“Thaw” in the USSR: two models of reflexion after the XX Congress of the CPSU

Abstract

The article deals with reflexive models by which Khrushchev’s “secret” report at the XX Congress of the CPSU was perceived. For the leaders of CPSU, Stalin’s “cult” meant only that Stalin had forgotten about collectivity, about the collective origin, about collective decisions; he had stopped paying attention to the opinion of other leading members of the party. He exalted himself, not the party. The very problem with his crimes was that Stalin repressed party members. The issue of his crimes against the entire people was not raised or considered. Thus, a turn towards reflection emerged that aimed to protect the renewed totalitarianism, new collective cohesion (and justification) of party decisions. In this model, the function of the logic of retreat was crucial for preserving the main value, which was the communist perspective. The article explores the behavioral strategies of the leading historians in the Academy of Sciences in the times of uncertainty in the official attitude towards Stalin: who is he from Khrushchev’s perspective: a criminal or a “prominent figure” in the party? The other model is found in the questions asked by the audience during the lectures given by Academician A.M. Pankratova, a well-known historian of the working movement in Russia, who spoke to different audiences in Leningrad one month after the Congress. In this “first” reaction to Khrushchev’s re­port, one can find a critical public intuition that expressed the need for human rights in order to protect oneself from any kind of outrage – including the collective one. For the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the boundary of what was tolerable lay in the exclusion of any personal superiority from the collective beginning, which meant a return to Lenin – the leader of the world proletariat, who “sacredly respected” the principle of collective decision; for the audiences in Leningrad, this boundary was not outlined in any way and the message that was transmitted allowed even for a scenario that led to a deconstruction of the entire communist mythology.