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In Poland ex-Deputy Prime Minister Wladyslaw Gomulka, arrested at the height of the anti-Tito campaign but never brought to trial, was released from prison along with dozens of other postwar Polish Communist leaders. "This does not mean," said Party Secretary Edward Ochab, "that the party subsequently approves of his political opinions. We admit, however, that his arrest was unjustified." Ochab followed through with a slashing attack on the "cunning sophistry" of Stalin, whom "we regarded as the model of revolutionary virtue."
The speed with which the curtain of murderous secrecy was being torn from past Communist pretension was making fools of foreign Communist leaders. In Rome Palmiro Togliatti, facing a lethargic Italian Communist National Council meeting, swept his arms towards a picture of Stalin hanging on a marble column, shouted: "They say we have dethroned a saint. I say to them we have never had saints ... He has conquered his place in history ... as builder and defender of Socialist society."
In Red China there was a belated and cautious reappraisal of Stalin. The former great leader, said the People's Dally, was "conceited and not circumspect," his thinking "subjective and one-sided." He carried the "extermination of counterrevolutionaries to excess" and showed "lack of necessary vigilance'' on the eve of World War II. Reprinted in Soviet newspapers, this criticism was the first public statement in Russia (as distinct from party briefings) of Stalin's guilty incompetency in World War II.
Visiting Stockholm last week, aging (71) Hungarian Communist George Lukacs added a grim footnote to Pravda's recent belated praise of Bela Run, famed leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution of 1919. Bela Run, whose fate has been one of the mysteries of international Communism, was secretly tried and executed by Stalin's order in 1938, said Lukacs. Wiped out with Bela Run, he added, were a hundred other Hungarian Communists and "the entire Polish Communist leadership" numbering several hundred men. According to approving George Lukacs: "The Russians are now going to rehabilitate their victims in enormous numbers, dead or alive . . . Every single case must be reviewed," a job likely to take "quite some time because their number is staggering."
In Communism's strange and dark world, unmasking yesterday's lie does not establish the truth of today's correction. More is involved in this great upheaval than a pious desire to redress the memory of dead comrades. The outside world can only guess at what conflict of motives inside the Kremlin drives its leaders to a reckless unraveling of the past, but does know that it is a dangerous game—the kind that usually calls for victims.