Caprice or the System

when Khrushchev opened the “anti-Stalin” campaign in 1956 some of our Kremlinologists had a small debate among themselves. They were asking if Stalin and the cult of the individual resulted from the nature of the system or if the entire period from 1925 to 1953 was just one of history’s caprices. (Bertram Wolfe showed that Stalin was the system, and vice versa—and even Togliatti agreed with him for a spell.)

Whatever the facts of that disputation, there can be no doubt about Khrushchev. He is a product of the system as a mule is the product of an ass and a mare. Our Kremlinologists now accept the fact and have gone to work to describe the sort of man the system has produced.

WJ

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Walter Darnell Jacobs

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when Khrushchev opened the “anti-Stalin” campaign in 1956 some of our Kremlinologists had a small debate among themselves. They were asking if Stalin and the cult of the individual resulted from the nature of the system or if the entire period from 1925 to 1953 was just one of history’s caprices. (Bertram Wolfe showed that Stalin was the system, and vice versa—and even Togliatti agreed with him for a spell.)

Whatever the facts of that disputation, there can be no doubt about Khrushchev. He is a product of the system as a mule is the product of an ass and a mare. Our Kremlinologists now accept the fact and have gone to work to describe the sort of man the system has produced.