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Stalin's Shadow Over Perestroika
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15469 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1989 |
6,219 Words |
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Vladimir Petrov
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Although Joseph Stalin has been dead for thirty-six years his enigmatic persona continues to fascinate everyone in the Soviet Union. During his lifetime, he was uniformly glorified in all the languages of his vast country and vilified, perhaps less uniformly, in the same languages. He is gone now but not forgotten, for he created a system that conditioned not only the behavior but also the thinking of his subjects. Those who refused to think his way perished. For a quarter of a century Stalin was the main, if not the only, symbol of national unity. When he died, so many people felt orphaned that his successors appealed to the nation "not to panic." Those who hated him found their hate outlasted the man; he was unforgettable. Some years after his death, when one of his successors, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to purge the country of Stalin's long shadow, the effort proved a failure partly because Khrushchev, himself Stalin's creature, was surrounded by a party apparat solidly staffed by Stalinists. Nor could he liberate the Soviet mentality from Stalin's bondage; whether the people still loved or loathed the dead dictator, they retained his values and behaved as he had taught them. That it took thirty-three years to publish Khrushchev's "secret speech" at the twentieth CPSU Congress is a fair measure of his continuing power over Soviet minds.
Gorbachev Leads The Attack On Stalinism
Twenty-five years after Khrushchev's failed crusade against Stalin, another man is undertaking a far more ambitious task. Whatever the reality of Mikhail Gorbachev's revolution, his primary goal is to liberate the country from the repressive legacy of Stalinism. Is he capable of achieving this formidable goal? He is heir to Stalin's mantle but lacks Stalin's mystique and his power to physically eliminate those who oppose him. He started a macabre process of "rehabilitation" of the Old Bolsheviks whom Stalin dispatched to the firing squad, but did nothing for those actively opposing the Stalinist system. And because Gorbachev deals daily with the millions who have known nothing but this system and who are not prepared to explore the alternatives, he cannot totally reject his illustrious predecessor. His own mind may be free of the Stalinist bondage, but as a politician he must recognize and deal with objective realities--or fall.
There is one more dimension to Gorbachev's predicament. As head of state, he also represents his country in the larger world outside, a world whose unflattering perceptions of the Soviet Union solidified during Stalin's regin. Fear of "communism"--the Stalinist system--spreading to other nations was an important part of international politics before the Second World War. It greatly intensified after the war as the Soviet Union expanded its territory, and as its power extended into the heart of Europe.
To deal with this aspect of Stalin's legacy, Gorbachev must, on the one hand, pay tribute to Stalin's achievement in transforming the Soviet Union into a world power and, on the other hand, erase the Soviet "enemy image" in the minds of people fearful of losing their independence and their way of life. Related to this dual task is a long overdue restructuring of Moscow's relations with the allied nations whose social systems were imposed upon them by Stalin's will.
Not unnaturally, this aspect of Gorbachev's revolution does not have many passionate adherents in the Soviet Union, where generations of people were
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