The New Gospel According to Khrushchev

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WHEN Samuel Butler wanted to write an "Apology for the Devil" he bade us remember: "We have heard only one side; God has written all the books." It is doubtful that there are no servants of the Devil among scribes, but the absolute ruler of a totalitarian state is less ambivalent about the Antagonist and more attentive to his monopoly over books. In Russia one can indeed read only one side. If the man at the top is too busy to "write all the books," he is not too busy to prescribe how they shall be written. To a French delegation in 1956, Khrushchev said: "Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything. They must be directed."

Others may question History, puzzling over her dark answers. But where there is foreknowledge of History's duty and path, where there is an infallible doctrine expounded and applied by an infallible interpreter, what questions shall we ask? History is to obey the "science of society," not alter it nor mock it by waywardness. History is to be fulfilled, not puzzled over; made, not learned. One does not ask her; one tells her. Marxism, says the new "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (Moscow, 1959), "enables us to know the present and foresee the future." If the present is so clear, the future foreknown, shall we permit ourselves to be puzzled by what is already past? To banish doubt, past events must be arranged to show that this or that mistake was never made by the Infallible Ones, or that it was made by the Antagonist, only to be uncovered and overcome by the Infallible Ones. Or that what look to the blind like errors were really strokes of genius. In short, the past must be so written as to show that it was pregnant with the present and the future, certain with the future's certainties. Nor is this to be limited to Russia's past, for the new history proclaims "the inevitability of the repetition of the basic features of the Russian Revolution on an international scale."

To be sure, some of these liberties with the past may be taken by historians in any land, but it can be done thoroughly, systematically, persistently and completely only where there is no free competition in the market place of ideas, where there is but one permissible version at any given moment. That is one of the manifest advantages of totalitarianism...