The New Gospel

(3 of 3)

Follow the Leader. In all of Khrushchev's 47,000 words, there was no mention whatsoever of Joseph Stalin, no mention of the U.N. in all the talk of peace and only three brief references to the Chinese Communists, whose possible "contributions to Marxist-Leninism" go completely ignored. Unlike the declaration put together at last fall's 81-nation Communist Party parley, where the Russians had to compromise with Red China, this time there was little mention of "separate roads to socialism." Says the Moscow program: "The main trail of socialism has been blazed . . . sooner or later all peoples will follow it."

And what is at the end? The organ notes swell up. There will arrive a day of "the noblest and most just morality" once "the magnificent and enduring edifice of socialism" is built. There will be love of the socialist motherhood, "conscientious labor for the good of society—he who does not work, neither shall he eat"; "one for all and all for one"; "man is to man a friend, comrade and brother," and there is "honesty and truthfulness, moral purity, modesty and guilelessness in social and private life," and intellectuals will not be a group apart because all the masses will have come up to their cultural standards.

Khrushchev's final promise was that "the present generation of Soviet people will live under Communism." On that day of the true "classless society," according to Marx, the state is supposed to wither away. Khrushchev makes no such promise. "The party holds," he says, "that the dictatorship of the working class [i.e., party] will cease to be necessary before the state withers away." But "to ensure that the state withers away" completely will require "the final settlement of the contradictions between capitalism and Communism in the world arena in favor of Communism." Shrimps will whistle first, comrades.