In the world's chancelleries the No. 1 item of wonderment was the Soviet Union's unflaggingly active and aggressive foreign policy in the face of convulsive disorder within the Communist Parties. While the West grappled with problems created by Soviet diplomacy, the process of destroying the legend of Joseph Stalin was causing obvious and increasing confusion in Russia and the satellite states. If the Soviet Union had not yet found it necessary to make policy concessions on this account, it was because the West had not yet discovered how to exploit a state of disorder, which may even reflect a critical weakness.
The only people who seemed to have put destalinization to some advantage so far were some deviationists in Russia. In a burst of articles the Moscow press last week revealed that party meetings called to criticize the "cult of personality" frequently became critical of the party itself. Said Pravda: "We cannot disregard the fact that some rotten elements are trying to make use of criticism and self-criticism for all sorts of ... anti-party assertions [and are] repeating the hackneyed, slanderous inventions of the foreign reactionary propaganda."
Pravda attacked a number of local party officials and Scientists Avalov, Orlov, Nesterov and Shchedrin for "slanderous statements directed against the party's policy and its Leninist foundations." Singled out for his "provocative, antiparty" attitude was Economist L. D. Yaroshenko, whom Stalin himself denounced for "Bukharinism."
Thus the present "collective leadership" indicated that not only were there deviationists at work in Russia, but showed itself almost as nervous about them as Stalin had been about Bukharin (whom he had executed). Warned Pravda:
"The party has never tolerated and will not tolerate petty bourgeois licentiousness . . . The party cannot permit the freedom of discussing problems to be interpreted as freedom to propagate views alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism."
Well might free discussion worry the Communist leaders; when they talked of Stalin's great crime, the obvious question to them was, "Where were you?" and the only answer was, "We were afraid." Such a confession of cowardice, and the implied admission of complicity in Stalin's crimes, hardly enhanced their claims to be leaders of men.
The Great Rewrite. One of the chief side effects of the Great Rewrite of history is the rehabilitation of former "Titoist criminals," dead or alive. Among last week's subjects for party absolution was Traicho Rostov, a Bulgarian Communist who had shocked his judges and been hissed in court when he denied having made the 32,000-word "confession" of traitorous acts presented at his trial in 1949. Last week it seemed that Rostov, who had been duly hanged, was really innocent all along.