Furr have been unable to refute the
arguments which have been given in ‘Khrushchev Lied’. The
publication of this book in a number of countries
internationally and in a number of Indian languages has
shown the value attached to this book by the supporters of
socialism and democracy.
Grover Furr
has given a devastating political critique of the closed
speech of Khrushchev. Yet it must be noted that the speech
played a central role in the politics and economics of the
post-Stalin period. Furr correctly links, following the
Russian historian Yuri Zhukov, the speech with the
opposition to the programme of
democratisation put forward by
Stalin. Furr
argues: ‘Stalin
and his supporters had championed a plan of democratisation of the USSR through
contested elections. Their plan seems to have been to move
the locus of power in the USSR from Party leaders like
Khrushchev to elected government representatives. Doing this
would also have laid the groundwork for restoring the Party
as an organisation of dedicated
persons struggling for communism rather than for careers or
personal gain. Khrushchev appears to have had the support of
the Party First Secretaries, who were determined to sabotage
this project and perpetuate their own positions of
privilege’ (p. 200, English edition). Furr
also notes the market
‘reforms’ of Khrushchev which shifted the emphasis from
heavy industry – production of the means of production of
Department A towards light consumer industry which slowed
down the economic development of the Soviet Union in these
years as well as the abandonment of the programme for the transition to
communism.
It may be argued that the
closed speech was a conditio sine qua non for
the demolition of the authority of Marxism-Leninism in the
form of the undermining of the political personality and
heritage of Stalin. It was the prerequisite for arranging
for the interruption of the transition from socialism to
communism which was being elaborated from the Eighteenth
Congress of the CPSU(b) onwards and the inauguration of the
norms of generalised commodity
production in the Soviet Union after Stalin in the period
1953-58.
After collectivisation,
which saw the abolition of the last exploiting class in the
Soviet Union, the kulaks, Stalin declared the foundations of
socialism being laid. He still envisaged the completion of a
classless socialist society as a task for the future in his
report to the 17th Congress of the party in 1934.
The 18th Congress of the CPSU(b) in 1939 saw
serious interventions on the question of the transition to
communism by Molotov, Voznesensky
and Stalin. Stalin noted that while the Soviet Union had
outstripped the main capitalist countries in terms of the
rate of industrial development it had yet to reach the rate
of consumption of the leading capitalist nations. This was
important in order to lay the basis for the abundance of
goods which was necessary for the transition from the first
to the second phase of communism. In Molotov’s report to the
Congress, he linked the new plan to the task of completing
of a classless socialist society and the gradual transition
to communism. It was considered at this congress that the
first phase of communism had been completed and that the
Third Five Year Plan was to be a major step towards the
formation of full communism.
The chairman of the State
Planning Commission, N.A. Voznesensky
enumerated the basis tasks for the transition to communism:
first, the productive forces needed to be raised beyond the
leading capitalist countries; second, labour
productivity had to be raised in order to create an
abundance of products; third, the cultural and technical
level of the working class had to be raised to the level of
the engineers and technical workers in order to end the
distinction between mental and physical labour; and fourth the socialist
state had to develop new forms while establishing communism.
He expected that while the transition to socialism had taken
two decades, the transition to communism would take a lesser
time period. He did not refer to Stalin’s thinking projected
in the 17th Congress of the party that the
collective farms would transit to communes founded on social
property.
The perspective for
communism implied that a new party programme
was necessary. A party committee was set up for this
purpose. Parallel to this Gosplan
prepared an economic programme
for the transition to communism in 1941 in two volumes.
These plans were resumed
after the war from 1946 and a draft party programme was formulated in 1947
after consultation with the writings of the utopian
socialists.
In Economic Problems
Stalin outlined the gradual transition to communism through
setting up a new planning body above the existing Gosplan so that the collective farms
did not gain the impression that their surplus was being
taken over by the state planning committee; and, the
inauguration of products-exchange between the collective
farms and the industrial enterprises without the mediation
of money relations. The new perspectives implied the gradual
elimination of commodity-money relations in the transition
to a communist society.
Khrushchev and the party
abandoned the programme of
communism of the Stalin period. Molotov, too, even pointed
out in his conversations with Feliks Chuyev
that he did not agree with Stalin's programme
for transition to communism which was outlined in Economic Problems.
The CPSU under Khrushchev
prepared a new party programme
in 1961 which took place after lengthy discussions. The programme formally accepted the
conversion of the dictatorship of the proletariat to a
‘state of the whole people’. It further argued that the
transition to a communist society would be achieved through
the further development of commodity-money relations.
What were the economic steps
between the death of Stalin and the 20th Congress
of the CPSU? In this period directive centralised
planning was terminated: the sphere of Gosplan
was steadily reduced, as Mikoyan openly accepted, from 1953
itself; the state planning committee itself was divided into
two organisations; the powers
of the ministries and the directors of the enterprises were
expanded at the expense of the state planning committee. Centralised directive planning for
constructing communism was replaced by decentralised
‘co-ordinated ‘planning’ to
restore a market economy. The 20th Congress in
1956 and the expulsion of the ‘anti-party group’ the
following year prepared the ground for the further changes
in the economy. At the end of May 1957
the system of allocation of the products of the state sector
had been ended and a number of sales organisations
were created under the state planning committee to sell the
goods of the state sector. The further commodification of
the instruments and means of production took place in
September 1957 as the enterprises were expected to operate
on the basis of profitability. It now became the new
understanding of Soviet political economy by 1958 that the
means of production circulated in the state sector as
commodities. Following from this the means of production in
agriculture, the Machine Tractor Stations, were sold to the
collective farms in 1958 and thereby also became
commodities.
If a paradigm is to be
sought for understanding the secret speech it may be found
not primarily in the question of the Stalin plan for democratisation but rather in the
reversal of the CPSU programme
for laying the foundations of communist society.
The closed speech
represented the attempt to bring about the correspondence
between the new relations of production ensuing from the
destruction of the socialist mode of production such as it
had taken place between 1953 and 1956 and to bring the
superstructure in line with it. The speech further
prepared the way for the creation of a generalised
system of commodity production in the Soviet Union and most
of the people’s democracies.
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