COMMUNISM NOW
519
into the factories an iron dictatorship was needed, and since the
Peking Government seems determined to embark on the same ex–
perience-though admittedly with greater caution-it follows (at
least if you are a Marxist) that it must in time produce its own
variant of the Stalinist terror: if indeed it has not already done so.
Now it is possible to counter this
line
of reasoning by pointing
to the uniqueness of the Soviet experience. The Russians after all
were
first in
the field, and in principle it is open to the Chinese and
others to avoid their worst and bloodiest mistakes. One may also,
if
one feels so inclined, draw some retrospective comfort from the
revelations about Stalin's personal rule which have become orthodox
since the Twentieth Party Congress last February. Although Khrush–
chev has not said so, it is conceivable that he and his colleagues now
regard the wholesale massacre and deportation of the
kulaks
as the
greatest of Stalin's criminal blunders, and that Mao Tse-tung at any
rate is determined to sidestep this particular pitfall. But taken by and
large, the major features of the Stalinist experience seem inseparable
from the attempt to telescope a century of industrial history into a
decade, and to do it dictatorially and at the expense of the popula–
tion.
In
its own way, the long-winded resolution of the CPSU's
Central Committee published in
Pravda
on July 2nd gets to the
bottom of the matter when it asserts that under the given conditions
there was no alternative to letting Stalin govern dictatorially. The talk
about "limitations of democracy" imposed by the need "to build
Socialism" under conditions of "capitalist encirclement" can be dis–
missed as the automatic paternoster of a regime committed to the
defense of Stalin's heritage; but to Communists such phrases have
an operational meaning when they are applied to the problems of
backward countries where Communists have only recently (or not
yet) come to power. What they suggest is a qualified defense of the
Stalinist pattern as being rational-and so it is, if one subtracts the
murderous and pathological aspects of the particular experience
undergone by Russia in the '30s and '40s. This, and not "Moscow
control," is the real obstacle to genuine de-Stalinization among the
East European satellites, and further afield, in the fiefs now pre–
cariously occupied by Togliatti and Thorez. Reject the pattern, and
what is left of the claim that Communism can industrialize faster
than capitalism?
