ABSTRACT
After Milan, the “end of ideology” prompted deep anxieties within the Congress over what new premise could keep its disparate participants together. “In our rejection of the ideologies we must study what can be salvaged from them, and what in them should be kept alive,” and in formulations that “will do justice to the situations of the new countries of Asia and Africa and South America,” Shils proposed just after Milan.1 Josselson believed “[i]t is perhaps the truest function of the Congress to become the organizing center for the worldwide discussion of the great moral and intellectual issues of our time.”2 But neither Josselson nor anyone else had a clear or concrete program for doing so. What held the Congress together, at least in the short term, was the sense of being proven correct. After Milan, the “end of ideology” looked like an increasingly apt description of events behind the Iron Curtain as much as in the West. The growing pace of the thaw, and accompanying signs that Communism was no longer credible even behind the Iron Curtain, seemed, for a time, to augur the end of Communist regimes as well. On February 25, 1956, at the end of the first Party Conference since Stalin’s death, Khrushchev convened an impromptu secret session. For four hours he enumerated Stalin’s crimes: torture, extracting false confessions, mass executions, and the destruction of Soviet agriculture. Stalin, Khrushchev proclaimed, had been a tyrant, a megalomaniac, and a coward. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was no secret for long. Within a month, practically every Party cell in Poland had read it. By April, the CIA had it, and by June, the entire speech ran on the front page of the New York Times. Khrushchev wanted a partial break with the past to assert his own leadership; the speech, he belatedly realized, had gone too far. By late June, after thousands of Georgians took to the streets to denounce him and lay thousands of flowers at the Stalin memorial in Tbilisi, Khrushchev’s speech was “revised” to only chastise Stalin mildly.3 It was too late to curb its impact. In Poland that spring, Party members rehabilitated victims, released prisoners, and denounced the regime’s favored writers as craven ideologues.4 In Hungary, Stalin Prize-winner Tamas Aczel published a story deriding the dachas and decadent lifestyles of the Party’s leaders. The Literary Gazette ceased printing propagandistic literature, becoming such a best-
issue arrived.5 Alexander Fadeyev, who had chaired virtually every Soviet front congress since the war, killed himself after official demotions.6 In late June, workers in economically depressed Poznan, Poland, rebelled against the state leadership, demanding better wages and sparking confrontations across the country.7 In September, Julius Hay, chairman of the Hungarian Writers’ Association, proclaimed, “The best Communist writers have decided – after many troubles, grave errors, and bitter spiritual struggles – that never again, under any conditions whatever, will they write lies in the future.”8 Within the Congress, these developments seemed like further validation: even intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain now proclaimed that Communism really was a flawed creed, as the Congress had long maintained. “Terror is now simply terror – nothing more, nothing ‘higher,’ ” Kristol wrote in an editorial, and “this demythologization, and its inevitable if still inscrutable consequences, is what we wanted to happen; and that this, moreover, is what we should have expected to happen, had we real confidence in our own ideals and ideas.”9
