Introductory note
This article by the then leader of the British "orthodox Trotskyists", Gerry Healy, appeared in the March 9, 1956, issue of Tribune, the paper of the left wing Bevanite current in the Labour Party and the trade unions.
The Bevanites were then a mass movement. Healy's piece appeared in the middle pages alongside a larger article by Aneurin Bevan on the same subject. It shows how well-integrated the Healy group was in the mass labour left wing of that time.
Healy's muted but unmistakable assertion of the need for the workers to fight and break the power of the Russian bureaucracy was starkly contrasted with the widespread belief on the British Labour Left in the likelihood of self-reform by the Stalinist Bureaucracy. Healy's ignorant reference to Lenin as "secretary" of the Bolshevik Party, and his tendency to substitude pieties for analysis, starkly illustrate the political deficiencies that would eventually wreck the Healy organisation.
Sean Matgamna
Although the speeches of Mikoyan and Khrushchev, in their attacks on cultism and the historical distortions of Stalin, revealed to the world at large the wide scope of the changes involved, they still present only a one-sided picture.
For the real architects of the changes are the Russian peoples themselves, whose opposition to Stalin's bureaucracy indirectly forced its way through to the Congress.
Such developments have been in the air ever since the about-turn on Yugoslavia. [After a bitter 7-year cold war between Russia and Tito-Stalinist Yugoslavia, there had been a reconciliation in 1955]. Was it not Harry Pollitt [Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain] who declared following the "confession” of Lazlo Rajk (former secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, who was hanged in 1949 after a show trial):
“Now after the Rajk trial we know that some of the leading figures around Tito were themselves trained among the Trotskyites, and have for many tears been agents of British and American imperialism. In fact Titoism represents the revival of Trotskyism in new and more dangerous forms".
Everyone now knows that this was nonsense, but at the time Pollitt with his ear cocked to Stalin's jukebox, only repeated the theme song of all the cultists – that Trotskyism and Titoism were the same. For this reason it was impossible for the 20th Congress to admit a serious error on Yugoslavia without bringing into question Stalin's treatment of Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks.
It is idle to heap all the responsibilities for the cult on the shoulders of Stalin. He represented a powerful bureaucracy which usurped Soviet power in the USSR.
They crushed all democracy within Lenin's Bolshevik party and transformed into a monolithic machine, engaging in total war against all who opposed them.
From this ensued the purging of Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks.
Stalin personified the bureaucracy and its monolithic requirements, and today, although Stalin is dead, this bureaucracy remains entrenched in the Party and the Soviet state.
Hence the hesitations of Mikoyan and Khrushchev in carrying the condemnation of the cult and the falsification of history to its logical conclusion. That would mean exonerating LeonTrotsky and the majority of Lenin's Central Committee of the charges made against them at the Moscow Trials.
The historical causes which produced Stalin have now dramatically changed. The Soviet Union has been joined by China and Eastern Europe; the Colonial Revolution has set millions moving along the road to freedom.
Moreover, thanks to the economic foundations of the Soviet Union, established by the October Revolution, the productive forces of the country have enormously increased despite the bureaucracy. This in turn has raised the cultural level of the people.
Khrushchev has assumed the mantle of power under enormously different conditions from Stalin; he, therefore, pursues a different course.
On all sides in the USSR there is enormous hostility to the bureaucracy. In democratic Labour circles outside Russia it is hated and despised.
The 20th Congress therefore decided to kill two birds with one stone – by attacking the Stalin cult they hope to stave off the growing criticism at home and at the same time impress Western Socialists.
In other words this is Khrushchev's method of defending the bureaucracy in the present world situation. Just as Stalin blamed Trotsky for every evil under the sun, so now we can expect all shortcomings to be explained away as the products of the cult.
The Congress conducted its proceedings in the name of Lenin, but the decisions were unanimous and unopposed – a method sharply in contrast with the traditions of Lenin during the years when he was Secretary of the Bolshevik Party. Democracy is not restored by congress speech-making. The real test will come when the Soviet workers begin to participate publicly in the policy-making decisions in the Soviets, factories and the press.
The re-establishment of democratic rights in Russia, no less than in the Communist Parties outside, will be accomplished only as a result of a successful struggle against the bureaucracy. The monolithic structure of their parties has now cracked wide open and will never be the same again.
