Gorbachev Brings Back Anti-Stalinism

For the first time in more than 20 years, anti-Stalinism is becoming a major factor in official Soviet politics.

Explicit criticism of Josef Stalin’s long, often murderous rule was banned after the 1964 ouster of Nikita S. Khrushchev, who had made it a driving force of his reform campaigns. A censorious glorification of the country’s historical achievements--imposed by his conservative successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev--prevailed for the next two decades. But as Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s own reform proposals have grown bolder, so too have sanctioned voices critical of the Stalinist era. This year may bring a still stronger form of official anti-Stalinism, with ramifications beyond those promoted by Khrushchev.

The signs are both symbolic and tangible. Many representative figures of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization “thaw” are playing leading roles in Gorbachev’s liberalization of cultural and intellectual life. Among them, to name a few, are writers Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Lakshin and Mikhail Shatrov. Well-known anti-Stalinists have even assumed influential posts under Gorbachev, including Sergei Zalygin and Grigory Baklanov--new editors respectively of the journals Novy Mir and Znamya. In a rare public reference to the unfinished de-Stalinization of the Khrushchev years, Shatrov revealed the outlook of this important cohort: “Today, history is giving us one more chance.”

Indeed, a growing number of literary works recently published or scheduled for this year indicate that crimes of the Stalinist past are no longer taboo. They include three novels, banned for 20 years, by major writers: Anatoly Rybakov’s “Children of the Arbat,” a remembrance of the encroaching terror of the 1930s; Vladimir Dudinpsev’s “White Robes,” an account of the repressions in science in the late 1940s, and Aleksandr Bek’s “The New Appointment,” a portrayal of moral corruption in the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The same development is taking place in the theater and in the cinema. Enormously popular plays, such as Shatrov’s “Dictatorship of Conscience” and A. Buravsky’s “Speak Out . . . !,” assail various aspects of Stalin’s legacy. Several anti-Stalinist films have been released, and Tengiz Abuladze’s “Repentence,” the first Soviet film to give a full-scale portrayal of Stalin’s terror, is scheduled soon for national release. Much of this cultural anti-Stalinism remains elliptical, not even mentioning the dictator by name, but its collective effect should not be underestimated.

If such works continue to appear, they will be widely reviewed and thus provoke a broader and more explicit discussion of the Stalin era. Nor is the new anti-Stalinism narrowly cultural. Similar trends are under way among official economists, sociologists, political scientists and even historians--one of the most censored and timid of Soviet professions.

How is this resurgent anti-Stalinism, dismissed by some Western scholars as a spent force, to be explained? Part of the answer is the magnitude of Stalinist crimes, which claimed tens of millions of victims. Until those atrocities are fully acknowledged and discussed, they will remain an intensely contemporary issue for many Soviets. As a result, Gorbachev’s glasnost , or “openness,” campaign cannot easily be limited to current problems. “A society that wants truth and openness,” as Rybakov and other intellectuals have said, “must be truthful and open about its past.”

Above all, anti-Stalinism is the unavoidable corollary of Gorbachev’s increasingly radical calls for reform. Despite important changes under Khrushchev, the underpinning institutions and procedures of the Soviet system are still those created by Stalin in the traumatic 1930s. Therefore, Gorbachev’s various proposals to reduce the state’s economic monopoly in favor of partial privatization and marketization, and to curtail central bureaucratic control in favor of individual initiative in other areas of life, bring him into fundamental conflict with Stalin’s legacy.

In recent months Gorbachev supporters have been remarkably explicit in linking the failures of the existing system to Stalinism. Their complaints focus on a “bureaucratic labyrinth” that imposes a “complex of prohibitions” on society and treats everyone like a “cog.” Recalling that the bureaucratic system took shape in the 1930s amid, as one critic wrote, “bloody terror and mute submission,” they called for the abolition of “obsolete forms and methods that emerged 50 years ago.” Not surprisingly, many also find a relevant alternative in the far more liberal, marketized Soviet system of the 1920s, known as NEP. They argue that by destroying NEP in 1929 Stalin betrayed Lenin’s legacy.

As the struggle over reform intensifies, this kind of anti-Stalinism offers Gorbachev important advantages. It can help him undermine dogmas, legitimize change and attract idealistic supporters. But it also is a dangerous issue because it calls into question Stalinist pillars of the Soviet system, such as the collectivized agriculture imposed in the 1930s, and because, as Gorbachev admits, it still arouses deep divisions in officialdom and in society. Though Gorbachev clearly stands behind the new anti-Stalinism, he has remained aloofly silent about the Stalinist past. When he finally speaks on this crucial subject, it will tell us much about his commitment to a new stage of de-Stalinization and about the forces that oppose it.