The 20th Congress of the CPSU. Khrushvhev’s theses—the charter of modern revisionism. The “secret” report against Stalin. Togliatti demands recognition of his “merits”. Tito in the Soviet Union. Molotov is dismissed from the task of foreign minister. Abortive attempt of the “anti-party group”. The end of the career of Marshal Zhukov. Another victim of the Khrushchevites’ backstage manoeuvres: Kirichenko. May 1956: Suslov demands that we rehabilitate Koçi Xoxe and company. Dune 1956: Tito and Khrushchev are displeased with us. July 1957: Khrushchev arranges a dinner in Moscow so that we meet Rankovic and Kardelj.
The betrayal at the top of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the country where the October Socialist Revolution was carried out, was an all-round attack on the name and great teachings of Lenin, and especially on the name and work of Stalin.
In the framework of its post-Second World War strategy, imperialism, headed by American imperialism, when it saw the first vacillations and retreats of the new Soviet leadership, further intensified its all-round attacks and pressure to force Khrushchev and company to go further and further down the road of capitulation and betrayal. The “striving” and big expenditure of imperialism in this counter-revolutionary direction were not in vain. Having set out on their course of concessions and betrayal, Khrushchev and his henchmen were continually justifying the long-standing efforts and the old desires of imperialism.
When they thought that they had strengthened their positions, had control of the army through the marshals, had turned the security force to their course, had won over the majority of the Central Committee, Khrushchev, Mikoyan and the other Khrushchevites prepared the notorious 20th Congress held in February 1956, at which they delivered the “secret” report against Stalin.
This congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has gone down in history as the congress which officially legalized the thoroughly anti-Marxist, anti-socialist theses of Nikita Khrushchev and his collaborators, as the congress which flung the doors open to the penetration of alien, bourgeois-revisionist ideology in a series of communist and workers’ parties of the former socialist countries and the capitalist countries. All the distortions of the major issues of principle, such as those about the character of our epoch, the roads of transition to socialism, peaceful coexistence, war and peace, the stand towards modern revisionism and towards imperialism, etc., etc., which later became the basis of the great, open polemic with modern revisionism, have their official beginning in Khrushchev’s report to the 20th Congress.
From the time Stalin died to the 20th Congress, the Khrushchevite conspirators manoeuvred cunningly with “bureaucratic legality”, “the rules of the party”, “collective leadership” and “democratic centralism”, shed crocodile tears over the loss of Stalin, thus step by step preparing to torpedo the work of Stalin, his personality and Marxism-Leninism. This is a period full of lessons for the Marxist-Leninists, because it brings out the bankruptcy of “bureaucratic legality”, which represents a great danger to a Marxist-Leninist party, brings out the methods which the revisionists used to profit from this “bureaucratic legality”, brings out how leaders, who are honest and experienced but who have lost the revolutionary class spirit, fall into the traps of intriguers and give way, retreat before the blackmail and demagogy of revisionist traitors disguised with revolutionary phraseology. In this transition period we saw how the Khrushchevites, in order to consolidate their power, operated allegedly with “a great party spirit”, “free from the fear of Stalin”, with “truly democratic and Leninist forms”, about which they set up a great clamour, while they worked actively to organize the filthiest slanders which only the bourgeoisie has been able to concoct against the Soviet Union, Stalin and the entire socialist order. All these monstrous calumnies of the Khrushchevite revisionists, all their destructive activity, were intended to “prove”, allegedly with legal documents, with “arguments” and “analyses in the new spirit”, the slanders which the reactionary bourgeoisie had been spreading for many years against Marxism-Leninism, the revolution and socialism.
Every good thing of the past was distorted, allegedly in the light of the “new situations”, “new developments”, “new roads and possibilities”, in order to go ahead.
Many were misled by this demagogy of traitors. However, the Party of Labour of Albania was not misled. It has made a detailed principled analysis of this question and has had its say in defence of the Marxist-Leninist truth long ago.
Together with Comrades Mehmet Shehu and Gogo Nushi, I was appointed by our Party to take part in the proceedings of the 20th Congress. The opportunist “new spirit”, which Khrushchev was arousing and activating, was apparent in the way in which the proceedings of this congress were organized and conducted. This liberal spirit pervaded the whole atmosphere, the Soviet press and propaganda of those days like an ominous cloud; it prevailed in the corridors and the congress halls, it was apparent in people’s faces, gestures and words.
The former seriousness, characteristic of such extremely important events in the life of a party and a country, was missing. Even non-party people spoke during the proceedings of the congress. In the breaks between sessions, Khrushchev and company strolled through the halls and corridors, laughing and competing with one another as to who could tell the most anecdotes, make the most wisecracks and show himself the most popular, who could drink the most toasts at the heavily laden tables which were placed everywhere.
With all this, Khrushchev wanted to reinforce the idea that the “grave period”, the “dictatorship” and “gloomy analysis” of things were over once and for all and the “new period” of “democracy”, “freedom”, the “creative examination” of events and phenomena, whether inside or outside the Soviet Union, was officially beginning.
In fact, the first report delivered by Khrushchev at the congress, which was trumpeted loudly as a “colossal contribution” to the fund of Marxism-Leninism and a “creative development” of our science, constitutes the official charter of modern revisionism. From those days on, the bourgeoisie and reaction gave exceptional publicity to Khrushchev’s “new developments”, spoke openly about the radical changes which were occurring in the Soviet Union and in the political and ideological line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
While they gleefully welcomed Khrushchev’s great and radical about-turn, reaction and the bourgeoisie, at the same time, did not fail to describe this turn on some occasions as “more dangerous” to their interests than the line of the time of Stalin. Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites used these “criticisms” by the bourgeoisie as arguments to convince the others that the “new line” was “correct” and “Marxist”, but in fact, the fear of the international bourgeoisie had another source: in Khrushchev and his “new policy” it saw not only a new ally, but also a new and dangerous rival for spheres of influence, plunder, wars and invasions.
On the last day, the congress proceeded behind closed doors, because the elections were to be held, and we were not present at the sessions. In fact that day, besides the elections, a second report by Khrushchev was read to the delegates. It was the notorious, so-called secret report against Stalin, but which had been sent in advance to the Yugoslav leaders, and a few days later it fell into the hands of the bourgeoisie and reaction as a new “gift” from Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites.
After it was discussed by the delegates to the congress, this report was given to us and all the other foreign delegations to read.
Only the first secretaries of sister parties taking part in the congress read it. I spent all night reading it, and extremely shocked, gave it to Mehmet and Gogo to read. We had known in advance that Khrushchev and company had cancelled out the glorious work and figure of Stalin and we saw this during the proceedings of the congress in which his name was never mentioned in favourable terms. But we could never have imagined that all those monstrous accusations and calumnies against the great and unforgettable Stalin could have been put on paper by the Soviet leaders. Nevertheless, there it was in black and white. It had been read to the Soviet communists, who were delegates to the congress, and had been given to the representatives of other parties taking part in the congress to read. Our hearts and minds were deeply and gravely shocked. Amongst ourselves we said that this was a villainy which had gone beyond all bounds, with catastrophic consequences for the Soviet Union and the movement, and that in those tragic circumstances, the duty of our Party was to stand firm on its own Marxist-Leninist positions.
After we had read it we immediately returned the terrible report to its owners. We had no need for that package of filthy accusations which Khrushchev had concocted. It was other “communists” who took it away to give to reaction and to sell by the ton in their book-stalls as a profitable business.
We returned to Albania heart-broken over what we had seen and heard in the homeland of Lenin and Stalin, but at the same time we returned with a great lesson that we must be more vigilant and more alert towards the activities and stands of Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites.
Only a few days later the black smoke of the ideas of the 20th Congress began to spread everywhere.
Palmiro Togliatti, our near neighbour, who had shown himself to be the most remote and unapproachable towards us, was among the first to come out in his party beating his breast. Not only did he praise to the skies the new “prospects” which the congress of the Soviet revisionists opened, but he demanded that his merits should be recognized as the precursor of Khrushchev in regard to many of the new theses and as “an old fighter” for those ideas. “In regard to our party,” declared Togliatti in March 1956, “it seems to me that we have acted courageously. We have always been interested in finding our own way, the Italian way, of development towards socialism.”
The revisionists of Belgrade rejoiced and aroused themselves as never before, while the other parties of the countries of people’s democracy began, not only to envisage the future, but also to re-examine the past, in the spirit of Khrushchev’s theses. Revisionist elements, who up till yesterday had kept under cover while they poured out their poison, now came out openly to settle accounts with their opponents; the wave of rehabilitations of condemned traitors and enemies erupted, the doors of prisons were opened and many of those who had been condemned were placed directly in the leadership of the parties.
The Khrushchev clique was the first to set the example. At the 20th Congress, Khrushchev boasted that more than 7,000 persons condemned in the time of Stalin had been liberated from the prisons of the Soviet Union and rehabilitated. This process was to continue and be deepened.
Khrushchev and Mikoyan began to liquidate, one by one, and finally all together, those members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the party whom they were to describe as an “anti-party group”. After they brought down Malenkov, replacing him temporarily with Bulganin; Molotov’s turn came. This took place on June 2, 1956. That day the newspaper “Pravda” carried a huge photograph of Tito on the front page and the dobro pozhalovat!1 to the head of the Belgrade clique arriving in Moscow, and page four ended a report of daily events with the “news” about the removal of Molotov from the post of foreign minister of the Soviet Union. The report said that Molotov had been released from this position “at his own request”, but in fact he was released because this was a condition laid down by Tito for his coming to the Soviet Union for the first time since the breaking off of relations in 1948-1949. And Khrushchev and company immediately fulfilled the condition set by Belgrade for Tito’s satisfaction, since Molotov, together with Stalin, had signed the letters which the Soviet leadership had sent the Yugoslav leadership in 1948.
The positions of the revisionist reactionaries were becoming stronger and their opponents in the Presidium, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and others, now began to see more clearly the revisionist intrigue and the diabolical plans which Khrushchev hatched up against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the party in the Kremlin, in the summer of 1957, after many criticisms, Khrushchev was left in the minority, and, as Polyansky told us from his own mouth, Khrushchev was dismissed from the task of the first secretary and was appointed minister of agriculture, since he was an “expert on kukuruza2”. However, this situation did not last more than a few hours. Khrushchev and his supporters secretly gave the alarm, the marshals surrounded the Kremlin with tanks and soldiers and gave orders that not even a fly was to leave the Kremlin. On the other hand, aircraft were sent to the four corners of the Soviet Union to gather up the members of the Plenum of the CC of the CPSU. “Then,” said Polyansky, this product of Khrushchev, “we entered the Kremlin and demanded admission to the meeting. Voroshilov came out and asked what we wanted. When we told him that we wanted to enter the meeting, he cut us short. When we threatened to use force he said: ‘What does all this mean?’ But we warned him: ‘Mind your words, otherwise we shall arrest you.’ We entered the meeting and changed the situation.” Khrushchev was restored to power.
Thus, after this forlorn attempt, these former co-fighters of Stalin’s, who had associated themselves with the slanders made against his glorious work, were described as an “anti-party group” and received the final blow from the Khrushchevites. No one wept over them, no one pitied them. They had lost the revolutionary spirit, were no longer Marxist-Leninists, but corpses of Bolshevism. They had united with Khrushchev and allowed mud to be thrown at Stalin and his work; they tried to do something, but not on the party road, because for them, too, the party did not exist.
All those who opposed Khrushchev, in one way or another, or were no longer necessary to him, were to suffer the same fate. For years on end the “great merits” of Zhukov were publicized, his activity during the Great Patriotic War was used to throw mud at Stalin, and as minister of defence his hand was used for the triumph of Khrushchev’s putsch. But later, we suddenly learned that he had been discharged from the functions he held. During those days Zhukov was on a visit to our country. We welcomed him warmly as an old cadre and hero of the Stalinist Red Army, talked about problems of the defence of our country and the socialist camp, and did not notice anything disturbing in his opinions. On the contrary, since he had come from Yugoslavia, where he had been on a visit, he told us: “With what I saw in Yugoslavia, I don’t understand what sort of socialist country it is!” From this we sensed that he was not of one mind with Khrushchev. On the very day that he left, we learned that he had been removed from the post of minister of defence of the USSR for “mistakes” and “grave faults” in his application of the “line of the party”, for violations of the “law in the army”, etc., etc. I cannot say whether or not Zhukov was guilty of mistakes and faults in these directions, but it is possible that the reasons went deeper.
In one meeting at Khrushchev’s, their attitude towards Zhukov had made an impression on me. I can’t remember what year it was, but it was summer and I was on holiday in the south of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had asked me to lunch. The local people there were Mikoyan, Kirichenko, Nina Petrovna (Khrushchev’s wife), and some others. Apart from me, Ulbricht and Grotewohl were there as foreign guests. We were sitting outside, eating and drinking on the veranda. When Zhukov came, Khrushchev invited him to sit down. Zhukov seemed out of sorts. Mikoyan got up and said to him:
“I am the tamada,3 fill your glass!
“I can’t drink,” said Zhukov, “I am not well.”
“Fill it, I say,” insisted Mikoyan in an authoritarian tone, “I give the orders here, not you.”
Nina Khrushcheva intervened:
“Don’t force him when it harms him, Anastasiy Ivanovich,” she said to Mikoyan:
Zhukov said nothing and did not fill his glass. Khrushchev changed the subject by cracking jokes with Mikoyan.
Can it be that the contradictions with Zhukov had begun to arise as early as that, and they had begun to insult him and to show him that others were giving the orders and not he? Perhaps Khrushchev and company had begun to fear the power which they themselves had given Zhukov in order to seize state power, and that is why they accused him of “Bonapartism” later. Could it possibly be that information about Zhukov’s views on Yugoslavia reached Khrushchev before Zhukov returned to the Soviet Union? In any case, Zhukov was eliminated from the political scene despite his four “Hero of the Soviet Union” stars, a series of orders of Lenin, and countless other decorations.
After the 20th Congress, Khrushchev elevated Kirichenko to the top and made him one of the main figures of the leadership. I had met him in Kiev many years before, when he was first secretary of the Ukraine. This big florid-faced man who did not make a bad impression on me, did not welcome me haughtily or as a mere formality. Kirichenko accompanied me to many places which I saw for the first time, showed me the main street of Kiev, which had been built entirely new, took me to the place called Babi Yar, notorious as the site of the massacre of Jews by the Nazis. We also went together to the Opera, where we saw a performance about Bogdan Khmelnitsky, whom, I remember, he compared with our Skanderbeg. I was pleased about this, although I was sure that Kirichenko had remembered only the name of Skanderbeg from all that the chinovniki had told him about the history of Albania. He did not fail to respond to my love for Stalin with the same terms and expressions of admiration and loyalty. However, since he was from the Ukraine, Kirichenko did not fail to speak about Khrushchev, too, about his “wisdom, ability, energy”, etc. I did not see anything wrong with these expressions which seemed natural to me at that time.
In the Kremlin I frequently had occasion to sit at the table beside Kirichenko and talk to him. After Stalin’s death, many banquets were organized, because, at that period it was usually only at banquets that one met the leaders of the Soviet Union. The tables were set day and night, laden with food and drink to the point of revulsion. When I saw the Soviet comrades eating and drinking, I was reminded of Gargantua of Rabelais. These things occurred after the death of Stalin, when Soviet diplomacy was carried out through priyoms, and Khrushchevite “communism” was illustrated, apart from other things, with banquets, with caviar, and the wines of the Crimea.
At one of these priyoms, when I was sitting near Kirichenko, I said to Khrushchev in a loud voice:
“You must come to visit Albania some time, because you have gone everywhere else.”
“I shall come,” replied Khrushchev.
Kirichenko jumped in at once and said to Khrushchev:
“Albania is far away, so don’t promise when you will go and how many days you will stay.”
Of course, I did not like this intervention of his and asked:
“Why are you ill-disposed towards our country?”
He feigned regret over the incident, and to explain his gesture, said to me:
“Nikita Khrushchev is not well at present. We must look after him.”
This was just a tale. Khrushchev was as healthy as a pig, and ate and drank enough for four.
Another time (at a reception, of course, as usual), I happened to be seated near Kirichenko again. Nexhmije was with me, too. It was July 1957, the time when Khrushchev had fixed things up with the Titoites and was flattering them, as well as exerting pressure on them. The Titoites seemed to like the flattery, while as to the pressure and the stabs in the back, they gave as good as they got. Khrushchev had informed me the night before, “in order to get my permission”, that he was going to ask me to this dinner at which Zhivkov and his wife, as well as Rankovic and Kardelj, with their wives, would be present. As was his custom, Khrushchev cracked jokes with Mikoyan. This is the way they combined their roles, with Khrushchev accompanying his arrows, trickery, wiles, lies, and threats with jibes at “Anastasiy” who played the “king’s jester”.
When he finished his introduction with jokes with the “king’s jester”, Khrushchev, in proposing a toast, started to give us a lecture about the three-sided friendship that ought to exist between Albania. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the four-sided friendship, between the Soviet Union, Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.
“The relations of the Soviet Union with Yugoslavia have not proceeded in a straight 1ine.he said. “At first they were good, then they were cool, then they were broken off, and later, following our visit to Belgrade it seemed they were put right. Then the rocket went up (he was referring to events of October-November 1956 in Hungary), and they were ruined again, but now the objective and subjective conditions have been created for them to improve. Meanwhile the relations of Yugoslavia with Albania and Bulgaria have not yet been improved, and as I told Rankovic and Kardelj earlier, the Yugoslavs must stop their undercover activity against those countries.”
“It is the Albanians who do not leave us in peace,” interjected Rankovic.
Then I intervened and listed for Rankovic the anti-Albanian actions, sabotage, subversion, and the plots which they organized against us. That night we had Khrushchev “on our side”, but he soft-pedalled his criticisms of the Yugoslavs.
“I don’t understand this name of your party, the ‘League of Communists of Yugoslavia’.” said Khrushchev, waving his glass. “What is this word ‘League’? Besides, you Yugoslavs don’t like the term ‘socialist camp’. But tell us, what should we call it, the ‘neutral camp’, the ‘camp of neutral countries’? We are all socialist countries, or are you not a socialist country?”
“We are, of course, we are!” said Kardelj.
“Then come and join us, we are the majority,” replied Khrushchev.
Khrushchev was on his feet throughout all this discourse, interspersed with shouts and gestures, and full of “criticisms” of the Yugoslavs, which he delivered in the context of his efforts to stand over Tito, who never agreed to consider Khrushchev as the “head” of the council.
Kirichenko, who was beside me, listened in silence. Later he asked me in a low voice:
“Who is this woman beside me?”
“My wife, Nexhmije,” I replied.
“Couldn’t you have told me earlier? I have been keeping my mouth shut, thinking that she is the wife of one of them,” he told me, indicating the Yugoslavs. He exchanged greetings with Nexhmije and then began to abuse the Yugoslavs.
Meanwhile Khrushchev continued his “criticisms” of the Yugoslavs and tried to convince them that it was he (of course, under the name of the Soviet Union and the Soviet communist party), and no one else who ought to be at the “head”. He was getting at Tito, who, for his part, tried to place himself and the Yugoslav party above everyone.
“It would be ridiculous,” he told them, “for us to be at the head of the camp if the other parties did not think us worthy, just as it would be ridiculous for any other party to consider itself at the head when the others do not consider it so.”
Kardelj and Rankovic replied coolly, making great efforts to appear calm, but it was very easy to understand that internally they were boiling. Tito had instructed them to defend his positions well and they wanted to do their master’s bidding.
The dialogue between them was dragging on, frequently interrupted by the shouts of Khrushchev, but I was no longer listening. Apart from the reply I gave Rankovic, when he made the accusation that we had interfered in their affairs, I exchanged not one word with them. I talked the whole time with Kirichenko, who left nothing unsaid against the Yugoslavs and described the whole stand of our Party towards the revisionist leadership of Yugoslavia as very correct.
But this Kirichenko, also, was slapped down by Khrushchev later. Although foreign observers for a time considered him to rank second after Khrushchev, he was sent to a small remote town of Russia, without doubt, virtually in exile. One of our military students told us when he returned to Albania:
“I was travelling on a train and a Soviet passenger came and sat down beside me, pulled out the paper and began to read. After a while he laid down the paper and, as is customary, asked me: ‘Where are you going?’ I told him. Noticing the accent with which I spoke Russian, he asked me: ‘What is your nationality?’ ‘I am an Albanian,’ I said. The traveller was surprised, but pleased, looked at the door of the carriage, turned to me, and shook my hand warmly, saying: ‘I admire the Albanians’. I was surprised by his stand,” said our officer, “because at this time the fight with the Khrushchevites had begun”. It was the period after the Meeting of 81 parties. “‘Who are you?’ I asked,” related the officer. “‘I am Kirichenko,’ he told me. When he told me his name, I realized who he was,” our officer told us, “and I prepared myself to talk to him, but he straight away said: ‘Shall we play dominoes?’ ‘All right,’ I replied, and he pulled the box of dominoes out of his pocket and we began the game. I quickly understood why he wanted to play dominoes. He wanted to tell me something and to cover his voice with the rattle of the dominoes on the table. And he began: ‘Good for your Party, which exposed Khrushchev. Long live Enver Hoxha! Long live socialist Albania!’ And in this way we continued a very friendly talk, covered by the rattle of the dominoes. While we were talking, other people entered the compartment. He placed the last domino saying: ‘Don’t yield, give Enver my best wishes!’ and took the newspaper and started to read it as if we had never met,” said our officer in conclusion.
Khrushchev and company did everything possible to spread and cultivate their openly revisionist line and their anti-Marxist, putschist actions and methods in all the other communist and workers’ parties. We saw how Khrushchevism began to flourish very quickly in Bulgaria and Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia. The process of large-scale rehabilitations, disguised as the “correction of mistakes made in the past”, was transformed into an unprecedented campaign in all the former countries of people’s democracy. The doors of the prisons were opened everywhere, the chiefs of other parties were competing with each other as to who would be quickest to release the most condemned enemies from the prisons, and who would give them the most positions right up to the head of the party and the state. Every day the newspapers and magazines of these parties published communiqués and reports about this spring of the revisionist mafia; the pages of the press were filled with the speeches of Tito, Ulbricht, and other revisionist chiefs, while “Pravda” and TASS hastened to report these events and to spread them as “advanced examples”.
We saw what was occurring and felt the pressure mounting against us from all sides, but we did not waver a fraction from our course and our line.
This could not fail to anger Tito and company, first of all, because, exalted by the decisions of the 20th Congress and what was occurring in other countries, they expected a cataclysm in Albania, too. The activity of the Titoites who worked in the Yugoslav Embassy in Tirana, against our Party and country, was stepped up.
Taking advantage of our correct behaviour and the facilities we had provided for them to carry out their task, the Yugoslav diplomats in Tirana, on orders and instructions from Belgrade, started to arouse and reactivate their old agents in our country, instructed them and gave them the signal to attack. The attempt to attack the leadership of our Party at the Tirana Conference in April 1956, an attempt which failed, was the work of the Belgrade revisionists but, at the same time, it was also the work of Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites. With their revisionist theses and ideas, the latter were the inspirers of the plot, while the Titoites and their secret agents were the organizers.
When they saw that this plot had failed, the Soviet leaders, who posed as our friends to the death and men of principle, did not fail to make demands and exert pressure on us openly.
On the eve of the 3rd Congress of our Party, which was held at the end of May and the beginning of June 1956, Suslov quite openly demanded that our leadership should “re-examine” and “correct” its line in the past.
“There is nothing for our Party to re-examine in its line,” we told him bluntly. “We have never permitted serious mistakes of principle in our line.
“You should re-examine the case of Koçi Xoxe and his comrades, whom you condemned earlier,” Suslov told us.
“They were and still are traitors and enemies of our Party and people, enemies of the Soviet Union and socialism,” we replied bluntly. “If their trials were reviewed a hundred times, they would be described only as enemies a hundred times. Such was the nature of their activity.”
Then Suslov began to speak about the things that were occurring in the other parties and the Soviet party in regard to looking at this problem with a “more generous”, “more humane” eye.
“This has made a great impression on and has been welcomed by the peoples,” he said. “This is what should occur with you too.”
“If we were to rehabilitate the enemies and traitors, those who wanted to place the country in the chains of a new slavery, our people would stone us,” we told Khrushchev’s ideologist.
When he saw that he was getting nowhere with this, Suslov changed his tack.
“All right,” he said, “since you are convinced they are enemies, that is what they must be. But there is one thing you should do: you should refrain from speaking of their links with the Yugoslavs and should no longer describe them as agents of Belgrade.”
“Here we are speaking of the truth,” we said. “And the truth is that Koçi Xoxe and his collaborators in the plot were downright agents of the Yugoslav revisionists. We have made known world-wide the links of Koçi Xoxe with the Yugoslavs for hostile activities against our Party and country and the great mass of facts which prove this. The Soviet leadership knows them very well. Perhaps you have not had the chance to acquaint yourself with the facts and, since you persist in your opinion, let us present some of them to you.”
Suslov could hardly contain his temper. We calmly listed some of the main facts and finally stressed:
“This is the truth about the links of Koçi Xoxe with the Yugoslav revisionists.”
“Da, da,”4 he repeated impatiently.
“And how can we distort this truth?!” we asked him. “Is it permissible for a party to conceal or distort what has been proved with countless facts, to please this or that person?”
Suslov snorted, “But there is no other way you can repair your relations with Yugoslavia.”
Everything had become more than clear to us. Behind the “fraternal” intervention of Suslov lurked the Khrushchev-Tito deals. The Tito group, which had now gained ground, was certainly demanding as much as possible space, along with economic, military and political advantages. Tito had insisted with Khrushchev that the Titoite traitors such as Koçi Xoxe, Rajk, Kostov, etc., be rehabilitated. While Tito achieved this aim in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, he was quite unable to do so in our country. In those countries the traitors were rehabilitated and the Marxist-Leninist party leaderships were undermined. This was the joint work of Khrushchev and Tito. With our resolute and unwavering stand towards him, we were a thorn in Tito’s flesh. And if the enemies dared to undertake actions against us, we would counteract. Tito had long known this, and Khrushchev knew it and was becoming convinced of it, too. He, of course, was inclined to restrict Tito’s roads and not allow him to graze in the “pastures” which Khrushchev considered his own.
About 15 to 20 days after the 3rd Congress of our Party, in June 1956, I was in Moscow for a consultation, about which I spoke above, in which the leaders of the parties of all the socialist countries took part. Although the purpose of the consultation was to discuss economic problems, Khrushchev, as was his custom, took the opportunity to raise all the other problems.
There, in the presence of all the representatives of the other parties, he admitted with his own mouth the pressure which Tito had exerted on him for the rehabilitation of Koçi Xoxe and other enemies condemned in Albania.
“With Tito,” said Khrushchev among other things, “we talked about the relations of Yugoslavia with the other states. Tito was pleased with the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Bulgarians and the others, but he spoke very angrily about Albania, thumping his fist and stamping his feet. ‘The Albanians are not in order, they are not on the right road,’ Tito told me, ‘they do not recognize the mistakes they have made and have understood nothing from all these things that are taking place’.”
In fact, by repeating Tito’s words and accusations Khrushchev found the opportunity to pour out all the spite and ire he felt against us, because at the congress we did not rehabilitate Koçi Xoxe, “whom Tito described as a great patriot,” stressed Khrushchev.
“When Tito spoke about the Albanian comrades he was trembling with rage, but I opposed him and said to him, ‘These are the internal affairs of the Albanian comrades, and they will know how to solve them,’” said Khrushchev, continuing his “report”, trying to convince us that he had had a great “quarrel” with Tito. However, we were now well aware of the meaning of the never ending kisses and quarrels between these two heralds of modern revisionism.
Up to his neck in treachery, Tito hatched up numerous plots against the socialist countries. However, when Khrushchev betrayed, he strutted like a “peacock” and posed as Khrushchev’s “teacher”. Tito was quite right to demand a great deal from him, and did not hang back in this direction. He aimed to make Khrushchev obey him and act according to his orders. Tito had the backing of American imperialism and world reaction, therefore Khrushchev, for his part, followed the tactic of making approaches to Tito, in order to flatter him and win him over, to embrace him and eventually strangle him. However, he was dealing with Tito, who had his own tactic of making approaches to Khrushchev in order to impose himself on him and not to submit to him, to dictate to him and not to take orders from him, to get the maximum possible unconditional aid and to compel Khrushchev to subjugate all Belgrade’s opponents, first of all, the Party of Labour of Albania.
It is precisely for these reasons that we see many zig-zags in Khrushchev’s line towards Tito—sometimes they got on well, sometimes their relations were embittered, sometimes he attacked and cursed him and at other times he retracted only to criticize him again. This was the result of lack of principle in his political stand. Tito and Khrushchev were two revisionists, two agents of capitalism, who had things in common, but also contradictions, which were expressed in the zig-zags and erratic behaviour of that time, which continue to this day, between Tito and Khrushchev’s heirs.
There was nothing Marxist-Leninist in their actions and stands. They were guided by counter-revolutionary aims and had assumed the leadership of revisionism, which is capitalism in a new form, the enemy of the unity of peoples, the inciter of reactionary nationalism, of the drive towards and establishment of the most ferocious fascist dictatorship which does not permit even the slightest sign of formal bourgeois democracy. Revisionism is the idea and action which leads the turning of a country from socialism back to capitalism, the turning of a communist party into a fascist party, it is the inspirer of ideological chaos, confusion, corruption, repression, arbitrarily, instability and putting the homeland up for auction. This tragedy occurred in the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries. Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites, incited and assisted by American imperialism and world capitalism, created this situation.
1. “Welcome” (Russian in the original).
2. “Maize” (Russian in the original).
3. “Master of ceremonies” (Russian in the original).
4. “Yes, yes” (Russian in the original).
Next: 7. Designing the Empire