Stalin's Ghost at the Party Congress

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WHEN his Father Confessor asked Narvaez on his deathbed, "General, have you forgiven your enemies?" the General answered: "I have no enemies. I had them shot." So Josef Stalin might have answered, too, had he believed in deathbed confession for himself, as he did for his victims. Yet one cannot have all one's enemies shot, for they grow by a chain reaction: each gap filled by tens and hundreds who knew, loved, believed in or identified themselves with the executed. This was doubtless one of the reasons for the six hours and ten minutes of silence of Stalin's heirs before they announced his death.

What debates and deals went on in those terrifying six hours we can only conjecture. But the announcement, when it came, was not so much a lamentation as an anxious call to collective leadership, orderly succession, monolithic unity, the avoidance of razbrod i panika, "confusion and panic."

The earliest post-Stalin issue of the Party's leading organ of theory, Kommunist (No. 4, March 9, 1953), declared that the Party's greatest strength lay in "collective work, collective leadership and monolithic unity." And on April 16, Pravda invoked some of Stalin's own words to denounce leaders who "decide important questions individually, without consulting members of the bureaus." Thus, even before his corpse was cold, the orphaned sons of the Father of the Peoples began to wrestle with his ghost. But laying a ghost is not so simple, especially when the exorcists are his accomplices, and his heirs.

II

A Party Congress is supposed to be the "supreme body" of the Communist Party. It picks the Executive, lays down the line, exacts responsibilities. But even in Lenin's day, the Congress had been drained of its sovereign powers...