Abstract

Sovieticus

For the first time in more than twenty years anti-Stalinism is becoming a factor in official Soviet politics. Explicit criticism of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin's long, often murderous rule was banned after the 1964 ouster of Nikita Khrushchev, who had made it a driving force of his reform campaigns. Glorification of the country's historical achievements, dictated by his conservative successor, Leonid Brezhnev, prevailed for the next two decades, the Stalinist era. The year 1987, the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's bloody purge of the Communist Party, may bring a still stronger form of official anti-Stalinism, with ramifications beyond those encouraged by premier of the U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev. A growing number of literary works, recently published or scheduled for this year, indicate that the crimes of the Stalinist past are no longer a taboo subject. These include three novels, banned for twenty years, by major established writers: Anatoly Rybakov's "Children of the Arbat," a remembrance of the encroaching terror of the 1930s; Vladimir Dudintsev's "White Robes," an account of the persecution of scientists in the late 1940s; and Aleksandr Bek's "The New Appointment," a portrayal of moral corruption in the Stalinist bureaucracy.