In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev made his celebrated "secret speech" denouncing the homicidal proclivities of Joseph Stalin. Barely a year later, at a Soviet Writers Union conference, he was threatening to shoot writers who might start trouble like their colleagues in Hungary. If the Budapest rulers had shot the literary ringleaders, he said, the recent unpleasantness in their country would have been averted. Should any Soviet writers misbehave, he went on grimly, "My hand will not tremble."

       His audience could not doubt the seriousness of his warning. Only several months before he had proved his iron nerves by sending hundreds of tanks into Hungary to crush the revolt; then his KGB had kidnapped tens of thousands of young Freedom Fighters and hauled them to Soviet concentration camps—where many of them still languish.

       In December 1958, the Soviet government promulgated a law prescribing the death penalty for a long array of offenses, some of them barely more than misdemeanors in other lands: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, private trade and other economic crimes, attempting to escape from the country. The law was broadened on May 5, 1961 to punish by death "acts of aggression against the administration" in penal institutions, evidently to counter continuing resistance and disorders in prisons and exile camps.

       Since none of the capital offenses already on the statute books had been removed, Soviet Russia today applies the death penalty "legally" to more real and pseudo-crimes than in Stalin times. (247)(Ordinary non-political murder is not on the list—a hangover from judicial practice under the monarchy.) Announcements of executions are so frequent that they have ceased to attract attention, and the public realizes that for every killing made public, dozens and scores go unrecorded.

       A decree against "parasitic elements" legalized the deportation of those so defined by administrative police action, that is without resort to courts. While the parasites listed in the law are alcoholics, hoodlums, the willfully idle, etc., the definition is broad enough to give the authorities a handy "legal" device for disposing of anyone they please. The parasite decree was used, for example, to imprison a recalcitrant poet, Joseph Brodsky, though clamorous protests abroad and by some daring Soviet writers in time obtained his release.

       Millions of young people in a variety of vigilante formations have been invested with quasi-police and quasi-judicial rights, as a civic duty, to spy on their neighbors, "try" and punish the immoral and the "loud-mouths" (meaning grumblers) and other assorted miscreants. In the city of Odessa,, according to the Kiev Pravda Ukrainy (June 10, 1962), there were 610 "comrades courts," one of the standard vigilante activities. Multiply the figure by all the cities and towns in the country, and the other varieties of vigilantism and you begin to see the vastness of these extra-governmental operations.

       Children, the Soviet press proudly reports, are being taken from their parents in "unhealthy" homes—usually a euphemism for religious homes. In general, Western analysts of the Soviet press agree, there has been an actual increase of interference in the private life of the ordinary citizen in the last dozen years.

       Two prominent writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, have been publicly tried and sentenced to long camp terms for allowing their works, unpublishable at home, to be published abroad under pseudonyms. Dozens of others have been jailed for allegedly anti-Soviet writings without benefit of public proceedings. Immediately after the death of Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago (still forbidden publication in the USSR), his friend and secretary, Olga Ivinskaya, and her daughter were imprisoned on trumped-up currency charges—a powerful state wreaking vengeance on two helpless women. (248)

       Adapting a trick first used by Tsar Nicholas I, the Kremlin has had many of its critics—writers, students, and scientists—certified as "mad" and confined in lunatic asylums. Ward Seven, a novel by one of these politically "insane," Valeri Tarsis, describing the ordeal of the victims, has been published in Europe and the United States.

       The persecution of religion has been intensified since the passing of Stalin, particularly in the 1960's. Churches, monasteries, mosques, and other places of worship have been closed on a variety of pretexts—their number was reduced by half between 1958 and 1964. Where there were eight Orthodox seminaries, there are now only three. The provisions against religious teaching to children are being more stringently enforced. Priests, rabbis, and others officiating at baptisms, weddings, religious services for the dead are required to register those requesting such rites by name-—making economic reprisals easier. [That religion still has deep roots was conceded indirectly by the Moscow atheist magazine Science and Religion. In August, 1967 it published the distressing news—distressing to its editors—that in an opinion pool in a typical city, Kazen, 21 per cent declared themselves religious. Since admitting such sentiment involves political risks, the actual percentage is presumably higher.]

       An American Baptist journal, The Watchman-Examiner, in its January, 1967 issue, carried a report out of Soviet Russia, understandably anonymous. It dealt primarily with the half-million or so Baptists, but the information applies no less to the Russian-Orthodox and other faiths.

       "The anti-religious campaign which began quietly in the late fifties grew like wildfire in the sixties," the report said, "disrupting the relatively cordial relations between church and state which had been the postwar norm. By 1964, all religious groups had suffered crippling loss of parishes closed by fiat. People found it increasingly difficult to lead a normal religious life, both in society, as pressures initiated by the state multiplied, and within the churches, as state limitations and controls increased to a level reminiscent of the early Stalin period." (249)

       Both among priests in the Russian Orthodox ranks and ministers in the "sects," as the Russians call the Baptists and other such denominations, there have been in the last two years open movements of protest against the submission of their respective hierarchies to government domination. A number of the documents, usually in the form, of "open letters," have reached the outside world. It is known that several of the leaders of these movements are under arrest; the extent of repressive measures against their followers can only be surmised.

       These are random facts from life and politics since the inception of so-called de-Stalinization. But they have not made a dent in the thriving illusion in some foreign circles that the Soviet Union is going "liberal" and edging toward democracy!

       In some ways this most recent of the myths about Soviet communism is the most mischievous. Moscow itself, which detests the word and the concept, has not claimed the degree of "liberalization" credited to it in the outside world. The strange anxiety to believe in the miracle of a totalitarian system evolving into its opposite is the source of the mischief. For it generates wishful-hopeful fantasies about the "convergence" of the two worlds and the imminence of a genuine détente between the communist and democratic worlds.

       Even the reckless conduct of the USSR in foreign affairs, has failed to scotch the legend of a meaningful evolution toward an open society. A partial inventory of highlights, from the record suffices to show that in the international arena, Stalin has been out-Stalined by his successors.

       There was the bloody suppression by the Red Army of popular uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. At the very time Khrushchev was posturing as an angel of peace at the Geneva Summit Conference in the summer of 1955, his agents were arranging an arms deal with Egypt's Nasser that has kept the Middle East in bloody turmoil ever since. (250) There was the erection of the Berlin Wall; the secret installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States, a gambit that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war; the dispatch of Soviet arms to the primitive Simba rebels in the Congo, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of whites and thousands of blacks; the massive equipment of North Vietnam with Soviet planes and weapons for use against South Vietnam and its allies—by 1967, some 80 per cent of the military and economic aid to Hanoi was coming from the Soviet bloc.

       All of this and more under the resuscitated Stalin slogan of "peaceful coexistence!" The Western will to believe in a new, more moderate and cooperative Kremlin appeared robust enough to survive such blows to credulity. Even Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who surely is no hard-liner on relations with the USSR, felt it necessary to remind his audience, in the course of a speech on China in early February, 1967, that "It was not Stalin, but Khrushchev, who in the fortieth year of the Russian Revolution, crushed Hungary and six years later came to the brink of nuclear war in his Cuban adventure."

• The Limits on Change

       Since Stalin's death in March, 1953, his self-appointed heirs have sought to disown some of his murderous excesses and to obscure their own complicity in his crimes. They have labored, in particular, to clear the communist system and its ruling party of the stigma by blaming certain past horrors and present troubles upon the blunders and aberrations of one man. In the hope of containing the general discontent, they have in effect provided scapegoats —not only Stalin but also his police chiefs, Yezhov and Beria, and some of his surviving henchmen, Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich.

       Their belated concern for "legality" of course did not signalize a change of heart but only a calculated change of tactics. Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan, the first to outline the de-Stalinization gambit, had been the dead dictator's most zealous comrades in crime and his loudest sycophants. (251) "It is not good will, still less humanity," Milovan Djilas has written, "which prompted Stalin's associates to perceive the harmfulness of Stalin's methods. It was urgent necessity that prompted the ruling class to become more 'understanding.'"

       Every "concession" was aimed to batten down some area of restiveness. Slave labor on the Stalinist scale, an important element in the economy in an earlier period, had become more and more of an economic drain. The costs of administration were higher than the value of the unpaid labor extracted; with industry growing more complex the need for sheer muscle power had receded. Besides, the economy was so close to paralysis that some leeway had to be provided for mental initiative and talent, throttled by dread of purge.

       The measures of moderation taken, far fewer and more limited than the world was led to believe, thus had no relation to considerations of justice. They were intended to shore up the foundations of the Soviet system and head off possible overt opposition. Nothing whatsoever has been done to identify those guilty of the worst crimes, the torturers and mass killers, and not one of them has been punished. Many of them still hold posts of great power, at or near the top of the oligarchy. The revelations, moreover, were made in a way to preserve Stalin's operational methods.

       Without doubt existence has become more tolerable for the Soviet citizen. The terror and its apparatus have not been dispensed with, but they have been moderated in scope and their operations are now more discreet. A degree of latitude of opinion and expression in many fields is permitted that would have been unthinkable twenty or thirty years ago. Official controls on literary and other cultural activities have been eased.

       It is only by contrast with the most malignant periods in the Stalin epoch, however, that the new Soviet atmosphere seems almost benign. By comparison with conditions under Franco in Spain, or Tito in Yugoslavia, let alone democratic societies, life in Soviet Russia is still bleakly tyrannical. Robert Conquest, a British poet who is also a specialist on Russia, writing in the U.S. journal, Problems of Communism, in 1962, put the issue in focus: "If Khrushchev's Russia were judged by any standards operating before the rise of Hitler and Stalin, it would be thought a revoltingly oppressive dictatorship."(252)

       Any abatement of the terror is welcome, especially to those bearing its weight. But in truth nothing fundamental has changed. Soviet Russia remains what it was: a rigidly totalitarian state. Its power structure, its morality and ideology—the things, that is, which made Stalinism possible—are intact. The dictatorship still has absolute control of the world's largest police system; of the press, schools, employment, and virtually everything else. The internal passport system remains in undiminished force. Foreign travel is not a right but a high privilege reserved for the elites; it is organized into group tours under police monitors, but there have been numerous defections notwithstanding. The misnamed trade unions still have no voice on wages, hours, and most working conditions; their chief purpose, specified in their constitutions, is still "to mobilize all the workers for the fulfillment and over-fulfillment of the state production plan."

       The supposed new freedoms and reforms all stop safely beyond the line where they might impinge on the power monopoly and its key institutions. Thus physical and social scientists may now explore and criticize everything— except the eternal tightness of the regime and its politico-economic theology. Creative men and women may stray from the dogma of "socialist realism"—provided they do not attack the dictatorship and its infallibility. Economic theorists in their discussions and writings may bypass Marxism-Leninism—provided they give lip service to it.

       In practice, the new freedom of expression is an elaborate game of doublethink and double-speak. The regime is untouchable, its ideological underpinnings are sacrosanct. The rules of the game are constantly revised to protect the oligarchy against the doubts of freethinkers. Some subject areas are off bounds. It will be time enough to suspect outcroppings of liberalism in the system, if and when the authorities allow publication of an honest defense of religion or capitalism; if and when Soviet citizens may with impunity criticize the Kremlin's policy on Vietnam, or expose the sins, not of the past, but of the present leaders.(253)

       In brief, what was before 1955 an absolute despotism, has become, very relatively, an enlightened despotism. The leash has been lengthened, but the collar has not been removed. None of the new rights has been confirmed and made permanent by laws; they are arbitrary gifts that can be arbitrarily withdrawn by the givers, as in fact happens in many cases. The people and the rank-and-file communists have no more voice in shaping their own fate and national policy than they did under Stalin. Decision-making belongs to the power monopoly.

       All the heights of authority in cultural and scientific organizations, in the newspapers and magazines and in educational institutions, are manned by totally obedient servants of the Kremlin. Should they manifest any nonconformist tendency, unless it is with the consent of the bosses for tactical reasons, their jobs and sometimes their liberty are forfeit. The "cult of personality" may be assailed as an abstraction, but without mention of specific crimes and faults beyond those already mentioned by the anointed leaders.

       That de-Stalinization has changed nothing essential was attested by the late Eugene Varga, perhaps the foremost Soviet economist, an Academician, and during most of his life close to the Kremlin leadership. He died in Moscow in October, 1964. A long essay of his, unpublished and quite obviously unpublishable in the USSR, has appeared posthumously in an illegal magazine, Phoenix 1966, about which I shall have more to say later. Dealing with the changes since the passing of Stalin, Professor Varga asserted that they have not altered the pattern of Soviet life and rule. He wrote:

       As before, power in the state belongs to the party and the bureaucratic elite; as before, the economic processes and the political relationships remain concealed from the working masses. Neither the trade unions nor any other groups of citizens have anything to do with the management of industry. (254) As before, workers vote mechanically in the elections for the pre-elected deputies to the Soviets, and as before, the ministers, the presidents of the executive committees, the secretaries of the provincial and district committees appointed by the party Central Committee continue to rule in the name of these Soviets. As before, the contrast is drastic between the luxuries enjoyed by the ruling elite and the exceedingly low wages of the great majority of workers, employees, and collective farm laborers. As before, all this gives rise to innumerable crimes. As before, social consciousness is dominated by the official ideology inculcated from above as infallible dogma. And all of this, as before, breeds social immorality.

• The "Liberalization" That Isn't

       The "secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 that initiated de-Stalinization is still secret in the Soviet Union. Only party insiders were allowed to read it. The full text was released by the U.S. State Department and has been widely published and annotated in the free world. Its general purport and some of the specific charges have percolated down to the average citizen in the USSR. Why, then, is the whole document being denied to the populace most directly concerned?

       The probable answer is that the Kremlin does not want its subjects to know and ponder what Khrushchev did not say. The outside world has read far more into the speech than it contained. Evidently the regime prefers that the Soviet masses, too, should believe vaguely that all of Stalin's iniquities were confessed and repudiated. In truth the accusations and revelations dealt only with narrow segments of the Stalinist reality.

       By silence, the "secret speech" and de-Stalinization have condoned the worst of the dead leader's depredations. His high-handed brutality against prominent party and military men and a few intellectuals was castigated, but not forcible collectivization, not the millionfold arrests, deportations and executions, not the man-made famine of 1932-1933 and the other major crimes and atrocities in which the whole population, rather than the elites, were victimized. (255)

       Khrushchev said that "thousands of absolutely innocent people perished," though he knew there were millions; his personal contribution to the total ran into hundreds of thousands. Indeed, he and other speakers on the historic occasion at the Twentieth Party Congress balanced excoriation with praise of Stalin. Specifically he was praised for having crushed Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and "bourgeois nationalists"; neither then nor since has the Kremlin denounced the Moscow blood-purge trials. Far from ruling out state violence, Khrushchev defended "necessary terrorism" against internal enemies, complaining only about its use against "good communists."

       The much-advertised "rehabilitation" of Stalin's victims followed the same selective pattern. Khrushchev said that 7,679 had been rehabilitated and presumably several thousand more were added to the ghostly company before the process was tacitly halted. But this is a drop in the ocean of tens of millions of innocents. Only some of the well known were exonerated and restored to posthumous respectability, not the myriad simple Ivans and Marias. Enough was admitted to encourage a new "image" but nothing basic was disowned.

       By their silence, also, the de-Stalinizers accepted all of Stalin's most flagrant lies: that full socialism has been achieved; that collectivization was voluntary; that the First Five-Year Plan was a roaring success; that the East European satellites had freely chosen communism; that the three Baltic republics had "voted" to enter the Soviet Union; that the massacre of some fourteen thousand Polish officers at Katyn Forest during the war was a German, not a Soviet atrocity; that the USSR almost single-handedly defeated Germany and Japan. Neither the Stalin-Hitler pact, nor the invasion of Finland was mentioned. The whole Soviet mythology has been carefully preserved and reinforced.

       Above all, the anti-Stalin campaign, in its inception and thereafter, did not surrender an iota of the arbitrary power used by Stalin, but merely made an implicit promise that his methods would not be employed so rashly against party leaders and activists.(256) Having finally consolidated his supreme power by early 1955—a process he began when he and Malenkov murdered Beria and thirty-nine of his subordinates—Khrushchev was telling his associates that they need no longer fear sudden death. It was not a liberal explosion but a power play.

       In effect the whole enterprise offered reassurance to the uppermost classes, not to the average citizen. As a Russian scholar in Germany, Dr. Herman Achminow, summed it up: "The Soviet party leaders decided to sacrifice Stalin in order to save Stalinism." Stalin had become the focus and. symbol of universal fears and hatred: they symbol was removed in a sacrificial rite, without affecting the substance.

       At best de-Stalinization promised a return to what its authors called "Leninist norms," to the policies and methods of the Lenin years. That was scarcely a prospect to warm the hearts of liberals. Had those in the non-Soviet world who have hailed the new moderation done their homework on the Lenin period and Lenin's code of conduct, they would have found little, if anything, to support their optimism. An impression has been deliberately fabricated that at last "the truth" is being told; it is an extremely restricted truth, however, larded with the same old lies.

       Not until five years later, at the Twenty-second Party Congress, after a lot of zigging and zagging on the subject, did Khrushchev and his chief spokesman at that gathering, Alexander Shelepin, return to the assault on Stalin. This time, their purpose was all too clear. It was to smear Molotov, Kaganovich, and others of the anti-Khrushchev leaders—the so-called anti-party group—with the Stalinist brush.

       And even on this occasion, Stalin was commended for his communist faith and his firmness in destroying enemies. "We shall punish mercilessly all the enemies of our people," Shelepin warned. And Khrushchev in substance promised that he would be as good a communist as Stalin, but without his unfortunate faults. (257)

       The rock-bottom reality, in the words of Boris Souvarine, is that "the system functions as in the past, the single party remains omniscient and omnipotent, the secret police operates in silence, the dreary press remains as it was, the strict discipline imposed on intellectuals keeps the official dogma intact."

       The decisive institutions created by Stalin, such as collectivized farming, "corrective labor" exile, central planning, have not been changed. Information is still rationed through multiple censorships. Foreign newspapers and magazines are not available to the public; even technical publications from abroad are extensively scissored to remove "dangerous" thoughts before being released to scholars and researchers. Foreign correspondents are more stringently spied upon and restricted in their movements than in the 1930's. Most non-diplomatic aliens residing in Moscow live in special buildings, watched day and night by police guards who make a record of Soviet callers and whom they are visiting—a procedure that was never that open in Stalin's time.

       Foreign tourists are more carefully watched than ever in the past, and more often subjected to interrogation and arrest. In August, 1966, the Supreme Soviet decreed rigid limitations on their movements and this was backed up with press warnings to Soviet citizens against contact with foreigners; no prudent Russian dares invite visitors from "the other world" to his home. Official anti-Semitism, expressed in Jewish quotas in higher education, exclusion of Jews from diplomatic and other sensitive posts, etc., has gone beyond Stalinist practices.

       Anyone who equates such things with trends toward liberalization and democracy obviously had a shockingly low opinion of those noble concepts. This thought apparently prompted Edmund Stillman and William Paff to remark, in their recent book, Power and Impotence: "Only a calamitous insensitivity to the depth and meaning of the free political culture of the West could produce the notion that the 'normalization' and moderation of Soviet society that has taken place since Stalin makes Russia today—or very soon—'like us.'" (258)

• The Levels of Terror

       It is with regard to the terror, legal and extra-legal, that the most farfetched and inaccurate assumptions have been made by the half-informed. The secret police are still ubiquitous, arrests continue on a scale that would shock any country without memory of even larger repressions in the recent past.

       The government, despite its revelations about that blood-chilling past, has gone out of its way to keep the picture of its security forces untarnished. In the very speech that initiated de-Stalinization, Khrushchev warned explicitly that "distrust of the state security organs" was "incorrect and harmful." On the contrary, he said, it was essential to strengthen them in every way. He returned to the theme at the following Party Congress in 1959, denouncing as "stupid and criminal" any suggestion that the secret police be weakened.

       Since Khrushchev's forced retirement, the new leaders have staged various celebrations of historic dates in the annals of the secret police, to remind the citizenry of their debt to "our glorious Chekists"—and, more to the point, to apprise them that the Chekists were still very much around. The prestige of the huge security apparatus is continually guarded and burnished: conspicuous evidence that the regime is keeping its powder dry. KBG troops and tanks have gone into action repeatedly in recent times to crush riots, runaway strikes, and other manifestations too big for the ordinary police.

       In a study of terror since Stalin, published in Problems of Communism in 1962, Professor Jeremy Azrael of the University of Chicago denied that "coercion is withering away" in the USSR. While "the level of coercion has dropped," he underlined "the need to discount the more sanguine claims and predictions now being aired." The regime, he made clear, "still attempts to imbue the population with the conviction that nothing of political significance escapes the secret police." In Orwellian terms, Big Brother is watching! (259)

       Another scholar, Paul Barton, an exiled Czech sociologist, writing in the same magazine that year, cited evidence from official Soviet sources indicating an increase of repressive measures in the past ten years. "These developments," he summed up, "belie any claim that the Soviet system since the death of Stalin has moved in a straight line toward eliminating coercion and replacing it with persuasion . . . . Indeed, a system of totalitarian one-party rule could not survive if it did not retain the power to enforce its will, however much it might ration and combine coercion with other methods of government."

       "If it becomes necessary we will restore the old methods," the Assistant Prosecutor General, P. I. Kudriavtsev, assured an American interviewer, Prof. Harold J. Berman of Yale. The same threat is implied, where it is not spelled out, in all the internal propaganda. Whatever the non-Soviet world may be induced to believe, no one inside the USSR believes that the terror has been abolished. Its cruder forms are less in evidence, but the basic system continues on a scale without match in any civilized country. The Brezhnev-Kosygin team especially has not disguised its purpose of re-imposing "discipline" over the intellectual and social forces set into motion by the two anti-Stalin waves, in 1956 and 1961.

       Millions of camp inmates have been released since 1953. Some have been transferred to the less onerous "corrective labor colonies," others forced to settle in the same inhospitable areas as free workers. Presumably many of the camps have been dismantled; the rest have been renamed "colonies." The electrified barbed wire and the police dogs, one guesses, have been removed from around the verminous barracks and living conditions for the prisoners have been ameliorated. The improvement began, in fact, in the last year of Stalin's life.

       The Kremlin remains as always tight-lipped about this ghastly skeleton in its closet. Analysts, on the basis of reports by ex-prisoners now abroad, chiefly repatriated foreigners, are unable to estimate the size of the prison population in the 1960's, but they have no doubts that the forced-labor system remains in massive operation. (260) If both camps and colonies are counted, the figure at the least exceeds a million. In 1957, Assistant Prosecutor General Kudriavtsev indicated that only eight to nine hundred thousand were still left, but his official job, after all, was to minimize the reality.

       A painstaking study by B. A. Yakovlev, published in Munich in 1965, was based on interviews with returned non-Russian slave laborers: Poles, Germans, Hungarians, and others. From their personal knowledge he was able to compile a list of 225 old-style concentration camps still extant in the late fifties and early sixties, several of them holding as many as five to eight thousand prisoners. Since these were primarily camps for foreigners, they represent only a small fraction of the aggregate abomination.

       Fresh light on the continuance of forced-labor camps was thrown very recently by a foreign prisoner released only in January 1967, after serving two years in a Soviet prison and three years in a concentration camp. Alexander Dinces, a veteran of the Polish wartime resistance, came to the United States in 1948. In 1961, he was unwise enough to step on Soviet soil on a transit visa from Scandinavia to Poland. He was arrested and drew a five-year sentence. After his release he recounted his ordeal in the Polish-language émigré press and in broadcasts for Radio Free Europe.

       Mr. Dinces had found himself, he wrote, in a complex of fourteen labor camps, three of them for women, called "Dubrovlag," near Potma, 250 miles east of Moscow. (From other sources we know that the Potma operation actually embraces thirty-six camps, with a total of over seventy thousand prisoners.) His own camp, for foreigners and stateless convicts, held about fifteen hundred men. Other such complexes, he learned from inmates through the years, exist in all parts of the country. The conditions he described—overwork, undernourishment, lack of medical attention, prevalence of scurvy, ulcers, and other diseases, inhuman punishments, and the shocking death rate—suggest that little genuine improvement has been made in these penal institutions. (261) In the last months of 1966, Mr. Dinces reported, there was a large influx of new political prisoners, evidently as a result of fee harsher law against "anti-Soviet elements" decreed in July and in September 1966.

       The oft-repeated Soviet assertion that there are "no more political prisoners" in the USSR is ludicrous on the face of it. The ever-greater number of "crimes against the state" defined in recent decrees obviously produce contingents of political prisoners. What the claim means is merely that people condemned for political activities are classed as ordinary criminals.

       It is revealing of the Kremlin's ambivalence on the whole subject that, in all the to-do about de-Stalinization, it has never given a factual accounting of the forced-labor system, its magnitude and its methods. Only glimpses of the obscenity have been provided in the Aesopian language of fiction—by the famous novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and a very few other literary works. After the second attack on Stalin in 1961, Soviet publishing houses were quickly deluged with personal stories on camp horrors—ten thousand manuscripts was Khrushchev's estimate when he ordered that the theme be dropped.

       The few published were in limited editions. Even the Denisovich novel by Solzhenitsyn, which could have sold into the millions, was limited to one hundred thousand copies. Circulation in the USSR is not determined by demand but fixed by the thought-control managers. The dimensions and depravities of the slave system have always been known to the people, yet the authorities do not permit a forthright exposure of the facts or offer one themselves.

       Besides, as an active process de-Stalinization is dead. It has been curbed to a degree where it could fairly be called re-Stalinization. The brakes were put on quite early, as a matter of fact, under the shattering impact of the Polish and Hungarian uprisings and the reaction of Soviet students to those events. On December 30, 1956, Pravda was already instructing its readers: " 'Stalinism' above all means communism and Marxism-Leninism. We believe that when Stalin's mistakes are weighed against his achievements it will be seen that his mistakes were secondary." (262)

       By 1963, this paper, main mouthpiece of the party, was all but restoring him to respectability: "The party fully acknowledges Stalin's services to the party and the communist movement. We now believe that Stalin was devoted to communism and that he was a Marxist; it is neither possible nor necessary to deny it."

       More and more often the Kremlin has found or made opportunities to emphasize the "positive side." There was not a word about Stalin's misdeeds in the latest Party Program, adopted in 1961. His leadership in the war effort is again being lauded. During a visit to Stalin's native Georgia in October 1966, Leonid Brezhnev paid tribute to him for great revolutionary services.

       On the eve of the Twenty-third Party Congress, a group of top-shelf Soviet intellectuals, including communists, appealed to Kosygin and Brezhnev against the rehabilitation of Stalin, which was then widely rumored. "It is difficult to doubt," their letter said at one point, "that a large part of striking, truly horrifying facts about Stalin's crimes has not yet been made public." They obviously were hinting that more revelations, rather than a whitewash, were needed to reassure the country. The Party Congress did not in so many words restore Stalin to glory but it restored some political institutions associated with his name and carefully avoided any further criticism of him. The leadership clearly hopes that this chapter of unsavory history can be closed.

• Orgies of Optimism

       It has been argued that, minuscule as the liberalization may be, it shows evolution "in the right direction." The fact, however, is that the regime has not moved in a straight fine in any direction. It has fluctuated between permissiveness and crackdowns. The so-called "thaw" reached its softest point in 1954-1956 and the trend since then, in its zigzag course, has been toward a deepening freeze intellectually and politically to offset the greater frankness in the sciences and economic reforms. In culture, the pendulum between official moderation and harshness is at this writing visibly swinging toward harshness. (263) Khrushchev's heirs are making manifest their intention to tighten "discipline" and enforce authority.*

       The idea that a totalitarian society can evolve toward democracy is at bottom naive, a product of the ingrained optimism of free men. In theory it may be argued that the autocrats, in some dim future, may choose to dilute and to share their power. As a practical matter such, a development is too remote to be treated seriously now or in the near future. In a recent symposium published in the United States, titled Religion and the Search for Ideals in the USSR, Peter B. Reddaway wrote that no one he had met in the Soviet Union believed that the Communist Party could be reformed from within.

       Had anyone suggested that Hitler's Nazism could gradually evolve into an open society tolerant of political dissent, he would rightly have been hooted down. It seemed clear that the Nazi creed could not to any meaningful degree change its essential nature. The situation is exactly parallel in the case of Soviet communism. The difference is in the fact that Western man, from the beginning, has been obsessed by the hope that Bolshevism would just go away, and the hope persists.

       When Lenin introduced NEP, restoring free enterprise and private farming, the world heaved a sigh of relief. Another wave of hope was generated by Stalin's victory over Trotsky, the apostle of "permanent revolution," and the new slogan of "socialism in one country." That was eagerly accepted as a species of Soviet isolationism, the end of "world revolution." The West rallied with trade and technological aid to help Stalin industrialize. A more affluent Russia; it was argued, would inevitably become more conservative and normal: fat communists would be less dangerous than lean ones. (264)

       The wildest orgy of wishful nonsense, however, was touched off by Stalin's own "thaw" in the mid-thirties. Suddenly he was kissing babies and milkmaids for the cameras, drafting "the world's most democratic constitution," and above all seeking popular fronts and united-fronts with anyone accessible to his charms, including the beast of prey on Wall Street. At that time the initiatives for what is today called "bridge-building" between the two worlds came from Moscow, not Washington,

       Many reputable experts excitedly announced that Russia, for all its faults, was evolving in the right direction. Political pundits rushed into print with books about the emerging new Russia, communist but democratic. The record for self-delusion was established by a prominent pro-Soviet journalist who brought glad tidings in the September, 1935 issue of Current History. "The Bolshevik revolution," he attested, "is slowly, almost imperceptibly, abdicating. When the change to democracy is completed, the world will wonder how it happened."

       The world, alas, had no chance to wonder—except about how it could have yielded so readily to the euphoria. The whole fantasy of evolution was soon enough washed out in the blood-purges and the pact of friendship with Hitler.

       Yet another bout of optimism came when Nazi Germany, in contempt of the pact with Stalin, invaded Russia, driving the USSR, willy-nilly, into the democratic camp during the war. Stalin, now a certified freedom-loving ally, grateful for the unstinting American aid, surely could not revert to his totalitarian past. The "Grand Alliance" and "One World" promised a new, hopeful start with the USSR as a loyal partner in the United Nations.

       But revert he did, even before the fighting was finished. Renewed euphoria had to wait for his demise and the effulgence of the "thaw" that followed, then the Spirit of Geneva and out of its ashes the Spirit of Camp David, with the wonders of de-Stalinization as climax. In every case the optimistic slogan was of Moscow coinage, worked to the limit to tranquilize and exact concessions from the world of freedom. (265) Many of the very pro-Soviet people who had defended and glorified Stalin—and denied his excesses and crimes—-now hailed his degradation and its portents for democracy.

       For those tempted by the myth of liberalization, Robert Conquest, in an article in Problems of Communism (November-December, 1962), provided a useful check-list of ten areas in which the unchanged and unchanging nature of Stalinism is on view:

       1. Most important, a self-perpetuating party bureaucracy remains completely in charge. No sharing whatever of its power with any other part of the population has taken place.

       2. The peasant, in spite of minor improvements in terms of tenure, continues to be a collectivized serf.

       3. The trade unions remain, in practice, simply adjuncts of the party and governmental machine. Wage decisions are still imposed on the worker.

       4. The consumer, though to a lesser degree than formerly, still has to put up with low standards because of a channeling into, capital goods and defense products of a proportion of the national income far higher than he would freely grant.

       5. "Socialist realism" remains the official law of the arts. Truly heterodox work is still banned.

       6. Control of all organs of information remains strictly a party monopoly. Foreign broadcasts are jammed. And even foreign books are admitted only as selected by cultural bureaucrats.

       7. The minority nationalities continue to live under strictly centralized control from Moscow. Great purges, carried out in reprisal against an extremely mild degree of nationalism, have lately swept away the party leadership of republics from Latvia to Azerbaijan and Central Asia; the influx of Russians has led to the virtual partition of Kazakhstan.

       8. Travel abroad is permitted only to a limited number of citizens.

       9. The labor camp network, though much shrunken since Stalin's time, continues to function. The laws against political opposition remain draconian. (266)

       10. Soviet political history, including the record of collectivization and the purges, is still taught in an entirely false and misleading fashion. So is foreign history.

       The list could readily be extended. True, some of the old Stalinism is being applied less brutally, to avoid exacerbating popular and even inner-party discontents. The most significant development in post-Stalin Russia, as mentioned earlier in the chapter on Resistance, is not in the feeble ameliorations. It is in the new courage and self-respect manifest in the population, especially among youth and the intelligentsia.

       The old fears and threats seem to have lost some of their power to intimidate. The regime no longer inspires as much awe as it used to. Its mystique has worn thin. Literary men and scientists write open letters of protest to the party leaders on acute issues. They dare come to the defense of persecuted colleagues, as they did in defending Sinyavsky and Daniel and in urging their release subsequently; or when the celebrated physicist Piotr Kapitza demanded that the avant-garde painter Alexei Anikeyenok be allowed to exhibit his works.

       The college and university campuses are increasingly vibrant with daring discussion of tabooed subjects. The soul-searching under way, the hero worship of young poets who voice popular aspirations—all of it is reminiscent of generations of rebellious students in tsarist times. Fewer writers make groveling confessions of guilt when officially reprimanded. They write and occasionally succeed in publishing poems and stories and novels far outside the limits of the permissible fixed by the hierarchs. The Soviet press is deluged with letters from readers, some of them boldly signed, asking questions and making complaints.

       This new mood was no part of the intentions of the regime in moderating the terror and partially disowning Stalin. The evolution, it indicates is not within but outside the communist system, against the system. It is therefore more revolutionary than evolutionary. What is apparently "thawing" is not the regime but the self-respect and self-confidence of a new generation and a new intelligentsia, reflecting now as throughout Russian history the deepest sentiments and intuitions of the masses. (267)

       The fact that the Soviet Union even today has more political prisoners than the whole non-communist world put together, underscores the political ruthlessness of the dictatorship—but also the obduracy of its subjects in fighting the ruthlessness. Soviet communism at its half-century point is being challenged by its subjects. What this portends, as the Kremlin surely knows and fears, is not an evolutionary process but a potential of revolution. For the regime the area of maneuver and compromise is strictly limited. It cannot dilute its power monopoly without risking expulsion and extinction. And apparently it dares not use raw force again—not because it rejects all-out terror on principle but because it is uncertain of its efficacy under the new psychological conditions.

       No one can guess how this historical dilemma, pregnant with destiny for Russia and the world, will be resolved. The one fixed element in the equation of forces has been well identified by Djilas: "Ideas, philosophical principles and moral considerations, the nation and the people, their history, in part even ownership—all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power. Because this would signify communism's renunciation of itself, of its own essence. Individuals can do this. But the class, the party, the oligarchy cannot. This is the purpose and meaning of its existence." (268)