TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0292> <link 93XP0403> <link 93HT0330> <link 90TT2600> <title> 1950s: Khrushchev </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Khrushchev </hdr> <body> [Power was flowing toward Nikita Khrushchev, who had become Party Boss in 1954. By February 1956, Khrushchev was strong enough to take on the very myth of Communism's demigod.] (March 26, 1956) The ghost of Joseph Stalin rose out of his granite tomb in Red Square last week and stalked the crenelated walls of the Kremlin with an awesome message for communists everywhere. Like Hamlet's father, the old dictator gave notice that he was doomed to walk the night and "to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away." The man who raised the ghost was Nikita Khrushchev, no Prince Hamlet, but now Stalin's clearest heir. In the last 19 years of his life Stalin had done enormous harm to the party, the Soviet Union and Soviet people, Khrushchev said. The crucial event had been the murder (1934) of Leningrad Party Boss Sergei Kirov. A drastic change had then come over Stalin--a "phobia" about treachery--and he had never been the same afterward. -- Stalin had contrived and falsified evidence against party members whom he (in most cases wrongly) conceived to be his enemies. He "murdered" (Khrushchev's word) hundreds of old Bolsheviks, including 70 out of 133 members of the Central Committee in 1937. He had tortured people in order to wring confessions out of them. Even little children had been tortured, said Khrushchev, as tears streamed down his face. To get confessions, Stalin had promised some victims a dacha (country cottage), but "the only dacha they saw was underground." -- The charge of treason against Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937 was a fabrication. He had been "murdered" together with some 5,000 other Red army officers. This was a "terrible mistake," which had brought the Soviet Union to the brink of disaster in World War II. -- Stalin had placed complete faith in his pact with Hitler in 1939 and scorned warnings from Soviet diplomats in Berlin, from Britain's Churchill and Sir Stafford Cripps, that Hitler was about to attack Russia in June 1941. Contrary to popular myth, he had not remained in Moscow when the Germans did attack, but fled the capital, leaving its defense in the hands of Zhukov, Rokossovsky, and Konev (whom he later created marshals). In his last days his phobia had reached paranoiac proportions. Officials summoned to his presence said goodbye to their families. Said Khrushchev: "We never knew when we entered Stalin's presence whether we would come out alive." When Khrushchev finished speaking, a profound hush fell over the hall. In one stroke he had destroyed a vast edifice of fictions masking Stalin's long reign of terror. After so much careful cultivation of the Stalin myth, this was a dangerous thing to do. Why was it done? Evidently, Khrushchev had taken the risk (possibly with some prompting from the Red marshals whose prestige as Russia's World War II saviors, as a result, stands higher than ever) because he felt it necessary to absolve himself and the present top Communist leadership, all old associates of Stalin, from the charge of complicity in Stalin's guilt. [More dissension in the satellite empire came that summer, when thousands of strikers rioted in Poznan, Poland, and had to be subdued with tanks. The rioters' trials, unexpectedly open and fair, aired such evidence of oppression that suddenly it was the Communist Party on trial. The trials were halted, but it was clear that a segment of the Polish leadership was pushing, not for liberation from Communism, but for a more "liberal," homegrown brand of Communism.] (October 29, 1956) Like a great fissure in the earth's surface, a crack opened wide last week in Russia's Communist empire. The place was Poland, and the explosive force that erupted there was a submerged allegiance that runs deeper than Communism: patriotism. What took place in six tense hours in Warsaw last week was an open defiance of the Kremlin, not by the oppressed people of Poland, but by their Communist rulers, who in an anxious testing moment acted as Poles first and dutiful Communists second. And for the first time in eleven hard years of Communist rule, these Communist rulers--tough, unloved Marxists--found themselves national heroes to the Poles. Their defiance of Moscow was the biggest internal shock the Communists have received since Tito's breakaway in 1948. In many respects what the Polish Communists did was a greater act of courage than Tito's, for Tito when he defied Stalin had control of his own country and of its armed forces. The Polish leaders did not. They had only the passion of an idea, and the knowledge that in this, at least, they might count on the backing of their people. That passion stirred the small ruling group that gathered at 10 a.m. sharp one rainy morning last week in the cream-colored building of the Council of Ministers on Warsaw's Stalin Avenue. This was the inner council the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party. They had two important items on their agenda. The first was to reinstate in the party hierarchy Wladyslaw Gomulka, 51, onetime party leader who, because he had refused to castigate Tito, had been disgraced and imprisoned by Stalin. The second item was more audacious: a motion to expel Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, famed Polish-born Soviet soldier who had acted as Stalin's (and Khrushchev's) proconsul in Poland since 1949. This was independence with a vengeance. The Kremlin's new leaders might be willing to bend with the times, to grant the satellites some easements in order to make their own control more secure. But now the Poles were asking them to loosen their tight hold on Poland. Of course, the Russians would not do so willingly; but perhaps they would have to. In making his submission to Tito, Khrushchev had acknowledged that there could be "other roads to socialism." Poland had won the first round because its Communist leaders had secured control of the Security Police--a startling departure on the old Stalinist order of things--and had avoided being arrested or, in Ochab's words, becoming the victims of a putsch. But their real strength lay in the Polish people. After eleven years of Soviet domination and destitution the Poles, at a word from Gomulka, would have joyfully flung themselves into bloody battle with their masters. In this struggle it is doubtful if the Russians could have relied on Rokossovsky's Polish army or even on Soviet troops in the area. Such an upheaval, spreading westward to East Germany, or eastward to the Ukraine, might shake the Russian empire to its roots. It was a risk Khrushchev could not take, and the Poles knew it. [Ominously, and tragically, the defiance spread to Hungary.] (November 5, 1956) It began like a carnival day. Thousands of people thronged Budapest's old cobblestoned streets wearing red, white and green boutonnieres, tossing red, white and green ribbons into passing cars. Then gradually the crowd began to gather at focal points and to express its will, and then to march. A scared Communist official told an American businessman: "The earth is moving." The earth moved to the tread of a million feet in Hungary last week, and a satellite which had been blindly spinning in the Soviet orbit for eleven years suddenly swung out of its gravitational course into a still unsteady national axis. It had never happened before. As the world looked on, incredulous, a people armed principally with courage and determination (and a few filched guns) fought one of the most spectacular revolutions of modern times. Behind barricades, from rooftops and apartment windows, they harried their powerful oppressors in the classic revolutionary manner, and at week's end they had wrung from the most ruthless of modern despotisms a promise of the right to be free. Poland's break with Russia was the spark. Hungarian students got permission to express sympathy with the Poles by gathering silently before Budapest's Polish embassy. Then the Central Committee of the Communist Party canceled the permit. Party Leader Erno Gero, belatedly conferring with Tito on a means to "liberalize" the regime and expected back from Belgrade that day, wanted no political demonstrations. At noon there were angry student meetings at every college. At the Polytechnic a printing press was seized, a broadsheet printed. Budapest came out to see the student fun. Said an old woman: "We, have been silent for eleven years. Today nothing will stop us." There was no hint of the violence to come. In a solemn but peaceful mood, the students went to pay their respects to Poland. Ten abreast down the broad Danube quays they marched to Petofi Square, named after National hero Sando Petofi, a poet who sang songs of national liberation and in 1848 drew up the manifesto that launched Hungary's revolution against the Habsburg monarch. The yeast of rebellion among young Hungarian intellectuals had been fermenting these past few months in a group called the Petofi Club. A voice in the crowd shouted a line from a Petofi poem: "We vow we can never be slaves." The Petofi spirit spread like wildfire. All over Budapest there were demonstrations. Student manifestoes demanded religious freedom, the release of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, the public trial of Rakosi and his lieutenants, sweeping economic reforms. In the square where the life-size statue of General Josef Bem stands, honoring the Polish officer who fought for Hungary's freedom in 1848, 200,000 people crowded around a latter-day poet named Peter Veres, silent mover in the Hungarian Writers' Union. He stood at the foot of the statue and read out a manifesto demanding complete freedom of speech and press, a new Hungarian government, release of political prisoners, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. The national flag--minus the Red star and hammer crossed by an ear-of-wheat emblem--was draped around the statue. The national anthem was sung. The crowd, swollen by workers, soldiers and yet more students, and orderly until this moment, began to thrill for action. There was another statue in Budapest, as hated as this one was revered. By 1951 the Russians had cleared away the World War II ruins of Regnum Marianum, the famed Roman Catholic church, and erected in its place a 25-ft. bronze statue of Stalin. There he stood, in baggy pants and handlebar mustaches, symbol of Hungary's servitude. One of the manifestoes had called for the removal of the statue. The crowd decided to do its own idol busting. Surging down Stalin's Boulevard, mounting the marble base of the statue, they flung ropes around Stalin's neck, but the old dictator stood fast. Then a group of workers appeared bearing ladders, cables and acetylene torches. Melting through the metal knees. they brought the statue crashing to the ground. Immediately the bronze corpse was set upon by people with hammers and metal pipes who smashed pieces off the statue. Said one wrecker: "I want a souvenir of this old bastard." Budapest (pop. 1,750,000) woke early next morning to the sound of machine-gun fire as a column of 80 Soviet tanks rolled into the city and took up positions covering all bridges, boulevards and public buildings. Other tank forces ringed the city. At dawn marital law was imposed on the whole country, a 24-hour curfew on Budapest. Trains and streetcars stopped running, telephone communication with the outside world was cut. The Communist maneuver might have succeeded but for the menacing presence of the Soviet tanks. Around noon a crowd began gathering in front of the huge neo-Gothic Parliament building facing the Danube, intending to present Premier Nagy with a petition demanding the withdrawal of all Soviet troops. Soviet tanks and a phalanx of security police blocked all entrances to the building. Trigger-sensitive young Russian tankists became unnerved by the milling crowd around them and began firing indiscriminately into the mass of unarmed people. In a few minutes hundreds of men and women were lying dead or wounded on the ground, while others crouched for cover behind statuary and columns, or lay flat on the pavement. The massacre in Parliament Square sent Budapest mad. The Soviet embassy was raided, Soviet automobiles fired, the contents of a Soviet bookshop burned in the street. Said a visitor: "I saw a column of rioters march with arms outstretched into machine-gun fire. Students were killed en masse by the Soviet tanks." Workers fought their way into an arms depot at outlying Fot, got themselves machine guns. Others made gasoline bombs out of wine bottles. Soon Soviet armored cars were burning in the streets. Street barricades were strengthened with overturned buses. Hungarian railroadmen tore the hammer and sickle insignia off their uniforms, held the railroad terminal for the rebels. Fierce battles broke out for control of a Communist Party headquarters and the Karoly military barracks. The Communist newspaper Szabad Nep was stormed, and rebel broadsheets were soon distributed proclaiming the now famous 16 points. Out of the fog and smoke that obscured the sky, Soviet jet planes roared down with cannons blazing. In the next three days a battle of position was fought. Travelers racing out of Hungary (passport control had lapsed, and some border crossings were wide open for the first time in nine years) reported "the people taking more control." Radio Budapest talked of "a state of siege" and appealed for "protection from hunger." While shooting was going on in one street, people queued for bread in another. Leaflets appeared. They reiterated the 16 demands, signed by "the new Provisional Revolutionary Hungarian Government and National Committee of Defense." Rebel troops now wore red, white and green arm-bands. Teenage girl revolutionaries joined in skirmishes. In a radio speech Nagy promised talks with the Soviet Union "on a basis of complete equality," and promised a reform government with "widest possible national and democratic" elements. Kadar said there would be a "deepening of democratization." Pleaded Radio Budapest: "Tell the youth we have a new leadership. All the new party secretaries are in prison under Rakosi. Tell the youths there is no danger." Early on the fifth day of the revolution, the Soviet leaders made a crucial decision: they agreed that Hungary should have a new government in which two (out of 28) ministers would be non-Communists. Premier Nagy announced that Bela Kovacs would be Minister of Agriculture, and Zoltan Tildy Minister of State. Both men were members of the Smallholders Party, which took 57% of the popular vote in the 1945 free elections but was later squeezed out of existence by the Communists. (November 12, 1956) What had come over Hungary, without anyone quite realizing it, was democracy. To continue holding down the premiership, new Premier Nagy was forced to yield to the pressures of the new parties, to promise free elections, to acclaim neutrality, and, above all, to insist that the Russian troops be withdrawn, not only from Budapest, but from Hungary. Thus he called in Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, renounced Hungary's membership in the Warsaw Pact, and put his case to the United Nations. His first Cabinet was made up of Communists, with four exceptions. At week's end there were only three Communists, including himself, in the government; the Cabinet portfolios were distributed among three non-Communist parties, with General Pal Maleter in the key post of Defense Minister. The Russians called for a meeting to discuss "technical details of the withdrawal of Russian troops." While seven Russian generals sat down with Defense Minister Maleter and Hungarian Army Chief of Staff Kovacs, rumors that had been flying around Budapest gained strength. Soviet forces were pouring into Hungary from Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the Soviet Union. It was said that Budapest was ringed with Soviet steel and the loyal Hungarian air force had been driven from Budapest airport. The Soviet generals explained that these were merely precautions taken to protect returning Soviet personnel, swore that Soviet forces would be out of Hungary "in three weeks." All day long the Russians had been ferrying Soviet passengers out to Soviet planes at the airport, among them, it was reported, Russia's First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and such wanted Hungarian notables as ex-Premier Hegedus and AVH Boss Piros. But, as the reports of Russian troop movements firmed, as rebel center Gyor was cut off from Budapest, as Czech radio stations jammed the rebel stations, the Hungarians suddenly knew that their worst fears were confirmed. They had been tricked. (November 12, 1956) The steel-shod Russian jackboot heeled down on Hungary this week, stamping and grinding out the vestiges of a daring young democracy. A force of 4,500 Soviet tanks, crack paratroops, MVD storm guards, and a quarter-million Red army infantrymen drawn from the remote wastes of Muscovy swept through the brown fall countryside, overwhelming towns and villages, smashing isolated Hungarian army resistance, and sealing off the country. On the hills around Budapest, heavy Soviet guns ranged in on the city's old Parliament House. Through the already battered streets thundered big new tanks, this time protected by trotting groups of dark-visaged Asian-Russian infantrymen. Weary but infinitely brave Freedom Fighters were mercilessly cut down. Traitors who had concealed themselves, or their intentions, during Hungary's miraculous five days of freedom were welcomed. In a matter of hours Moscow was able to report that Communist Premier Imre Nagy, who had defied the Kremlin, was in jail, and a new Communist government installed under Party Secretary Janos Kadar. [TIME Magazine named the Hungarian Freedom Fighter as the 1956 Man of the Year. The Hungarian revolution had a curious effect on another Communist country, China. In a series of secret speeches, Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung propounded the heretical notion that even after a Communist regime has crushed all organized opposition (in China's case by executing as many as two million people), "contradictions" between the government and the people can still exist. The contradictions can be exposed and eradicated by permitting criticism, and even strikes. The alternative, Mao apparently feared, was a Hungarian style revolt in which the Communist Party would be the first victim. The response to Mao's resulting call to "let a hundred flowers (of criticism) bloom" was overwhelming.] (July 1, 1957) Now that everyone--especially the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe--had become disturbed and confused about Mao Tse-tung's "secret" speeches, Red China decided to publish one of them to get the European comrades off the hook. Watered down as it was, Mao's speech remained a cry of warning against the danger of the Marxist rigidity that led to revolt in Hungary. Above all, it made clear that what Mao called the "contradictions" in Chinese Communist society were actually symptoms of widespread disaffection. Items: -- "Certain people in our country were delighted when the Hungarian events took place. They hoped that something similar would happen in China, that thousands upon thousands of people would demonstrate in the streets. Other people in our country took a wavering attitude toward the Hungarian events." -- "In 1956 small numbers of workers and students in certain places went on strike. The immediate cause of these disturbances was failure to satisfy certain of their demands for material benefits. Because of their lack of experience in political and social life, quite a number of young people cannot make a proper comparison between the old and the new China." Even more revealing than Mao's own admissions was the violence of the public criticism unleashed by Red China's current "rectification" campaign. At a discussion meet in Peking's China People's University, Ko Pei-chi, lecturer in industrial economy, chemistry and physics, took at face value Mao's slogan "Let a hundred schools of thought contend." Wrote Ko, recalling Communist promises of a higher standard of living: "Who are those whose standard of living actually has been raised? It is those party members and cadres who used to wear torn shoes but are now riding in sedan cars. China belongs to its 600 million people, including the counterrevolutionaries. It does not belong to the Communist Party." Then, in a final access of daring, Ko warned the Communists what would happen if they did not mend their ways and do something for the Chinese people: "The masses will beat you down, kill you, overthrow you." To the Peking People's Daily, which published it as an example of the kind of criticism Chairman Mao does not welcome, all this was nothing but "queer talk and absurd theories." But perhaps Ko's remarks had some bearing on the most startling admission in Mao's no longer secret speech: "The question of whether socialism or capitalism will win [in China] is still not really settled." [One place where the Chinese most feared revolt was Tibet, which China had invaded and occupied in 1951. Clashes between rebellious Khamba tribesmen had indeed broken out in 1956 and could not be suppressed. By 1959, the Chinese were pressuring Tibet's religious and secular leader, the Dalai Lama, to move against the Khambas or else relinquish his civil power. The Dalai Lama refused, and fighting broke out in Lhasa's lamaseries and temple.] (April 13, 1959) On the night of March 17, under cover of darkness, Tibet's Living Buddha slipped out of the Norbulingka, his summer palace outside Lhasa, and together with his mother, two sisters and a younger brother, headed south across the most forbidding mountain country in the world to join the Khamba tribesmen who had launched Tibet's revolt against Red Chinese tyranny. For 15 days the Dalai Lama and his tiny retinue traveled by foot and by muleback, first across the Kye Chu River, 25 miles south of Lhasa, then on up through the 17,000-ft. Che Pass. The Chinese did not discover the Dalai Lama's escape until he had already been gone for two days. When they did, they insisted that he had been kidnapped by the rebels and spirited out of Lhasa "under duress." Red China embarked on one of the most massive man hunts ever. Detachments of the estimated 300,000 Red troops in Tibet began to drive painfully into the rugged land south of the great Tsangpo River, which still remained in the hands of the Khamba guerrillas. Supply planes roared over Lhasa; other planes dropped paratroopers to seal off the passes north of the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, which the Dalai Lama might conceivably be heading for. To stifle all word of what was going on, the Chinese surrounded the Indian consulate in Lhasa, reduced its staff to virtual prisoners. But for all their efforts, the Chinese could not organize a search big enough to trap the Dalai Lama. Proceeding mostly at night to avoid Red spotter planes, the royal fugitive dispensed with all ritual. (Normally, any place where the Dalai Lama stays automatically becomes sacred and may not be used again as a dwelling.) Once across the Tsangpo and protected by jubilant Khamba tribesmen, he took a course unanticipated by the Chinese, headed for the Indian border town of Towang in the wild and wooded plateau region of Assam province. Until he and his party crossed the border, a thick, unseasonable wall of cloud covered the eastern Himalayas, hampering pursuit. The next morning, in an abrupt change, which the normally cool-headed London Times suggested might be due to the mystic powers of Tibet's lamas, the clouds dramatically lifted. Enraged by the Dalai Lama's escape and the defiance of his subjects, Peking threw off the last vestige of the go-slow policy that only two years ago had moved Mao Tse-tung to announce that the final communization of Tibet would be postponed for six years. In Lhasa, the Reds poured hundreds of artillery shells into the huge, fortress like winter palace, shot up the Norbulingka as well. One by one, reports filtering into the border town of Kalimpong, India's window on Tibet, told of the fate of other buildings: Chakpori Medical College and the Ramoche Monastery, the chief training center of the Mahayana sect of Buddhism, both destroyed; the main Lhasa cathedral of Jokang desecrated. Even worse was the savagery vented upon the people as in Budapest three years ago; as truck after truck carted off its load of male adults to forced labor, the Chinese began to turn Lhasa into a city of women and children. </body> </article> </text>