Rehabilitation, as well as being done in this illogical and partial fashion, took a variety of forms. The maximum was the full-scale article with at least a remark at the end that the man named had fallen victim to slander as a result of the personality cult. The minimum was simply the mention of the former purgee’s name in a neutral or favorable context. There was, indeed, something even more minimal, if one can so express it, than the above. It was now conventional in the “biographical notes” on people who had played a part in the earlier history of the Party and who were listed at the end of works dealing with that time to give, in addition to those of birth and death, the date of entering the Party. In the case of all those in good odor, this was phrased “Member of the Party from 1910,” or whatever the date might be. In the case of those still unrehabilitated, this was invariably “Got into the Party [Sostoyal v partii] 1910.” From this minor convention, it can be seen that, for example, Syrtsov was now, to this degree at least, restored to favor, while Preobrazhensky was not.
This curious, and typical, indirectness marked a failure to come to grips with the past. It is easily explicable. After Stalin’s death, the machine he created continued to rule the country. The principle of one-party rule, the overriding competence of that party in all spheres of life, the preservation of its “monolithic” nature—and rule over it by a small central body—all continued.
All the leaders had arisen in the old machine during Stalin’s time. The channels through which they rose remained as then established. And the principles of rule were, in general, those then brought to fruition.
The efforts of Khrushchev personally and of a number of intellectual and other figures had nevertheless made important, if partial, progress in uncovering the truth. The resistance from the whole traditionalist cadre at every level was natural. And it beat him.
THE BREZHNEV REACTION
After the fall of Khrushchev in October 1964, an end was gradually put to speculative and risky initiatives in every field. This applied also to the matter of “Stalinism.” The rehabilitation process virtually ceased, as did written discussions of the more sensitive areas of the Stalinist past. Stalin himself began to be treated at first with a rather cold respect and later with considerable favor, in spite of the protests of intellectuals. The system of government he created, as amended and improved under Khrushchev, was consolidated.
The extent of the reaction since Khrushchev’s time could be seen in the treatment of Raskolnikov. In his military Memoirs (published in 1964), the introduction states flatly, “The C.C. of the C.P.S.U. has completely rehabilitated him, and restored him posthumously to party membership and to Soviet citizenship.” Even as late as 1968, his Civil War record was favorably referred to;114 but soon his photograph was removed from books, and various editors who had permitted favorable reference to him were reprimanded or dismissed. Finally, an article in the authoritative party organ Kommunist spoke of him as “a deserter to the side of the enemy and a slanderer of the party and the Soviet State.”115
This was, indeed, a special case. More generally, those rehabilitated remained so, though the expression “Illegally repressed. Posthumously rehabilitated” disappeared from the reference books. And accounts of events of the Purges simply ceased to appear. For the moment, at least, the promise of better things after forty years in the wilderness showed little sign of fulfillment. The reason, basically, seems to be that the caravan was led by men skilled in the ways of the wilderness, and enjoying the powers they had gained and would certainly forfeit in a lusher land.
For Pyatakov’s “miracle”—the idea that by sheer political organization the Party could create industry and the proletariat, which should in Marx’s view have preceded the coming to power of Socialism, and having done that, go back to the main line forseen by Marx—had not worked out. The reason is plain. It had been a mistake to think that the Party would, after this Marxist detour, simply revert to a humanist democratic representation of the new proletariat. It was not the case that Stalinist methods could be used and then simply cast aside when specific economic and social aims had been achieved. Terror institutionalizes its own cadres, its own psychology. And the Party machine, whose loyalties for so long had been in practice simply to itself, whose interests for so long had been equally circumscribed, had become Djilas’s “New Class,” no more capable of easily changing its ways than the old classes and bureaucracies of the past had been.
The Stalin era was a past so atrocious that its repudiation brought obvious dividends to any succeeding regime, but its successors also inherited a set of institutions and a ruling caste indoctrinated in certain habits and beliefs. And in an important sense, the essence of Stalinism is less the particular periods of terrorism or special views on industrial organization than the establishment of the political set-up. And that still remained substantially unchanged.
Even the Khrushchevite “de-Stalinization” had consisted of little more than the abandonment (or even the denunciation) of a specific set of excesses associated with the late dictator. It did not amount to any change of substance in the system of political rule in the USSR or in the basic principles behind that system. Russia was still ridden by the Party machine, and the principle of Partiinost—the doctrine of the Party’s right to rule and to decide on all questions of speed and direction—remained untouched. What took place, in effect, was simply the renunciation of excessive use of whip and spur.
There was now, in fact, a considerable effort to rehabilitate the NKVD: criticism was leveled at those who, basing themselves on the organization’s role in the Purges, “are not averse to putting practically all the officers of the Cheka under a cloud.”116 A whole series of novels and plays appeared featuring Secret Police heroes.fn7
Those police officers condemned to imprisonment rather than death in the post-Beria purge were released—Eitingon, the organizer of Trotsky’s assassination, among them. There were complaints that the former Georgian NKVD officer Nadaraya, a “specialist in shooting wives and daughters,” only received ten years after Beria’s death and was now at liberty; that Colonel Monaldiov, who had shot several hundred foreign Communists in the Solovetsk camps at the beginning of the Finnish War, was living in a villa near Leningrad, an attempt to have him expelled from the Party having been prevented by Tolstikov, then First Secretary of the Leningrad province; that the leading interrogator of the Jewish doctors in 1952, A. G. Sugak, had a job as Assistant Director of a museum, and a villa near Moscow; and so on.
In September 1966, new articles were added to the Criminal Code, providing for the imprisonment of those given to uttering or writing material “discrediting the Soviet State” or participating in “group activities” involving “disobedience in the face of the lawful demands of the authorities.”117 Such laws led to those increasing repressions against writers and dissidents which were such a mark of the period.