THE TABLET, March 24th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6044

HE TABLET WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 24th, 1956

NINEPENCE

“Too Readily and to o L ightly” : The Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce France and the Favour o f A lla h : Algerian Revolt. By John Dingle Britain, Greece and Cyprus : A Badly-Handled Relationship. By the Earl of Lytton The Elderly in Industry: Willingness that Should Not be Wasted. By Letitia Fairfield A Word for Mrs. Pardiggle: Tobacco and Mr. Turton’s Warning. By M. Bellasis In te lle ctuals Unwanted : A “Hard Core” of Professors. By Richard Russell Holy Week Restored: VI : Easter Eve. By Lancelot C. Sheppard Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book R eview s : Letters : Chess

POSTHUMOUS LIQUIDATION T HE intention of the Soviet leaders seems for the present at least to be that the Russians of the future shall care as little about Stalin as the Greeks cared about Kronos. Stalin had to be allowed to die before he could be subjected to a sort of posthumous liquidation ; Kronos was destroyed by the thunderbolts of Zeus as now the legend of Stalin is being destroyed by the thunderbolts of Khrushchev. Lots have been cast, as the sons of Kronos cast lots, and Khrushchev has clearly won. It is a macabre spectacle. For Khrushchev is the child of Stalin, who climbed to power by favour of Stalin, swallowing his pride when necessary on the way, as when—so he is now said to have told the Twentieth Party Congress—Stalin shouted at him in the presence not only of Soviet citizens but of foreigners : “Khokol, dance the Gopak.” He added tersely, the report goes on : “So I danced it.”

delegates who had attended the Seventeenth Party Congress in Moscow were shot on Stalin’s orders soon after it was over. Nor were such deeds ascribed by M. Khrushchev to some terrible form of madness which afflicted Stalin only in his later years, for the events described went as far back as the death of Lenin in 1924, when, M. Khrushchev said, Stalin insulted and threatened Lenin’s widow, saying that if she did not do as he wanted he would issue a statement to say that she had never been Lenin’s wife at all, and would produce a pseudo-widow against her.

Now he need dance it no longer ; he calls the tune instead. Moscow in Stalin’s time, he can tell the horrified delegates, was “ridden by plots, counter-plots and intrigue,” in which “ no one knew who might be the next victim.” Then, the report goes on, some of the delegates shouted to M. Khrushchev, “How did you stand it ? Why didn’t you kill him ? ” To which the reply was : “What could we do ? There was a reign of terror. You just had to look at him wrongly and the next day you lost your head.”

The whole horrifying speech is said to have lasted three and a half hours, and to have included a denunciation of Stalin not only as a tyrant but as a disastrous ruler with disastrously bad judgment, who was, in particular, so far deceived by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that he refused to believe that an invasion of the Soviet Union was possible, and who accordingly ignored not only the warnings of Sir Winston Churchill and of Sir Stafford Cripps, who was British Ambassador in Moscow, but even of the Soviet military attaché in Berlin, who advised him of the exact date of the attack. Not only this, but when the invasion came, in June, 1941, Stalin refused to believe even then that it really was an invasion ; he thought it was no more than a local “border incident” due to lack of discipline on the German side, so that Red Army units were at first ordered not to return the German fire.

The decimation of the Communist Party in successive purges was described and denounced as never before ; especially the purges of 1936-38. It is all familiar ground to Western readers, but it seems to have come as a shocking surprise to the Soviet delegates, who fainted like ninepins. Five thousand Russian officers were murdered after the trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937, said M. Khrushchev, and the Red Army was thereby gravely weakened, at a time when invasion from Nazi Germany should already have been expected and prepared for. About three-quarters of the

A good deal of all this will have to be regarded very critically by historians when they collect the source-material for those years. It has, for instance, been pointed out that it is not true that Stalin “controlled operations during the war from a school globe, without really knowing what a proper map was.” On the contrary, Sir Winston Churchill is among those who had the opportunity to observe, and who later paid public tribute to, Stalin’s good knowledge of maps and mapreading. But there can be no doubt that M. Khrushchev said substantially what is attributed to him, even if the story may