Exorcising Stalin’s Ghost

On the night of Feb. 24, 1956, in a long address to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, Nikita S. Khrushchev spoke about the unspeakable as he began to lift the veil of denial that had long shrouded the crimes of the Stalin era. This famous “secret speech,” the text of which reached the West within a few months, was like a jackhammer turned against the cult of personality that Josef Stalin and his sycophants--Khrushchev himself was one--had erected over nearly three decades of despotic rule. The destruction of the personality cult did not, however, usher in an age of candor about recent Soviet history. For more than 30 years Soviet leaders continued to remain silent about the enormous abuses and costs of Stalinism, lest their own activities during this period be exposed and questioned.

Nearly a year ago Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signaled that the time had come for this, too, to change. In November he made a major speech criticizing Stalin. More broadly he has called for the “blank spaces” in Soviet history to be filled in. How far will a program of greater historical honesty be allowed to go? In the case of Stalin, as just the last few days have shown, perhaps far indeed.

Thus the science editor of the influential Literary Gazette, citing psychiatric opinion, suggests that Stalin exhibited typical symptoms of clinical paranoia not only in the frightening years immediately preceding his death in 1953, but as far back as 1927. What is now being publicly said is that for more than a quarter-century Russia was ruled, as it had been under Ivan the Terrible, by a man who was mentally unbalanced.

Thus the Moscow News has now published an account, based on eyewitness testimony, of the executions by Stalin’s secret police of more than 100,000 people in 1941 at a single site in the Byelorussian republic. Accused by paid or coerced informers of being “enemies of the state,” they were among the millions of Soviets murdered under Stalinism.

And thus a group of leading Soviet intellectuals now calls for an assessment of Stalin’s crimes in a public tribunal, to be conducted--the irony is certainly intended--in the same Hall of Columns where the notorious Moscow purge trials of the 1930s took place. That such an enterprise is even being openly discussed says something about the parameters of the Gorbachev era. A flood tide of change has begun to roll across the cemetery of Soviet history, exhuming the corpses of its victims. And with each disinterment, terrible truths are being revealed.