(3 of 3)
Khrushchev repeats Lenin's confident prediction, unfulfilled in 40 decades of imminent capitalist collapse. The program reports the "increasing proletarization in capitalist society," blandly and blindly ignoring the fact that since Lenin's day, the exact opposite has happened. Indeed, the document is so frequently divorced from reality and lurches so inconsistently from ethics to history, pedagogy to sociology, that Swiss Soviet Expert Ernst Kux concludes: "Khrushchev's program reveals the decline of Soviet ideology and its inability to come to grips with the problems of our time."
But Khrushchev's "romanticism," as some Western experts label his repeated rejection of fact, is not necessarily a source of comfort for the West. Abroad, should it lead Khrushchev to believe his own propaganda about capitalist weakness, it could lead to fatal miscalculation and war. And at home, so far, it has not noticeably weakened his grip. Though Khrushchev has dismantled much of Stalin's police state, he has shrewdly rebuilt the Communist Party—demoralized under Stalin—as Russia's dominant force. In fact, the Khrushchev Code almost lyrically extols the party and promises that even in that distant day when "the state will wither away," the party will remain. Through such devices as citizens' courts, voluntary "people's militia," and a reorganized political police whose new role is that of "friend and helper," Khrushchev has effectively replaced full-scale terror with the Orwellian technique of "mass discipline."
This is perhaps the most impressive and chilling achievement that Khrushchev can point out to any critics among the comrade delegates at the 22nd Congress who may not be moved by his vision of a "mighty unifying thunderstorm marking the springtime of mankind."
*One of the most far-reaching was the 8th (1919), which endorsed the Comintern as the export agency for worldwide Communist revolution, and adopted Lenin's creed that wars with capitalist states are "fatalistically inevitable." Even more dramatic was the 2Oth in 1956 at which Khrushchev 1) reversed Lenin by announcing that peaceful coexistence had become a fundamental principle of Soviet policy, and 2) in a six-hour, closed-session speech reviled Stalin as a "brutal, despotic" merchant of "moral and physical annihilation."