The attack on Stalin has produced disbelief, uncertainty, confusion, embarrassment, and anger.
US INTELLIGENCE REPORT, 30 March 1956
On 25 April 1956 Harper & Bros, the prestigious New York publishing house, released The Long Walk, the purportedly true story of an audacious escape from the Soviet Gulag.1 The book was written by Slavomir Rawicz, a former Polish army officer who, in November 1939, had been captured by the Russians and accused of espionage. After a harsh interrogation by the secret police and an obligatory show trial, he had been sentenced to twenty-five years’ forced labour. In his memoir, Rawicz provided a detailed description of the horrors of the Soviet police state, including the brutal beatings and torture that he had experienced: on one occasion, molten tar was poured onto his hand in an attempt to extract a confession; on another, for two days guards took turns to tap the same spot on the crown of his head every two seconds. Rawicz was also forced to endure six months in the kishka (which translates as ‘the intestine’ or ‘the gut’):
A chimney-like cell into which one stepped down about a foot below the level of the corridor outside. Inside a man could stand and no more. The walls pressed round like a stone coffin. Twenty feet above there was the diffused light from some small, out-of-sight window . . . we excreted standing up and stood in our own filth. The kishka was never cleaned.2
After an evocative account of life in a Siberian labour camp, Rawicz described how, in April 1941, he and six companions made their daring break for freedom. Having successfully tunnelled under the wire fence of Camp 303, near Yakutsk (about four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle), the escapees spent almost a year walking four thousand miles before reaching the safety of British India. Their journey took them through some of the most demanding and inhospitable terrain imaginable, including the blistering heat of the Gobi desert and the treacherous mountain passes of the Himalayas.3 Three of the party never made it. Rawicz’s remarkable book was one of the publishing sensations of the year. Writing in the Manchester Guardian, R. L. West declared: ‘I have read no modern tale of adventure that can compare with this, either for excitement or for the inspiration of its dogged heroism.’4 Meanwhile, the New York Times described Rawicz as a man ‘with something of a poet’s sensibility – but . . . a poet with steel in his soul’.5 The Long Walk was not just a terrific read. Its meditation on the horrors of Stalinist oppression and emphasis on man’s innate yearning for freedom gave it a powerful contemporary resonance – particularly in light of developments in Eastern Europe, where, in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, an oppressed citizenry sought to push back against the constraints on their own liberty.
On 22 March Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, told a meeting of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin posed a particular problem for Communists in Eastern Europe. ‘What’, he asked, ‘would the leadership in the satellite states now do?’ – since, as he pointed out, ‘These men were almost all the creatures of Stalin.’6 Dulles’s question was a pertinent one. Not only did the Communist regimes in places like East Germany, Poland and Hungary owe their very existence to the USSR (which had furnished them with critical military and political support after ‘liberation’ by the Red Army during 1944–5), their leaders had demonstrated tremendous personal loyalty to Stalin. Moreover, in order to solidify Communist rule they had embraced Stalinist methods – including agricultural collectivisation, the nationalisation of businesses, factories, mines and banks, a relentless focus on rapid industrialisation, central planning, press censorship, attacks on the church and civil society, the purging of rivals and the use of police terror. A number, including Poland’s Bolesław Bierut and Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi, had even developed their own personality cults that aped that of the Soviet dictator. In the two weeks leading up to Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday in 1951, for example, half a million Hungarians attended special evening classes to study the heroic life of their leader, while a similar number participated in public meetings or reading groups dedicated to the same theme. Meanwhile, the walls of Hungary’s classrooms, shops, factories, offices, public buildings, libraries, cinemas and hospitals were adorned with portraits of ‘the people’s wise father’.7
As news of the ‘secret speech’ began to filter out across the Eastern Bloc, Party activists, workers, students and others responded by seeking more information, asking probing questions and – tentatively at first – demanding change. At the Šttí paper mill in Czechoslovakia, for instance, Party activists ‘wanted to know why the facts were only disclosed now’, three years after the dictator’s death (they were told that it had taken this long ‘to “investigate” the case of Comrade Stalin’).8 At the large Skoda plant in Pilsen, a Party official was unable to respond to workers’ demands that he ‘comment and explain the debunking of Stalin’, only promising that they would receive answers ‘after two weeks or so . . .’9 In Hungary, meanwhile, many citizens praised the ‘condemnation of Stalin’, while others seized on the chance to ‘sneer at Communism and the Communists’.10 It was in Poland, though, where the full force of the speech was felt most immediately.11
Poland’s Bolesław Bierut, one of Europe’s ‘little Stalins’, was – literally – finished off by the ‘secret speech’, which was read to him as he lay in a Moscow hospital, having been taken ill with pneumonia during the Twentieth Party Congress. The shock of Khrushchev’s denunciations caused a heart attack, from which the Polish leader never recovered; he finally succumbed on 12 March.12 His successor, Edward Ochab, described Khrushchev’s speech as ‘like being hit over the head with a hammer’, but he believed that the Polish leadership ‘had no right to conceal what had happened at the Twentieth Congress’ or try to ‘pass over’ Stalin’s crimes in ‘deathly silence’. Although aware that ‘complications would inevitably ensue’, he judged it better to ‘tell the bitter truth the way we saw it’ and hope that, after the Party and society had come to terms with the shock, they would ‘emerge into clear waters’.13 Ochab and some of his more liberal-minded colleagues also viewed Khrushchev’s demolition of Stalin and Bierut’s death as a golden opportunity to burnish their own reformist credentials, and thereby renew public support for the Party.14
On 21 March, the leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) launched a mass campaign to familiarise the party aktyw (activists) with Khrushchev’s speech, distributing fifteen thousand copies of a Polish translation of the text.15 During late March and April thousands of meetings took place across the country, which were open to non-Party members as well, to enable the speech to be read out and discussed. At these gatherings, which often lasted for several hours, Poles expressed their confusion and doubts.16 For many, the ‘demolition’ of Stalin’s image and reputation was a major shock. As one previously loyal Polish Communist put it: ‘I feel lost and betrayed; I believed in Stalin for so many years. I am in despair, for we have been turned into idiots and dummies. It turns out that everything that happened before was wrong and false. I no longer believe anything.’17
For others, open discussion of the ‘secret speech’ presented an opportunity to ask pointed questions and engage in vigorous debate.18 At a ‘heated’ meeting at the Szczecin Technical University on 26 March, for instance, Party activists demanded a ‘guarantee against a reversion to Stalinist methods’ and criticised Soviet control of the Polish armed forces (the defence minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky, was a marshal of the Soviet Union). When activists began to question the legitimacy of Poland’s own Communist leadership, the meeting quickly spun ‘out of control’. It eventually broke up at 2 a.m. Workers at the Gdask shipyard, meanwhile, poured scorn on Khrushchev’s explanation that Stalin had acted alone, asking, ‘How was he able to decide everything? Where were other members of the Politburo?’ Others voiced nationalist concerns by describing the PZPR’s heavy reliance on Moscow as a violation of Poland’s sovereignty.19 The prime minister, Józef Cyrankiewicz, even found himself heckled at a meeting of Polish architects.20 Alarmed by the scale of dissent, the Central Committee restricted access to the full text of Khrushchev’s speech to Party functionaries, but by then it was too late. Unofficial copies changed hands on the black market for significant sums.21 As one young Pole put it, ‘The people have regained confidence and are not afraid to speak up to the authorities when they think that they are right.’22
Throughout the spring Poland was consumed by what British diplomats characterised as an ‘orgy of public criticism’.23 Nowhere was this more evident than in the press (Polish newspapers were viewed as so subversive that the authorities in Hungary and Czechoslovakia quickly banned them).24 Articles appeared criticising the secret police and condemning the ‘distortions’ of Stalinism that had ‘demoralised’ and ‘humiliated’ the people. There was also open discussion of the persecution of those who had served in the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), which had led Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation and had subsequently been denounced by the Communists.25 As the spring wore on, bold demands for reforms to the entire political and economic system came to the fore. For example, in the 15 April edition of Po prostu (‘Frankly Speaking’*) – a leading weekly for ‘students and young intelligentsia’, with a print run of 150,000 – Jerzy Urban argued for a much greater role for ‘the people’. ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat’, he explained, ‘does not exist when it is ruled by professional functionaries in the name of the proletariat. The people’s democracy does not exist without actual rule by the people . . .’ Other writers complained that in Poland, rather than the people’s rule, there had instead been a ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’, or a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’.26
There was evidence of dissent elsewhere, too. During the May Day parade in Łód, some students held aloft banners proclaiming ‘Down with tyrants!’ and ‘Down with despots!’ Later that month, during the annual student festival in Kraków, hundreds marched through the streets, demanding changes to the constitution. Tram windows were smashed, and some students even attempted to break into the radio station in an effort to broadcast jazz music.27 Across Poland, discussion clubs, theatre groups and satirical reviews blossomed, and writers and artists spoke out.28 Jan Kott, a leading theatre critic and intellectual, lamented the fact that ‘whenever the facts stood in the way, the facts were changed. If genuine heroes were obstacles, they evaporated’, while the poet Antoni Słonimski charged Communist apparatchiks with having ‘warped’ the nation’s cultural life by zealously imposing the Party line on all forms of art.29
At the secret police headquarters in Warsaw, reports started to trickle in that citizens were refusing to pass on information, and even previously reliable informants would no longer co-operate. Some Poles were expressing their hostility openly. With the security services subject to harsh criticism for their abuse of power (including torture, fabrication and the imprisonment of thousands of innocent people), and undermined by the amnesty granted to thousands of political prisoners, morale plummeted.30 One young Pole, a technician from a small town in the south of the country, gloated that the security officers were ‘going around as if they were castrated’.31 From the Party rank and file, meanwhile, came demands for greater transparency and democratic elections for all Party posts, and, despite the PZPR’s sustained campaign to marginalise the Catholic Church, thousands of devout Poles took advantage of the more relaxed atmosphere to celebrate holy days, press for religious freedoms and display Christian symbols openly.32
As peasants vented their frustration with agricultural co-operatives, collective farms and harsh production quotas, a dangerous combination of coal shortages, discontent over living standards and low wages fed discontent among Poland’s industrial workers. The Central Committee reported that there was ‘much bitterness’ and ‘cursing of the people’s government’, with many blaming the Party for their predicament.33 Workers also used the official criticism of the ‘cult of personality’ as a way of challenging factory officials, who were accused of aloofness, dictatorial behaviour and rank incompetence.34 The difficulties faced by ordinary Poles were exacerbated by the existence of so-called ‘yellow curtain’ shops: reserved for senior Party, military and security officials, they contained goods that most citizens could only dream about. In this more liberal climate, tram passengers were overheard making quips about ‘shops for the cult of personality’, or making highly charged comparisons with the ‘Meinl’ stores that, during the Nazi occupation, had been ‘for Germans only’.35 That April, Po prostu carried a sharply satirical article that described a woman, dressed in a mink coat, exiting a military car to purchase goods from a shop that was ‘stuffed with meat and other luxuries’ as, across the street, a crowd of women were forced to queue in the bitter cold outside a municipal shop, whose shelves were virtually bare.36
For many Poles, their hopes of a better future – within a reformed and genuinely Polish version of socialism – came to centre on the figure of Władysław Gomułka, the former general secretary of the PZPR. Gomułka had been demoted in 1948 and, three years later, arrested and imprisoned on charges of ‘rightist-nationalist’ deviation. A supporter of Tito, Gomułka had broken further with Stalinist orthodoxy by urging the encouragement of private industrial enterprise and opposing agricultural collectivisation. Although he had been released from prison at the end of 1954, this was only made public in April 1956 (though it had, apparently, been common knowledge for many months).37 But while Ochab announced that Gomułka’s conviction for espionage and subversion had been a product of an ‘atmosphere of espionage mania’, he maintained that his expulsion from the Party had been justified due to his embrace of ‘false ideological conceptions’.38 Nevertheless, calls for Gomułka’s full rehabilitation, and even his return to power, would prove unstoppable. As an anonymous letter, mailed to Trybuna Ludu (‘The People’s Tribune’), put it:
The nation does not want Bolshevism, it doesn’t want the Sovietisation . . . of Poland. We want to walk on our own Polish road . . . Comrade Wiesław [Gomułka] must be rehabilitated and paid the honour and respect he is owed . . . Down with Bolshevism and Moscow! Long live an independent and truly people’s Poland.39
The reaction to the ‘secret speech’ elsewhere in Eastern Europe was, for the time being at least, rather less dramatic. Walter Ulbricht faced relatively little opposition in East Germany, where (until the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961) critics of the regime were able to flee to the West – 316,000 did so in 1956 – and where the failed workers’ uprising of June 1953 served as a powerful deterrent; Soviet tanks had brutally crushed the million-strong revolt.40 Elsewhere, though, there was plenty of confusion, anger and uncertainty, as well as outright opposition to the Communist authorities.41 On 16 April Bulgaria’s ‘little Stalin’, Vulko Chervenkov, tendered his resignation as prime minister. Just ten days before he had been censured for having encouraged his own ‘cult of personality’. Although he had tried to remain in office, Moscow, eager to improve its relations with Yugoslavia, withdrew its support for a man who had been one of Tito’s fiercest critics (they also ensured that a Yugoslav delegation was in Sofia to witness Chervenkov’s humiliation first-hand).42
Meanwhile Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi, who had taken considerable pride in his sobriquet of ‘Stalin’s best pupil’, was furious, warning the future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, ‘You shouldn’t have hurried. What you have done at your Congress is a disaster, I don’t know what will come of it, either in your country or in mine.’43 On returning from Moscow, Rákosi prepared to ride out the storm. When briefing the Hungarian Central Committee about the Twentieth Party Congress, he chose to emphasis his own (newly discovered) enthusiasm for ‘Leninist collective leadership’, and passed quickly over Khrushchev’s sustained critique of the ‘cult of personality’.44 The comrades duly passed a resolution which, while acknowledging that tweaks to economic policy might be required and that more could be done to ‘democratise’ the Party, affirmed that their overall approach was fundamentally ‘correct’.45 They also made a point of condemning the ‘right-wing distortions’ that, they claimed, had been introduced during Imre Nagy’s short-lived premiership (from June 1953 to April 1955). During this period, as part of the so-called ‘New Course’, Nagy had attempted to switch the emphasis away from rapid industrialisation and onto living standards, announced an end to the forced collectivisation of agriculture and encouraged a more liberal approach to cultural and press freedoms.46 Rákosi also attempted to keep news of the ‘secret speech’ from the Hungarian people. When details began to leak out (through the press, the radio and word of mouth), he sanctioned the publication of a heavily redacted edition, widely ridiculed on the street as a ‘children’s version’.47 None of this prevented Party organisations from being inundated with requests to implement the new line from Moscow, as well as complaints about living standards, bureaucracy and press censorship.48
On 28 March, during a Party meeting in the northern city of Eger, Rákosi – under mounting pressure – announced the posthumous rehabilitation of László Rajk, the former interior minister. Rajk, who had helped found the Államvédelmi Osztálya (ÁVO, later reorganised as the ÁVH), Hungary’s secret police, had been one of Rákosi’s most powerful rivals. In October 1949 he was executed, following a brutal interrogation and show trial, as an imperialist, a Titoist spy and an enemy of socialism. Now, Rákosi explained, it had become clear that these charges had been fabricated. In a move that cost him the support of senior security officers, he sought to pin the blame on Gábor Péter, the former chief of the secret police.49 Rákosi’s personal authority continued to drain away. On 30 March, at a meeting of the Writers’ Association, one young literary critic accused the Hungarian leader of being a ‘Judas whose hands are stained with blood’.50 Just a few days earlier, at a meeting of Party activists in Budapest’s Thirteenth District, György Litván, a twenty-seven-year-old history teacher, turned to the platform where Rákosi was sitting and told him directly: ‘Comrade Rákosi, the Hungarian people no longer trust you.’ That Litván was not arrested, never mind thrown in jail or even hanged, spoke volumes.51 Indeed, many ordinary Hungarians were openly disparaging their once-feared leader as ‘the baldheaded murderer’.52 On 18 May, in a speech in Budapest, Rákosi was forced to admit to past mistakes, and accepted some culpability for Rajk’s execution. But he continued to warn against ‘rightist views’, and sought to blame recent dissent on domestic reactionaries, internal enemies and Western propaganda.53 With many of his own Party activists now calling openly for ‘the trial of the assassins’, he appeared to be fighting a losing battle.54
Two days after Rákosi’s partial atonement, the Majáles – a student carnival celebrating the arrival of spring – was staged in Prague for the first time since 1948. The Czechoslovak Union of Youth (CSM), a Communist organisation, had been pushing hard for the festival’s reinstatement as part of an effort to boost their own credibility with students, and the authorities eventually relented. That afternoon, under cloudy skies, the city’s population lined the two-mile parade route to cheer some five thousand students and admire the colourful floats. The parade, led by its ‘King’ and ‘Queen’, set off from the Old Town Square just after 1 p.m. Many of those taking part had donned fancy dress and masks and were carrying placards and banners. They headed down Paížská Street, Prague’s most fashionable boulevard, before making their way past the Dvo
ák Embankment, on the right bank of the Vltava River. As the students headed over the beautiful
ech
v Bridge, with its Art Nouveau styling, a giant, seventeen-thousand-tonne marble monument to Stalin – which had been unveiled just a year earlier – loomed ominously over them. Once on the left bank of the river, the parade entered the Julius Fu
ík Park of Culture and Rest for a post-parade party.55
The Majáles, whose origins could be traced back to the Middle Ages, was traditionally used to send up professors, celebrate student life and carry out lighthearted pranks.56 But this year it had a distinctly political edge. Sydney Gruson of the New York Times described how one group of students, wearing top hats and beautiful silks, marched behind a placard labelled ‘The Theory’; they were followed by a second group, dressed in rags, who held aloft a banner reading ‘The Practice’. The lack of press freedom was lampooned by a dozen or so ‘gagged and blindfolded boys and girls’, representing the editor and reporters of Mladá Frontá, the CSM’s own newspaper.57 A series of placards, meanwhile, provocatively referred to the show trials of 1952: ‘What is better?’ ‘That the small criminals are hanged and the great ones go scot free?’ ‘Or that the great ones are hanged and the small ones take their place?’58 There was also some barbed commentary on the new fashion for blaming all of Communism’s woes on the ‘cult of personality’: one student, carrying a poster proclaiming ‘Small cult’, was followed by two shorter students who held posters that read ‘Smaller cult’ and ‘Tiny cult’.59 The students also shouted out slogans including: ‘Nowadays we eat less than before, but we do it with more pleasure!’ and ‘Don’t build students’ dormitories, but build monuments for the glorification of personalities!’ By all accounts the crowds seemed to lap up the anti-establishment mood: when a group of law students, loyal to the regime, passed by with a placard reading ‘We thank the working class for having an opportunity to attend the university’, it was widely presumed to be ironic, and drew laughter and sarcastic cheering.60
This very public display of dissent, while highly unusual, was not exactly unexpected. According to one observer, just a week earlier students in Bratislava had taken ‘even more liberties’. Their Majáles parade had featured one group weighed down with chains, following behind a coffin labelled ‘Academic freedom’; another contingent marched with a banner proclaiming: ‘The principle stands firm, but the house tumbles down!’ Most provocative of all, Soviet soldiers were ridiculed as ignorant drunkards.61 Students had, in fact, been holding noisy meetings in universities across Czechoslovakia, venting their criticisms of living conditions, the quality of the curriculum and constraints on academic (and other) freedoms.62 The most important of these gatherings took place on the evening of 26 April, when hundreds of students at Prague’s Charles University attended a meeting of the local CSM chapter. The atmosphere inside the packed lecture hall was electric as, over the course of several hours, a series of resolutions were debated and then endorsed unanimously. Along with a call for comprehensive reforms to the education system and curriculum, the students demanded greater worker involvement in economic decision-making, insisted that Party organisations and leading officials be ‘subject to full scrutiny and control from below’, and urged that the National Assembly be made more accountable to the people. Calling for a climate in which discussion and criticism would be actively encouraged, the students also demanded greater press freedoms, access to foreign newspapers, an end to the jamming of foreign radio broadcasts, and the easing of travel restrictions. They also decried the continued existence of an official ‘index’ of prohibited books. Criticising the ‘practice of mechanically adopting the Soviet experience’ (which had, they asserted, caused ‘great harm’ to the country), they further requested that the ‘Soviet national anthem and the Soviet flag be present only on occasions which directly involve the Soviet Union’. Perhaps most daring of all, the students directly attacked the regime and its leader, Antonín Novotný, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KS): they disputed his insistence that the Central Committee was properly the ultimate source of authority, demanded a full and transparent investigation into the 1952 show trials and called for measures to guarantee that such gross violations of justice would ‘not be repeated’.63 A partial report of the meeting was published in Mladá Frontá on 28 April, and copies of the resolution were mailed to a range of newspapers, Party organisations and government ministers. In the absence of any official response, and after failing to persuade any newspaper to publish the resolution, some of the students took it upon themselves to spread the word; within days, similar resolutions were adopted at a number of universities, including in Ostrava and Plze
.64 The regime, though, stood firm. On 12 May the minister of education even told a student delegation that they should count themselves lucky not to have been beaten up by the police, and four days later motorised units were used to snuff out student protests in Bratislava.65
Faced with growing dissent not just from students, but also from writers, academics, artists, rank-and-file Party members and some workers, the leadership held fast.66 Their resolve strengthened by the alarming reports emerging from Poland and Hungary, they sought to pin the blame for any internal discontent on ‘enemy agents’, ‘criminals’ and ‘scum’ who, they claimed, were being smuggled into Czechoslovakia from military bases in West Germany.67 This uncompromising approach had been adopted in the immediate aftermath of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, which saw the leadership in Prague stress that the more liberal line from Moscow should not be taken too far. They had warned, for instance, that ‘Our enemies would like to persuade us that with the lessening of international tension, peaceful co-existence should also find its expression in the field of ideology. They would like us to demobilise ideologically so that they could defeat us.’68
Novotný had also made it perfectly clear that the Central Committee’s hold on power was not up for discussion: it ‘decides and must decide the most important questions of the Party and state’.69 This conservative line continued to be applied. At the KS’s annual congress on 11 June, for instance, Novotný declared that the comrades’ approach to building socialism did not need to be altered ‘in any way’, warned newspapers against flirting with ‘incorrect ideas’ and condemned student reactionaries.70 In his own speech four days later, the Czechoslovak vice premier denounced student protestors for using ‘anti-Stalinism’ as cover for their efforts to undermine the Communist system: ‘It begins with a demand for freedom of the press’, he said, ‘and ends with freedom for capitalism.’71 Shortly after the congress had concluded, the education minister tightened the rules permitting children of the ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ to attend universities: students from such backgrounds, he explained, were behind the ‘most aggressive and most unjustified’ of the recent ‘provocations’.72
Amidst rumours of mass arrests and expulsions, and with the troublesome Charles University chapter of the CSM disbanded ‘temporarily’, the student rebellion had been subdued by the start of the summer holidays.73 In proving more capable than their Polish and Hungarian counterparts at holding the line, Czechoslovakia’s leaders benefited from the fact that Communism enjoyed a far greater degree of public support there than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc (the KS had won 38 per cent of the popular vote in the free elections of 1946 – a contest in which the total vote for Socialist parties reached 69 per cent; in contrast, the Hungarian Communists had managed just 17 per cent). Czechoslovakians also enjoyed a higher standard of living than was the case in many of the other ‘people’s democracies’. Moreover, since he had come to power shortly after Stalin’s death, Novotný was better able than many of his peers to claim that his leadership marked a genuine break from Stalinism.74
While it caused a series of crises for Communist parties in the West, outside of the Soviet bloc the repercussions of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ were felt most strongly in the People’s Republic of China.75 The Chinese had neither been consulted in advance of the speech nor invited to listen to it at the Twentieth Party Congress. Although China’s leader, Mao Zedong, had had a number of run-ins with the Soviet dictator, he nevertheless viewed Khrushchev’s denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ as an attack on his own authority (reportedly, he never forgave Khrushchev for the assault on Stalin).76 In the immediate aftermath of the ‘secret speech’, then, Mao sought to differentiate his own leadership style from that of Stalin. And in April, during a keynote speech, the founder of the People’s Republic claimed that, while a certain level of discipline was necessary, if it was too rigid, ‘initiative will be stifled’. Mao therefore called on the Chinese Communist Party to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend’.77 China appeared to be on the threshold of an exciting new era of cultural, intellectual and political reform.
* Po prostu is hard to translate literally: ‘Saying it Straight’ or ‘Saying it Simply’ are good alternatives.
A triumphant Kwame Nkrumah, following London’s announcement that the Gold Coast was to become independent.
© Bettmann/CORBIS