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Stalin's Shadow Over Perestroika
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15469 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1989 |
6,219 Words |
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Vladimir Petrov
Vladimir Petrov, Emeritus Professor of International Affairs
at George Washington University and a native of Russia, has
authored several books and many articles about Russia.
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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
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