ABSTRACT
Nikita Khrushchev is free from that pathological greed of credit that made Joseph Stalin claim credit for everything. Only Khrushchev remains as the sole reporter on the party statutes, from which statutes a seven-line quotation constitutes the only words immortal enough to get into the pages of history. Khrushchev has names to eliminate from honorific lists whom Stalin delighted to honor as extensions of him. In despair at the transitoriness of all the individual efforts to celebrate the power and glory of the party and its leaders, Stalin ordered his lieutenant, W. Knorin, to assemble a "collective" of Red professors to write the definitive party history. Stalin's Short Course, though virtually unreadable, could be memorized by the faithful, and indeed, as a life insurance policy, had to be. Stalin's successor could not destroy the link which puts him in the line of apostolic succession.
