An ex-Communist acquaintance of mine has a very loose -- most would say inadequate -- standard for determining whether or not someone has atoned for the sin of Stalinism. The standard is admitting to a single crime committed by the Soviet dictator, and admitting it in no uncertain terms. This is the giveaway confession, says my recovering Red, of the wound-down ideologue, who likely hasn't realized just how liberated his captive mind has become. By this standard, Nikita Khrushchev qualifies as primus inter pares of anti-Stalinists despite the fact that that he was no democrat or humanitarian but rather a decades-long loyal functionary of the dead man he repudiated.
"Gaudy butterfly in a drab chrysalis" is how the historian Perry Anderson described the supposedly bumbling Ukrainian peasant who initiated the period of Soviet "thaw," which more refractory apparatchiks then refroze after his fall. If this striking metaphor seems a mite too generous -- what extravagant lepidopteron occupied Budapest in 1956, or ordered the "arrest" of Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece Life and Fate? -- then it is necessary to recall just how momentous Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the 20th Party Congress was that same year. Speaking in a closed session, the transcript of which eventually made its way into the international press, Khrushchev deplored Stalin's "personality cult" as a gross perversion of Marxism-Leninism; he highlighted lethal mistakes the Generalissimus had made during World War II (such as killing off the people best able to fight it); he acknowledged the use of torture ("Beat, beat, and beat again" was Stalin's dictum) as the central means of obtaining confessions from Old Bolsheviks; and he hinted at the true origins of the notorious murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, an event that raised the curtain on the Great Terror and consolidated Stalin's power.
One would think, then, that Khrushchev should hold pride of place in the annals of Russian history as a brave reformer. Not so in a country where Stalin is now ranked the third greatest national hero, and all the civics textbooks under Putinshchina treat the gulag as an unpleasant curio that doesn't compare to industrialization schemes and defeating fascists. Not only Khrushchev has come in for reprehension: his family has, too. In a highly absorbing essay for the Abu Dhabi-published newspaper The National, Peter Savodnik surveys the controversy surrounding Leonid Khrushchev, the premier's son, who died under mysterious circumstances in World War II and is now the subject of a neo-Brezhnevite smear campaign. Was the pilot Leonid shot down by Nazis or captured by them and turned into a traitor? And why does the record of one famous son's fate matter beyond the murky defamation precincts of Russia's murkier legal system?
The quixotic legal struggle to clear Leonid Khrushchev’s name may seem a minor footnote, a historical irony that pits the heirs of one supreme leader against the power of another. But it represents precisely the kind of self-criticism that Russia has spent the better part of the past decade running away from. This process, which began under Gorbachev and petered out under Yeltsin before being aggressively opposed under Putin, is a precondition for any liberalisation. At its heart, at the core of the much-needed Russian conversation about Russia – Stalin, the meaning of the Gulag, the purges, the centuries-old tension pitting Westerniser against Slavophile – is Nikita Khrushchev. It was Khrushchev who embodied the Soviet dream, the rise of the peasant-worker to the highest echelons of the Soviet superstructure, and, at the same time, it was Khrushchev who gave voice to the contradictions, the inequities and iniquities of the system, who symbolises this double consciousness of contemporary Russia.
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