SO WHY DID STALIN HAPPEN?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440021-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: February 12, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/03/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440021-3
ARTICLE APPEA
ON PAGE
WASHINGTON TIMES
12 February 1986
ARNOLD BEICHMAN
So why did Stalin.
happen?
sated and revolutionary legality
ome let us now speak of in-
famous men, namely Josef
Stalin and Nikita
Khrushchev and all their
successors. For in a little while, it
will be the 30th anniversary of Mr.
Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech, the
world-famous one in which he re-
counted some of the crimes of the
Soviet dictator during his quarter-
century reign.
Stalin effectively ruled the Soviet
Union from 1929 to 1953, in what is
probably the most sanguinary reign
of terror in all recorded history. He
was extraordinarily successful in
covering up his human butchery and
finding Western apologists to ex-
plain away his crimes. I have no
doubt that the genocidists who fol-
lowed him - in Hitler's Germany, in
Mao Tse-tung's China, in Idi Amin's
Uganda, in Ho Chi Minh and Pol
Pot's Southeast Asia - were much
influenced by Stalin's achievement
in finding so many willing dupes in
the West to glorify him.
On Feb. 25, 1956, almost three
years after Stalin's death, Mr.
Khrushchev addressed a closed ses-
sion in Moscow of the 20th Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. In that 20,000-word speech he
recited Stalin's iniquities in graphic,
horrifying detail - "barbaric tor-
tures;' "abuse of power," "mass ter-
ror against the Party cadres, ""mass
acts of abuse against socialist legal-
ity," "odious falsification and
criminal violation of socialist legal-
ity," "odious falsification and
criminal violation of revolutionary
legality," "the most brutal violation
of socialist legality, torture and op-
pression ... self-accusation of inno-
cent people:' "large-scale repres-
sion against the military cadres"
He described Stalin as
"capricious, irritable, and brutal;'
informed by a "persecution mania
[which] reached unbelievable di-
mensions" He said that "honest
Communists were slandered, accu-
sations against them were fabri-
was gravely undermined." Not even
the most outraged anti-Communist
would have used such language
about Stalin, not so much from lack
of will as from lack of the kind of
intimate documentation which Mr.
Khrushchev submitted to his Party
audience.
The Khrushchev speech itself
was never officially published by the
U.S.S.R. (Mr. Khrushchev confirmed
its existence in his memoirs,
Khrushchev Remembers, published
after his ouster in October 1964). It
was, however, made public
worldwide by tl the CIA in June 1956.
Its provenance was never in ques-
tion. Copies of the speech were cir-
culated all over the U.S.S.R. in re-
stricted fashion. It was read aloud
and discussed at party meetings, but
the speech itself was never handed
around to rank-and-file party mem-
bers. The speech shook the non-
Russian Communist world, where
Stalin had been the godhead.
In the West, the usual wide-eyed
mystics of the left thought the
speech heralded real changes in the
"evil empire." Disillusion set in
when the Red Army put down anti-
Soviet outbreaks in Poland. Later in
the fall of 1956, came the Hungarian
uprising, accompanied by Red
Army massacres of the Hungarian
revolutionaries.
Actually there should have been
no illusions about the implications of
the "secret" speech, because what
Mr. Khrushchev was really doing
was masking the meaning of Stalin's
Great Terror with a euphemistic
phrase, "cult of personality" In other
words, there was nothing wrong
with Lenin's revolution. What was
wrong were Stalin's terrible neuro-
ses.
As Edward Crankshaw put it, the
speech was a "smokescreen as well
as an exposure," intended to estab-
lish "Stalinism without tears."
In fact, by September 1956 the re-
habilitation of Stalin, initiated by Mr.
Khrushchev despite his anti-Stalin
speech, was well under way. The re-
habilitation of Stalin continues to
this day under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr. Khrushchev omitted a great
deal of Soviet history from the
speech. So far as Mr. Khrushchev
was concerned, his indictment was
selectively based on those of Stalin's
crimes which had been committed
against party leaders and officials,
Soviet marshals and generals. The
20 million or more ordinary Soviet
men, women, and children exterm-
inated by Stalin in the interests of
forced collectivization merited not
even a phrase in Mr. Khrushchev's
speech. As the Yugoslav diplomat,
Veljko Micunovic, wrote in his book,
Moscow Diary:
"Not even in secret did
Khrushchev mention the millions of
completely innocent Soviet citizens
whom the Soviet leaders sent to their
death; he spoke only about a few out-
standing individuals, high officials
of the CPSU who were executed for
nothing. Khrushchev did not say a
single word about the fact that the
Soviet Union had imposed the very
same system of executing innocent
and decent people, high officials and
government, on all countries of East-
ern Europe under Soviet dom-
ination.... But even at the 20th Con-
gress the Russians whitewashed
Stalin as far as crimes committed in
the East European countries of 'peo-
ple's democracies' were concerned."
For Mr. Khrushchev, the secret
speech was part of his strategy to
beat back his opposition within the
party. And it worked, because in July
1957, he was able to purge his party
enemies and to become what has
been called "dictator by consent"
Eventually, Mr. Khrushchev himself
was overthrown by a cabal of youn-
ger apparatchiks, such as Leonid
Brezhnev, who owed him everything
except, it seems, their loyalty.
Those pro-Soviet pilgrims who for
an optimistic moment thought that
Soviet anti-Stalinism meant the end
of Stalinism were extraordinarily
wrong. (Any competent Sovietol-
ogist knows that optimism about
Conti nl:2d
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/03/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440021-3
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/03/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440021-3
2.
changes for the better in Soviet
policy, foreign or domestic, is the
sure road to misunderstanding So-
viet realities.) The events which fol-
lowed Mr. Khrushchev'e speech
showed a U.S.S.R. still on the attack
against the democracies, principally
the United States, an attack which is
the principal plank in the U.S.S.R:s
foreign policy platform:
? Khrushchev's January 1961
speech announcing support for all
wars of "national liberation."
? Building of the Berlin Wall.
? Intensification of the Sino-
Soviet split.
? Support of Communist North
Vietnam.
? The fall 1962 Cuban missile cri-
sis.
? Persecution of Andrei Sakharov,
Anatoly Shcharansky, and other dis-
sidents.
? Persecution of Jews and other
minorities.
? Attempt on the pope's life.
? Support for Libya's Col. Muam-
mar Qaddafi and international ter-
rorism, engineered by the
pro-Soviet Radical Entente - Syria,
Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Cuba.
? Huge Soviet arms buildup from
1962 until 1981 while the United
States stood still to allow what five
administrations called Soviet
",catch-up."
? Creation of an unprecedentedly
powerful Soviet Navy, with a heavy
concentration in the Pacific.
? Invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 and promulgation of the
Brezhnev Doctrine, defined as
what's ours is ours, what's yours is
up for proletarian grabs.
? Introduction of punitive psychi-
atry and pharmacology.
The list is endless.
What has changed since the anti-
Stalin speech?
So far as we know, the purges are
no longer bloody, and there are no
more public "Moscow trials." Those
officials who have been purged by
each new Politburo gang become the
living dead, unlike in Stalin's day,
when they became the dead dead.
But has civil society been restored
in the post-Stalin era? Is there a pub-
lic life, a rule of law, human rights?
No, no, and no.
The one question which no Soviet
Politburo has ever dared face is this:
How could Stalin "have wielded
absolute power without the support,
if not complicity, of the Communist
Party?" as Sidney Hook has asked.
In actual fact, Stalin had the fullest
cooperation of the Khrushchevs, the
Mikoyans, the Suslovs, the very men
who were now condemning Stalin,
despite their attempt via the "secret
speech" at self-absolution.
Could the answer to the question
lie in the socialized collective system
established by Lenin in 1917? In
short, could Stalin's rise have been
due to something more than the "cult
of personality"? Are we so sure that
Stalin could never happen again?
From Mr. Khrushchev to Mr. Gor-
bachev, the Soviet leadership has ig-
nored the question, "Why did Stalin
happen?" Can a regime of such
clouded legitimacy be trusted on any
level? Twenty million of his own peo-
ple are estimated to have been killed
by Stalin and another 20 million of
them died in World War II. That's at
least 40 million Russian and other
Soviet citizens dead. (We cannot for-
get the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the Scene
1, Act 1 of World War II.) Are these
40 million owed nothing by Mr. Gor-
bachev and his ministers of evil?
On this, the 30th anniversary of
Mr. Khrushchev's so-called anti-
Stalin speech, Mikhail Gorbachev
should be asked to explain why he
still praises Stalin, why he still re-
calls Stalin's leadership with evident
admiration.
It is time to open up the Kremlin
archives and to speak on behalf of
the silenced and the broken and
those who lost everything forever
and ever.
It is time for a real "secret"
speech.
Arnold Beichman is a visiting
scholar and political scientist at the
Hoover Institution.
,, Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/03/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100440021-3