Remaking the Revolution : Glasnost Brings New Look at Soviet History

It happened in Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring” of 1968. It happened in Poland in 1980 and 1981, during the heyday of the Solidarity trade union movement. And now it is happening in the Soviet Union under Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The first whiff of reform anywhere in the Soviet Bloc, it seems, brings with it a national compulsion to go back into history, to talk out loud about all those people and events previously banished from--or distorted in--the official record.

Nowhere are the blank spaces more extensive than in the Soviet Union itself, where the Communist leadership long ago made an art of rewriting or suppressing history for ideological and political ends.

As a result, nowhere has a burst of public discussion about a nation’s history been more startling, more controversial or more pivotal to the future than the one unleashed by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness.

Reappearing Names

Names that were once unmentionable have suddenly reappeared in speeches and in the official press. Gorbachev himself has praised once-disgraced figures such as former Kremlin chief Nikita S. Khrushchev and Nikolai I. Bukharin, a revolutionary hero and theoretician who was executed on orders from Josef Stalin--a sure sign that both are nearing official rehabilitation.

The focus of the historical revision has been Stalin’s 29-year rule, which began after the death of Soviet founding father V.I. Lenin in 1924 and constitutes one of the bloodiest chapters in human history. Debate over Stalin’s role apparently reaches into the highest levels of the Soviet leadership, and the stakes are nothing less than the soul of the nation he still haunts nearly 35 years after his death.

Western historians have estimated that up to 20 million Soviet citizens died as the result of Stalin’s tyrannical rush to consolidate his personal power and to transform a backward, agrarian society into a modern industrial nation. Some of Stalin’s victims died of starvation after his forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture triggered massive famine. Others were declared “enemies of the people” and were tortured to death or executed during purges. Still more simply disappeared forever into a vast network of forced labor camps known as the gulag, by its initials in Russian.

‘Repressive Measures’

Gorbachev himself has been closely involved in the re-evaluation of Stalin. In an extraordinary, nationally televised address last Monday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gorbachev declared that “the guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the party and the people for the wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness is enormous and unforgivable.”

“It is sometimes said that Stalin did not know of many instances of lawlessness,” Gorbachev added. But “documents at our disposal show that this is not so.”

Yuri N. Afanasyev, director of Moscow’s Historical Archives Institute, in a recent interview underscored the significance of this drive to come to terms with Stalinism. “Until all Stalinist roots are upturned, no other model of socialism is possible,” he said, adding that to pursue Gorbachev’s plan for restructuring the system “without having a clear-cut definition of what, precisely, we are going to reconstruct, to change, is unthinkable.”

To the extent that these long-sealed pages of Soviet history have already been reopened, the process has riveted the nation’s attention, particularly that of intellectuals.

Vitaly A. Korotich, editor of the weekly magazine Ogonyok and a leader in publishing previously banned material about the Stalin period, said in an interview that hundreds of the letters the magazine gets these days are in response to its articles about the 1930s. He has enough “very interesting documents” about Stalin to fill the magazine to the end of the year, he said.

Letters published in central newspapers have spoken candidly about Stalin’s legacy of fear, and Gorbachev has mentioned the “dire effect” on the nation of the atmosphere of “intolerance, hostility, and suspicion” created by the “wanton repressive measures of the 1930s.”

Still, what has been seen so far is only a drop in the historical bucket.

There have been only hints, for example, of the depth of the catastrophe of Stalin’s forced collectivization. Gorbachev, whose grandfather was briefly arrested, spoke Monday of the “excesses” and “flagrant violations” that took place under collectivization. But he said nothing of the millions who died in the subsequent famine and added that “in the final analysis, (collectivization achieved) a transformation of fundamental importance.”

The Communist Party archives from the period of Stalin’s rule are still sealed from Soviet historians. And the text of Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” to the 20th party congress, in which he revealed some of Stalin’s crimes, has never been published here.

“The very necessity of delving into past history is still under a big question mark,” historian Afanasyev conceded.

And how that question is resolved will depend not on public opinion but on the outcome of what appears to be a continuing debate within the leadership over how far it can afford to go.

The main themes of Gorbachev’s speech last Monday, for example, were agreed on ahead of time by the full Politburo, according to party sources. And the speech, even as it broke new ground in reappraising Soviet history, seemed to have been carefully crafted so as not to antagonize needlessly those who worry that too much criticism of the past calls into question the present and future legitimacy of the party.

Gorbachev balanced unprecedentedly blunt criticism of Stalin’s crimes with praise for the rapid industrialization that Stalin oversaw. He also defended the 1939 Russo-German nonaggression pact under which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided Poland. And while he lauded the “courage” of Khrushchev for exposing some of Stalin’s crimes, he emphasized that Khrushchev had committed “no small number of subjectivist errors.”

To the Western ear, the Soviet historical debate often sounds almost hair-splitting, but it is as current as today’s news.

Party sources say, for example, that it is virtually inevitable that Bukharin, who was executed for treason and counterrevolutionary activities after a 1938 show trial, will eventually be rehabilitated.

Gorbachev skirted the issue last Monday, but he did announce that the Politburo has set up a commission to examine “new facts and documents” related to the victims of Stalin’s purges.

“Bukharin was never a criminal,” Afanasyev said. “You don’t even have to be a scientist to hold that view. You only have to be an honest man. . . . “

Rehabilitating Bukharin represents more than just righting a historical injustice, however. It could be the key to Gorbachev’s political strategy.

Bukharin was described by the late journalist, historian and Soviet expert Leonard Shapiro as an early advocate of “socialism with a human face”--the motto adopted by Czechoslovakia’s reformers in 1968. He argued for continuation of Lenin’s relatively benign New Economic Policy and a gradual approach to collectivization as opposed to Stalin’s forced approach.

It is the Stalinist model that Gorbachev is now trying to dismantle, at least partially. And in order to do so, without undermining the basis of party rule, it is important to show that Stalinism was a deviation from the correct path charted by Lenin.

“Each time you have an article rehabilitating Bukharin,” a Western intelligence source remarked, “you have a clear message: ‘Gorbachevism is opposed to Stalinism.’ ”

But a vast army of party and government bureaucrats owe their livelihood to the Stalinist model Gorbachev is trying to change.

Afanasyev said: “Opponents say there was no Stalinist scheme for the construction of socialism, that there was, and still is, only a Leninist scheme. But it seems to me they are in glaring contradiction with themselves. . . . What are we supposed to reconstruct if we are so successful in implementing Lenin’s plan? If . . . Lenin’s plan for building socialism was being met, then you’ve got to admit that it provided for repression, innocent blood, corruption and moral decay.”

Strong Support for Opposition

But Afanasyev conceded that those who oppose a full accounting of Stalinism for their own political purposes enjoy broad, populist support.

“The lack of desire to see the Stalin period in a negative light is very wide in our society,” he said.

Georgy V. Matveyets, an old Communist who described his father as “an innocent victim” of Stalin’s purges, said that the 1930s were nevertheless a time of many national accomplishments.

“These were accomplished by Soviet people, not out of fear but out of conscience,” he said in a letter to Pravda. “People were inspired by a great idea. It mobilized them. . . . It was a time when fairy tales really did come true. . . . It was real, heroic activity by Soviet people--activity that can in no way be nullified by any miscalculations, mistakes or even crimes of one person, even if he did wear a generalissimo’s high-collared tunic.

“The lives of millions of Soviet people cannot be reduced to him alone. It seems to me that those who denigrate our history in this way have no sense of compassion for its errors, misfortunes, grievous mistakes and tragedies, which have cost us so dearly.”

Cautious Approach

Given such powerful sentiments, even Afanasyev, who insists that the Stalin period be opened fully to historical research, said he favors a cautious approach in making the results of that research public.

“Here I am for a (phased) approach, not just dumping the whole mountain on the table,” he said, “because we might have quite unforeseen consequences here. We must still hold on to the reins, not succumb to emotions.”

But ultimately, he said, everything must come out. History has been so abused here that it has become virtually “useless in our society,” he said, and added that “over the years its main function was servicing the propaganda of success--imagined achievements.”

And that, Afanasyev said, makes history’s role in the current situation even more important.

“Without rethinking that time,” he said, referring to the Stalin period, “we will be unable to make any forward progress. We cannot cease being the scarecrow we sometimes are for the rest of the world.

“Without opening up to ourselves, we cannot open up to the world. And we cannot open ourselves to ourselves without dealing with the Stalin period. We must pass this moral test.”