The Secret of Khrushchev's Downfall

Author: Khrushchev
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: I first met Alexei Vladimirovich Snegov in the early 1960s. At that time, he had been back in Moscow for several years after returning from the labor camp. He had been dismissed, or rather, "let go." He lived with his wife, Galina, and his young daughter on Kropotkin Street. Snegov was studying the sharp issues of our country's and the Communist Party's history during that period. He was engaged in the work that today would be called eliminating the "blank spots." The 22nd Congress had already been held, Stalin's body had been removed from the mausoleum, but not moved too far—buried beneath the Kremlin wall nearby. This duality was everywhere. The country had just begun to recognize the Stalinist period in its history, and the phrase "cult of personality" still sounded a bit awkward. A few years ago, we didn't even know the phrase existed. When the Pospekhov commission was formed a few years ago to conduct a preliminary analysis of the events of the 1930s, my father first said the words "cult of personality." Naturally, we began to search the original works of the classic writers for any passages that addressed the issue, and of course, we found the relevant quotations. I remember, it was a Sunday, and the location was the villa. I was sent a file folder containing documents, and from it, my father took a thin silver-gray folder with quotations from the classic writers. My father asked me to read Marx's thoughts on the dangers of the cult of personality and the inadmissibility of the cult of personality. I started reading from the title: "Karl Marx on Personal Culture." At the time, I mocked the error ①, but if you think about it carefully, there was nothing funny about the printing error, because it takes many years to understand what happened in the past. Snegov's words at the time amazed me. He argued that there were no individual errors or mistakes by Stalin, and that everything that happened was the result of his criminal policies. These horrifying phenomena in the 1930s were not accidental. Snegov said the roots lay in the revolutionary events of the October Revolution and the Civil War. Snegov not only criticized the dogma of the "Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)" but also attacked the entire history that was revered as classic. Snegov wrote several historical articles, including one on Stalin's stance on the issue of Lenin's court appearance in the summer of 1917, and another on Stalin and Voroshilov's tragic unauthorized actions—which were one of the reasons for the Red Army's failure in the Polish campaign in 1920. Today, such materials would be classified. But at the time, they had explosive effects. Stalinists did everything they could to prevent these research materials from being published. Those who stood firmly against Snegov, tightly united, included some theorists and practical workers led by our main thinker Mikhail Andreevich Suslov and the Minister of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Fedorovich Ilichev. It was they who wrote the "history" that Snegov utterly refuted, and Snegov accused them of falsifying history. In his struggle against the conservatives, Snegov could only count on the support of Khrushchev and Malenkov. He trusted their integrity.