Dashnor Kaloçi
Part One
Memorie.al/ publishes several archival documents, which have been taken from the archives of Bulgaria, where the speech of the former first secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Nikita Khrushchev, has been transcribed (clarified), given during an official dinner in Yevksinograd, Bulgaria, where he was invited by the Bulgarian high leadership led by the general secretary of the Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, and Prime Minister Anton Yugov. The conversation of the former Kremlin leader held with the Bulgarian high leadership, where he first dwelt on the two main figures who had led the Soviet Union since the triumph of the October Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, comparing them with one another for the period they were at the head of the Kremlin leadership, where according to him, Lenin not only did not take revenge against his political opponents, inside and outside the Bolshevik Party, but on the contrary, showed patience and allowed them to leave their homeland, as happened with Maxim Gorky, etc., while Stalin proved to be a cruel dictator, who, besides killing the flower created by the Revolution, he killed the flower of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ‘planting’ the grave with coffins! Khrushchev’s speech about the high leadership of the Party of Labour of Albania, led by Enver Hoxha, whom he described not only as ungrateful for all the aid that Moscow had given to official Tirana up to that time, but also as a cruel man and a butcher, who was acting much worse than Stalin, since he had managed to physically eliminate all the founders of the Albanian Communist Party, even killing a pregnant member of the Political Bureau, as well as his accusations against Mehmet Shehu and Beqir Balluku!
16 May 1962
The speech of Nikita Khrushchev, during an official dinner in Yevksinograd, Bulgaria.
16 May 1962
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV: Comrades, I want to complain to you to some extent. For a long time I have been asking for the floor, but apparently because I am a newborn and not yet grown, therefore they tell me: wait, what are you getting involved in? I admit that I am not yet at an old age, since I have become a new citizen. It’s not that you have 8 million and I am only one. Apparently this is the 8th of the million.
(Translator’s note: for a final note, Khrushchev became an honorary citizen of the city of Yevksinograd on this date)
What can you do? Therefore I treat the Komsomol (the youth) with understanding. How difficult it is for the Komsomol, and even more so for a pioneer, but I am still at the stage of a pioneer in my birth.
I want to repeat and express again gratitude for everything good, the good words. And I know what is always said to a guest, so to speak, to multiply the positive sides and soften the negative ones. That is the rule. Therefore apparently, I must choose a figure in such a way that I separate everything that is said into a figure and that which is separated will be more or less approximate. (Noise)
Our relations are good, as I have already said in the meeting. But it was interesting when it was declared that a delegation of the Party and the government were leaving reports that appeared in the bourgeois press, that Khrushchev is going there because an unfavorable situation has developed in the relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Bulgarian Communist Party and that the Bulgarian Communist Party is also like the Albanian Communist Party, so to speak, rising in opposition, (noise). Yes, yes, therefore Khrushchev is coming here as a firefighter. (Laughter)
Well, I understand that these people are far from understanding our psychology and our procedures. Therefore I would say and would wish one thing that, God willing, such “bad” relations that exist today with the Bulgarian Communist Party exist also tomorrow, and we truly need nothing more, with all the other parties. But I also do not understand what the reasons are for taking that, that we would have bad relations. We are fighting together with you. We were victors before, but the Bulgarians have always had revolutionary combat traditions, in the revolutionary communist movement.
If you take your immortal communist revolutionary. Georgi Dimitrov, he immortalized himself in history and also immortalized the Bulgarian people, the Bulgarian Communist Party and the revolutionary movement in general. The trial was not against him, but his trial was against fascism in Germany. And the Communist Party of Bulgaria deserves these traditions in its arsenal of revolutionary struggle.
Therefore, to speak about our relations, in my opinion, is to waste this time, because the relations are good and I see no, so to speak, clashes and no ‘storm clouds’, or anything of the sort… that would overshadow our relations! We must look forward and think about the rapprochement of our peoples together.
If we speak about Albania, I do not understand now, truly I do not understand what motives Albania had, to take such a position, in relation to the Soviet Union! On our part, we did nothing, nothing at all. I explain it this way: You know that this happened. I grew up among miners and peasants and therefore I knew people early.
You know, it happens when hooligans teach a small child to pronounce words that you cannot say in front of adults. So, he is walking along the street and the miners give him three kopecks and he (thinks): la, la, la, but he does not know the meaning of the swear word and pronounces it correctly because he received three kopecks.
The Albanians are like this child: If someone were to speak about what we have done for Albania, then I do not know who could do more than we could have done and have done, and for this we have received spittle. You have to be a completely unreasonable person to do this. As they say, God will punish a person before he takes away his reason. But we Russians have another saying: ‘get the old woman out of the cart’, because it is easier to pass. This is a Ukrainian saying.
A man was riding on a horse, carrying an elderly woman. She argues with the old man and says: ‘I am not going with your horse’, and he replies: ‘Well, go, it’s easier on the horse’. The same thing with us. We have argued and nothing will happen from this. I do not want to exaggerate our role, but it would also be a sin to diminish it. That was foolishness. Well the devil takes it, what is this business with them…!?
Once I gave an explanation, that when we were actually persistently pursuing a policy of eliminating the cult of personality and its consequences, then this of course contradicted the essence of the political line of the Albanians. What is the cult of personality? We were thinking how to explain this, so that it would be incomprehensible to us, but comprehensible and half-incomprehensible to others. That is the cult of personality. But we in essence, rose up against the policy of the gangsters that Stalin had used in relation to our Party!
Some people say that Stalin did this because of the conditions that had been created. That is, what were these conditions that had developed? It is the year 1937, the best conditions of all times that the Soviet people had experienced after the October Revolution. We had finished the Civil War, we had carried out collectivization, we had fought against the Trotskyists, we had fought against Grigori Evseyevich Zinoviev, we had fought against the right wings, and against the left and right, Sergey Syrtsov and the ‘bloc’ of Lominadze.
We literally cleansed our territory and the Party, literally of everything, we achieved the monolithic nature of our Soviet society, and we achieved a position where the Party was strong, as never before. A complete victory, so to speak, a victory of Leninist policy. And we achieved these successes under the leadership of Stalin. We all gathered around and looked at him as the greatest person after Lenin, because he had led us towards this, he had brought us together, and we gathered around him.
And suddenly the death of Sergei Kirov comes! Think about Kirov’s death. Kirov’s assassin in Smolny had been arrested twice with a weapon. Twice this assassin was arrested and twice he was released, and not only released, but he re-entered Smolny and killed Kirov! He killed him when the commissar who was supposed to guard Kirov stood an entire floor away from the person he was guarding!
How could this happen?! Moreover, when Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in Leningrad after Kirov’s murder, they brought the person who had guarded Kirov to be interrogated. Along the way, they created a story, pretending that the vehicle supposedly had been involved in an accident and the commissar was killed as a result of this!
And now we have found the driver, who was in this vehicle and had driven the truck. He said: when I was behind the wheel, a GPU commissar (the Soviet Secret Service, predecessor of the KGB. Our note) was sitting next to me and he wanted to grab the wheel and drive the vehicle, crashing it into a building. I did not let him seize the wheel. I steered the vehicle and while I damaged the hood and the fender, just at that time, I heard a noise in the vehicle and they declared that this commissar was killed. But in fact, he was killed by a blow to the face, when they took him for interrogation. We wanted to find those Chekists who took him for interrogation. They were shot. And now find the ends.
Who could have done this, which needed this to be done, who needed to do this, who would need to cover their tracks?! The GPU? That is the question that arises now. And in fact ‘heads flew’ at the same time, thousands, tens of thousands were killed. Who was killed? They killed members of the Central Committee, they killed delegates of the 17th Party Congress, they killed Party leaders, Soviet leaders, and they decimated the command staff of the Red Army.
Thus they killed the flower created by the Revolution; they killed the flower of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Three generations were killed! When they sent me to Ukraine, I went immediately. There was no first secretary of the region; there was no chairman of the Executive Committee of that region. All were annihilated and not just once.
Who needed this? Members of the Political Bureau were shot, Stanislav Kosior, a member of the Party since 1907, was killed; Chubar’, a most honest person, a worker and metalworker, was killed; Yan Rudzutak, a worker who wrote theses, when there was a struggle with the opposition and the Trotskyists, was killed. Rudzutak’s theses were taken as a basis and with these theses; the Party waged a proper struggle against the workers’ opposition and against the Trotskyists. Lenin signed these theses. Rudzutak was killed. Pavel Postyshev, and thousands such people, were killed.
What was happening and why? That is why this question, you know, is on the table. Why? Because Stalin in fact was that person, about whom Lenin said: this person may abuse power, that he should not be trusted with the post of First Secretary. And here is the Party, which did not listen to Lenin, but listened to Stalin and he swore that he would draw lessons, but in fact always broke his oath. You know how, a dog to whom you have brought meat and he cannot resist eating and shows his nature. So did Stalin. Showed his nature in this question.
Now we say why the Party could not do this. But the Party was powerless because, as you know, there is a philosophical play with words: can God create another substance more powerful than God? If he can create it, then accordingly, God is not Almighty. If he cannot create it, he is not Almighty either.
So it happened with the Party which created a boss, created a God for it and lost power over this God. And this God created by the Party and the people, raised his hand against the Party, against the people. Therefore we say that the Party must draw lessons that no one is above the Party, no one is above the people. That is the struggle against the cult of the individual.
Now look at what Albania is doing. Albania is copying what we had done exactly, only with greater Asiatic brutality. In our Russian sense, Asiatic brutality is unusual brutality. So they are doing it at a lower level, because Stalin in fact was a Marxist, was in fact a genius and talented, but he misused this talent and directed it against the Party, against the people.
Stalin and Enver Hoxha cannot be compared, nor Stalin and Mehmet Shehu. And they do not act like Stalin, but like butchers, they just cut. Whoever speaks, they cut off his head! Of course, they might support us. Therefore the 20th Congress uprooted this policy and for that reason, they first agreed with it. But when they found support from others, they began to speak against us with foul language.
If someone were to ask Stalin before his death (he had already erected his monuments here, there and everywhere), he thought that he would be remembered in Russia, in the Soviet Union, for centuries. He had created everything, and Lenin had already died and there was no monument, because Lenin would never allow this. But Stalin gave his name to all objects, throughout the period he was at the head of the USSR. So there is a great difference between them.
Here we are, the other comrades, who were together with me in the leadership. If someone speaks about me, I am a product of the Stalin era. When Lenin died, I was studying in a workers’ school (Translator’s note: according to the final note, a general educational institution). I started work in the Party in Stalin’s time, so to speak.
I was promoted in Stalin’s time, Stalin promoted me: I became a member of the Political Bureau; I became First Secretary of a very large Party organization, Ukraine (the Party Organization). In a word, I was with Stalin, I idealized Stalin and I supported Stalin. Why did I come out now against Stalin? I knew Lenin less, I never saw Lenin, I never met Lenin, but I lived with Stalin. Why do I and my other comrades now say: No, not Stalin, but Lenin? Why? As if in gratitude they say: “One hand washes the other and both get dirty”. Therefore it would seem that we should not praise Lenin, but Stalin.
Lazar Kaganovich also spoke about this. We ate and drank together. Kaganovich was a ‘toad toy’ and a ‘bootlicker’. He said to Stalin and to us: “Well, Lenin lived only six years after the Revolution, but Stalin raised the country, etc., etc. Why do we call it Leninism? No, not Leninism, but Stalinism.” We all fell silent. Stalin looked at us and then as if cursing Kaganovich, he addressed him: what are you saying, how you can belittle Lenin?!
He had expressions that I cannot repeat. But he looked and saw himself that we were not speaking for or against this. He understood, he was an intelligent person. Nevertheless, the next day, Kaganovich began to repeat this. Kaganovich was a coward. If Stalin had said: What are you saying? He would have immediately crawled under the table and the smell from there would be such that you could not stay at the table. But he spoke, because he believed that Stalin was cursing him and provoking him to repeat himself. That was the situation.
Therefore we want to create a situation so that we exalt the Party and not a person. What about the person? Lenin died. What could be greater in our era than Lenin? But, nevertheless, the Party turned out to be above Lenin in the sense that it was stronger than Lenin. Lenin died, but his ideas remained and the Party continued forward.
Stalin, of course, considered himself above Lenin and above all. Comrades, you know that when Stalin died, how many crowds of people there were to see Stalin for the last time. One hundred and nine people were crushed; the crowd trampled them. The militia and military troops were powerless to establish order and prevent it. That is, Stalin’s influence was great.
And then he died. Now after his death, we are looking at who Stalin was and what he did for the country. Lenin and Stalin are incomparable figures, because Lenin is Lenin. Stalin once did great things, but Stalin, you know…! I cannot say more now. We have created a large commission chaired by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, in order to collect all these materials.
Four volumes of these materials have been written, and I have not yet had the chance to read them. We collected everything there and we gathered all those who had remained alive. It is difficult for us to investigate and after us it will be even more difficult. We want to leave it and let others read it after us.
Thus we have decided to proceed, but this could be fatal. At the 17th Congress, six people voted against Stalin. It was officially announced, I remember, because also six people voted against me. We received the same number of votes against. But now, we have gathered those people who were in the voting commission and they say that there were not six, but more than 100. They did not show them.
Of course, Stalin understood who could have voted against him. A worker, a collective farm worker, or the secretary of a district Party committee? No, they could not have voted against him, they idolized Stalin. All the old Leninists voted against Stalin.
They were watching, observing and thinking that Stalin was going in the wrong direction. Stalin understood this, of course, and he directed the blow against them, because most of all the heads of the old Bolsheviks ‘flew’! The older they were, the more their heads ‘flew’ and then the others who were younger followed after them.
I know that you are recording on tape recorders what I am saying and I ask you to make public what you are recording, but not to exaggerate it. Therefore you want me to be overly ready to say other things, but I want you to be overly clever to ask me the questions you think. We will give you what you need, but what we do not have, we cannot give you and you will not get it. That is not a secret from the Bulgarian Communist Party.
We said this at the 20th Party Congress. It was a shock to the Party. Some were also feverish at the 22nd Congress. Therefore our Party has already acquired immunity against this, but others still have a very weak organism. I am not thinking about myself, but this flows and suddenly they begin to use it not only against us, but against you, and against the communist movement in general. Therefore, it is necessary to be careful in this question.
A large report could be made on these questions and I think that such a report is necessary and perhaps we will make this report and publish it. But apparently, not everything that needs to be said can be said. Time is needed for this. Apparently, after another generation, this will be investigated as a historical phenomenon that occurred, so that the peoples and revolutionary parties are guided and an immunization takes place, so that there is no repetition of this.
But here I take the Albanian issue. Look at all those who participated in the creation of the Communist Party of Albania. Most of them are in the grave. They were killed. Stalin did this too. Therefore, so to speak, they are not worried about Stalin when they speak against us, they are protecting themselves, because it is already clear to each of them and they see this in Albania. But they were powerless to stop those killings and all those people who went to the grave, since we were also powerless when Stalin was doing this.
Take Beqir Balluku. He served the Italians. Mehmet Shehu was in France. What kind of person is he? God knows. Is he a communist or something else? And there are many such people! Therefore look, there are no more founders of the Albanian Communist Party alive. At the last Congress Mehmet Shehu said: “Whoever is against us, – we will give him the floor, but we will spit in his ugly face. If he repeats – a bullet in the forehead.”
There is party democracy for you, as they say, Bolshevik centralism. That is not centralism, but gangsterism. How can a Party be strengthened, how can the life of the Party be enlivened? Can any person guarantee that he never makes mistakes? No. Mistakes can always happen. Look at what Lenin did.
When the October Revolution ended, Lev Borisovich Kamenev rose against him, Grigori Evseyevich Zinoviev rose against him and Maxim Gorky left the Soviet Union. He left the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. Anatoli Vasilyevich Lunacharsky warned Lenin: ‘The artillery is firing on the Kremlin and historical monuments are being destroyed’. Lenin said: ‘We will win and we will rebuild it, we will build, but a battle is developing now’.
That was the situation and Lenin brought Kamenev to his side, he brought Zinoviev, Lunacharsky, and of course he brought other people to his side that had wavered. During the Civil War, he appointed Trotsky as People’s Commissar of Defense. Trotsky organized opposition against him. Lenin defeated the Trotskyists, but he left Trotsky as he was, as People’s Commissar of Defense. Lenin had Bolshevik patience. /Memorie.al
