Polishing the Escutcheons

The Soviet view of history has always been that it exists only in the eye of the beholder--or at any rate, the holder of power. To fall from favor was to fall from sight--to become an "unperson," who, as far as official comment was concerned, might as well have never existed. But the post-Khrushchev leadership of Brezhnev and Kosygin seems determined to give Russians a more honest glimpse of some tarnished heroes of the past.

First to be rehabilitated was Joe Stalin himself, whom Nikita had savagely pulled down in the official myth from demigod to scapegoat-devil. Two months ago, Kremlin spokesmen raised Moscow eyebrows by giving Stalin his due for helping Russia stem the Nazi tide. Next victim to be reprieved from obscurity was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who showed up, replete with honors and ribbons, for last month's V-E-day celebrations in Red Square. Finally, after a decade in the doghouse, the wartime chief and "father" of the Soviet navy, Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, surfaced with the publication of excerpts from his Potsdam memoirs in Neva.

Last week Moscow revealed it was even planning to reopen the ornate marble Stalin Museum in Gori, the dictator's birthplace in Georgia, where dust has been gathering on the mementos of his "personality cult" since the museum was closed in 1957.

The new trend hardly signaled a return to Stalinism, but rather a judicious polishing of besmirched escutcheons. While crediting Stalin with victory in 1945, the Kremlin still rapped the old tyrant's knuckles for the defeats of 1941-42 and for the nation's general unpreparedness for Hitler's assault. Thus the latest issue of the Soviet Academy of Science's monthly journal notes that one reason Hitler was able to surprise Moscow was that Stalin ignored "detailed" reports from Soviet intelligence; moreover, his security police "instead of fighting the real enemies of the state, were used for entirely different purposes"--meaning Stalin's personal reign of terror over his own citizens. Nor do Zhukov or Kuznetsov get off scot-free: Zhukov has not been cleared of what Khrushchev called his "Bonapartist" tendencies to put the army outside party control, nor has Kuznetsov been absolved of his temerity in opposing Khrushchev's emphasis on submarine over surface ships.

What the new leadership seems to want is to make Soviet history respectable by recognizing that even the best of Communists can make mistakes. As one Soviet historian puts it: "We must write in such a way that we need not burn with shame in ten years' time." In this spirit, Brezhnev and Kosygin have ordered both the party's history and the official six-volume history of World War II to be rewritten and made "more objective."

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