ABSTRACT
De-Stalinization surely constitutes the most significant political event of the 1950s in Russia. The success of “tactical de-Stalinization” points unequivocally to the persistance, in the full flush of Khrushchevism, of one of the fundamental characteristics of the totalitarian mentality, that is, its lack of historicist sensibility. It might be said that de-Stalinization is the blend of a propagandistic artifact intended for export, plus a primitive abreaction of guilt craftily shaped for internal consumption. Voluntary and concerted de-Stalinization utilized the death of Stalin as an occasion for abreaction of collective guilt and, at the same time, as a means of propaganda. One of the distinctive features of Stalinism was, consequently, its unconscious rejection of all genuinely dialectical social processes, in flagrant contradiction to its program which remained, in principle, a dialectical one. The Communist International was everywhere dominated by its socialist rival at the beginning of the Stalinist era.
