Day of betrayal in Congress
THREE YEARS after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, shocked the world and the Soviet Union in a secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress on Feb, 25, 1956, by denouncing Stalin’s dictatorial rule and cult of personality. He also attacked the crimes of Stalin during his 31-year rule of terror from 1922 to 1953
With the speech, titled “On the Personality Cult and its Consequences,” Khruschchev started the process known as “De-Stalinization,” erasing the legacy of the Stalin era from Soviet life. “The process sought to strip the aura of greatness that had surrounded Stalin,” according to one source, About.com European History. In an article, titled “Body of Stalin Removed from Lenin’s Tomb,” it said: “Stalin had been a dictator and tyrant, and yet he presented himself as the Father of Peoples, a wise leader, and the continuer of Lenin’s cause. After his death, people began to acknowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of their own countrymen.”
Five years later, it was time to physically remove Stalin from a place of honor. Khrushchev read a decree ordering the removal of Stalin’s remains. The decree said: “The further retention of the mausoleum of sarcophagus with the bier of J.V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honorable Soviet people, and other activities during the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V.I. Lenin.”
“A few days later, Stalin’s body was quietly removed from the the mausoleum,” said the article. “There were no ceremonies and no fanfare. About 300 feet from the mausoleum, Stalin’s body was buried near other minor leaders of the Revolution. His body was placed near the Kremlin wall, half-hidden by trees. A few weeks later, a simple dark granite stone marked the grave with the very simple identifying mark ‘J.V. Stalin, 1879-1953.’ In 1970, a small bust was added to the grave.”
Other aspects of de-Stalinization followed. According to Wikipedia, Khrushchev’s drive to expunge Stalin’s influence from the public sphere followed through the late 1950s. The drive was marked by the removal of Stalin’s name from cities, landmarks, and facilities which had been named or renamed after him. On Nov. 11,1961, the “hero city” Stalingrad was renamed Volvograd.
According to another source, Spartacus Educational, in the months following Khrushchev’s speech “thousands of those people imprisoned in Stalin’s Gulag camps were released.” Those who had been in labor camps, were given permission to publish their experience, including writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” became a world-wide bestseller.
In 1962, the official party newspaper published a poem by Yevgeni Yevtushenko, titled “Heirs of Stalin.” It describes the burial of Stalin but at the end suggests that the problems are not yet over. “Grimly, clenching his embalmed fists, just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside. He was scheming. He merely dozed off. And I, appealing to our government, petition to double, and treble, the sentries guarding the slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again.”
The de-Stalinization process had a far-reaching impact on Soviet foreign policy. According to Columbia Encyclopedia, Khrushchev’s announced policy, contrary to that of Stalin, was one of “peaceful co-existence” in the Cold War.
Freenet Encyclopedia said the impact of de-Stalinization on Soviet politics was “immense.” The speech stripped the legitimacy of Khrushchev’s remaining Stalinist rivals. Afterwards, “Khrushchev eased restrictions, freeing millions of political prisoners (the Gulag population declined from 13 million in 1953 to 5 million in 1956-57).
The regime change after the end of the Stalin era of terror ushered in a period of political reform. Khrushchev never questioned Stalin’s role in turning back the German invasion at Stalingrad in World War II, and his status as a hero.
In the Philippines, we are taking a reverse process. The political heirs and family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos are moving heaven and earth to reestablish the Marcos legacy after it had been overthrown by the people in the 1986 People Power Revolution. The Soviet people removed the physical monuments of the Stalinist personality cult in the campaign to exorcise the legacy of Stalin in their national memory. Here we have been doing the opposite. Instead of expunging the Marcos legacy, cohorts of the dictatorship are using the democratic institutions restored by the People Power Revolution as the staging ground to bring Marcos back to public adoration through the resolution in the House of Representatives petitioning the President to allow the burial of the Marcos remains in the cemetery of heroes.
Stalin was an authentic Soviet war hero in the Patriotic War against the German invasion. Marcos’ heroic role in the resistance movement against the Japanese Occupation has been debunked as a monumental fraud.
The day 216 representatives signed HR 1135 seeking the burial Marcos as a national hero was a day of infamy in the post-Edsa Philippine democracy. Among other things, the Marcos regime is accused of the murder of several thousand Filipinos who opposed the dictatorship. Filipinos can never live down that day of betrayal by their representatives in Congress.
