RUSSIA: The Model Communist

Just a year ago, in a speech to the 20th Communist congress in Moscow, First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had this to say about a man he had spent most of his life servilely trying to please:

“Stalin practiced brutal violence towards everything that opposed him . . . was capricious and despotic in character . . . [ordered] mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation . . . sanctioned torture and oppression which led to the slandering and self-accusation of innocent people. Whoever opposed Stalin was doomed to … moral and physical annihilation.”

Last week, between swigs of a potent Chinese drink called mou-tai at a Moscow party for Red China’s Chou Enlai, Khrushchev summed it all up: “As a Communist fighting for the interests of the working class, Stalin was a model Communist.”