Bravely, one man rose, a foreman obviously preselected by the workers. He told the party official that he had been released from a Siberian prison only six months before, one of tens of thousands similarly liberated from unjust imprisonment and trying to return to a normal life in post-Stalin Russia. For the last three months the plant manager had given only 200 to 300 rubles to his workers and kept the rest, measured in thousands, for himself. The foreman stated that the men would not go back to work until the manager was fired. That was their bottom line.
At first the party official described the foreman’s demand as “outrageous,” but then, after a few minutes, promised the workers that he would “consider” the foreman’s demand. The foreman rose once again and in firm tones repeated his earlier demand for the manager’s ouster. Otherwise, he warned, the workers would not go back to work.
Later that afternoon the manager was fired. The following morning the workers returned to the plant and resumed working. The strike, never called by that term, was over. For the next three weeks worker salaries shot up two to three times above the norm.
For the first time in more than twenty years, members of the Soviet working class had stood up to established power, demanding that a plant manager be fired. In this case, the party establishment caved to their demands. Before Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, it’s safe to say that such a “strike” would have been unimaginable.
Change seemed to be everywhere in the fall of 1956. On some days it looked as though the whole system of communist rule was collapsing. The students were in rebellion. Workers were summoning up the courage to question party dogma, and even, apparently, to strike. Georgians, still loyal to their now officially disgraced Stalin, a hero in their eyes, were literally up in arms in bloody protest against Moscow’s policy of de-Stalinization. And now, throughout Eastern Europe, Moscow’s writ was being challenged and its domination questioned by restless satellites eager for greater autonomy and ready to challenge Moscow if necessary. Much to their surprise, Russians learned during the Hungarian uprising that, far from being the saviors of Eastern Europe, as Pravda had been trumpeting for years, they were actually seen as the oppressors of Eastern Europe.
Hungary had jolted the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, like an electric shock shooting through the entire nervous system. It raised profound questions, often forcing judgments without adequate time for reflection. One student told me that it had a “major impact on all of us.” One casualty was his lifelong commitment to communism—it had been a central tenet of his upbringing, but now his commitment seemed to be withering on the vine. What was he to believe? Another student, Maria, a young woman I met at the History Institute, had a totally different take. “We may not be able to crush the ‘fascists’ in Hungary tomorrow, or the day after,” she said, using the Kremlin’s word for the rebels, “but we will. We will, eventually.” Her faith in communism seemed firm.
We had met after a lecture at the institute. Maria was intelligent, well-read, talkative, and opinionated—on almost every subject. We discussed the Khrushchev speech. “How could he be so cocky, so certain that socialism would triumph over capitalism?” I asked.
“He was not cocky,” Maria said. “He was simply stating the truth. He was repeating what all of us communists know. Socialism will follow capitalism. It’s the law of social and historical development.”
“But there is no such law,” I said. “Anything can happen between today and tomorrow. You know that. I think it was Herzen who said, ‘History follows no libretto.’ And he was one of your own.” Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century democrat who had fought czarism with his elegant pen, mostly from Western Europe. Had he remained in Russia, he would have been arrested and silenced.
Maria tried not to be condescending, but her explanation was patronizing and simplistic, and her approach to me was that of a mother to a six-year-old. “There are laws of social development,” she began. “We can do nothing about them. They just exist. Even if I thought communism was bad, and wanted to fight against it, I’d be fighting against something that was inevitable. And that’s just stupid, isn’t it? Communism is the inevitable result of history. It is the culmination of historical development. It will happen, whether we like it or not.”
For a moment I thought I had found a hole in her argument about inevitability. “If capitalism inevitably follows feudalism, and communism inevitably follows capitalism, and if everything in history is constantly in flux, then how do we know that another social system won’t follow communism, another system that is better than communism?”
I saw a flicker of doubt rush through her eyes, but she recovered quickly. “I forgot to mention the ‘class struggle,’” she said, smiling. “You see, in all other systems of government, there is a class struggle. It is never-ending, like workers fighting bosses. But under communism, or socialism, there are no longer any antagonistic classes. They are all harmonious. The class struggle is over, and communism is supreme.” She folded her arms across her chest, a warrior after a triumph. “You do understand now, don’t you?” she asked.
In frustration, I threw both hands in the air. “Maria, what can I say? You think you have discovered the single key to history. No such thing exists. There will always be change. Please, you must open your mind to change.”
As I became more exasperated, she became more calm. “Change there will be,” she said softly. “But at the end we will surely have communism, and with communism, an end to class struggle. It is simply a law of historical development, which will all end with the arrival of communism.”
Sensing that our conversation had just come to an abrupt end, Maria returned to the book she was reading. As I left I looked over her shoulder. She was reading a Russian translation of Keats.
If Maria could believe in communism, then surely her leader could as well; and on November 18, in a speech at the Polish embassy designed to reassure his East European allies that Russia had no interest in military solutions to festering quarrels in Eastern Europe, Hungary notwithstanding, Khrushchev strongly supported the notion of “peaceful coexistence”—and not just among socialist countries. He also had his Western adversaries in mind, principally the United States. He wanted them to understand that his adventure in Hungary did not shake his belief in “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West.
One paragraph in Pravda’s edited translation of the speech, published the next morning, caught Anna Holdcroft’s eye, and I translated it for the embassy. It could be seen as a personal message to President Eisenhower. “There can be no question of whether or not peaceful coexistence of the various states is needed,” he said. “Coexistence is an acknowledged fact which we can see before us. We say to the representatives of the capitalist countries: if you wish, you can come and visit us; if you don’t wish, you need not come. This will not grieve us particularly. But it is essential for us to coexist. The fact that the Great October Socialist Revolution was carried out, that the Soviet Union and the whole system of states of the socialist camp exist, does not depend on you, after all. Such is the law of social development. Furthermore, this law is operating in our favor. We Leninists are convinced that our social system, socialism, will be victorious over capitalism in the long run. Such is the logic of the historical development of mankind.”