Nine months of one year

Exhibitions for the anniversary of the XX Congress of the CPSU

An idle question: does it make sense to measure Soviet history by party congresses? Did they have any real meaning? Was the 20th Congress, in particular, such a key and turning point event for the country? Yes - due to Khrushchev’s report “On the cult of personality and its consequences”, which then began rehabilitation. No - the report was secret, the country learned about it much later, and it was half-truth, and the other half, therefore, a lie. What actually happened then, half a century ago: the beginning of the end of Soviet totalitarianism or a kind of Botox injection that allowed the regime to save face for another three decades?

Be that as it may, the anniversary of the 20th Congress is celebrated by two exhibitions at once, a large archival one and a more compact one in the Historical Museum. The second is called “Thaw” and represents something touchingly nostalgic: gifts for the congress, rehabilitation, virgin lands, new buildings, a satellite, photographs in which everyone is smiling. And the corn ventures look sweetly naive. Khrushchev with his family, Khrushchev in America, Khrushchev and Gagarin, Khrushchev’s blouse, and finally a ceremonial portrait of Khrushchev at a (completely empty) desk in the Kremlin. The restrained apotheosis of Nikita Sergeevich. Perhaps unintentional. It’s just that Soviet things and images carry such a strong propaganda message that, when presented on their own, they demonstrate it.

In this regard, the exhibition in the Hall of Federal Archives is structured and balanced more seriously and more rigidly. No nostalgia, no tenderness. Not that story.

So, the congress of the CPSU took place. Everything is as it should be: stands, mandates in red, greetings from pioneers, food orders, serious deputies at meetings and beaming smiles during breaks; guests from fraternal communist parties (amusing two lists: foreign communist parties, delegations from which are invited to the congress, and communist parties that are not invited - it is emphasized in the title of the document). Stupid gifts for the congress: “a box made of postcards” - from a Soviet worker, a souvenir barrel - from the Bulgarians, a rag doll - from Portuguese workers; metal panels with a clumsily scratched design “Fraternization of an Israeli soldier with an Arab” - from Israel; from the communists of Mexico - a huge wooden dish, where Lenin and Stalin flaunt on top of the national ornament, but the ornament fails, in the core of the dish, right between the two leaders, revealing a creepy grinning Aztec muzzle, with a toothy tongue sticking out, in general, the writer Pelevin can rest.

Behind the scenes of the congress there was a harsh rat race around Khrushchev's report. The report was closed, and it was announced at the last moment. There is nothing like this in the preparatory documents on the agenda. But the possibility of delegates visiting the Stalin House Museum is being discussed, but it needs to be completed quickly. Unsuspecting domestic and foreign workers send gifts with paired portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Although the first cracks appeared in the lists of invitees: old Bolsheviks were invited to the congress, and some of them had recently left the camps. The exhibition is unobtrusive, but creates this feeling of a double layer of events: behind the official, ceremonial events, the tense, sharp, hidden appears. Breaking through with the report “On the Cult of Personality.”

The design of the exhibition, which created an accurate and effective visualization of its concept, should be considered a special success. The main hall is designed in two colors, red niches of display windows are in gray false walls. Gray with red is a heavy combination, but due to the proportions of the hall and the movement of newsreels on a series of monitors interspersing display cases, it does not look oppressive. The monotony of documents and photographs is enlivened by relevant objects, attributes of a solid Soviet office of the fifties - a lamp with green glass, a typewriter, pens, pencils, a terribly clumsy hole punch; A teletype machine was attached to the welcoming telegrams to the congress. The finality and completeness of the hall is given by the number “XX” lined up in the middle, taller than human height (on the back are enlarged photocopies of a draft of Khrushchev’s report). It simultaneously resembles a memorial sign, a monument (tombstone?), and hypertrophied anti-tank hedgehogs, and something else, significant and joyless.

So, in the first hall there is a party congress. An explosion of a report on the cult of personality, alarmed, excited, frightened notes from the audience, spreading in circles of commotion throughout the fraternal communist parties. What should they do now, Torez, Tolyatti, Ulbricht?

The second hall is dedicated to the most obvious, memorable and immediate consequence of the congress within the country. Rehabilitation of victims of political repression, the work of Pospelov’s commission. Camp photographs (page from the official Gulag photo album: a flock of pigeons flocked to the barracks, caption “Pigeons - birds of the world are frequent guests in our unit”). Uprising in Gorlag (original leaflets have been preserved and presented). A certificate compiled in the depths of the Ministry of Internal Affairs back in December 1953 on the number of people convicted during the years of Soviet power. According to their data, from 1921 to 1938, 4,835,937 people were arrested, 2,944,879 were convicted (written on the side in pencil that 30% of them were for criminal offenses). At the highest level - 745,220 people.

And, of course, following the leaking information about Khrushchev’s report, which the communists were introduced to at closed party meetings, and finally, after the publication in June of the resolution “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences” (in the West, the text of the report obtained through espionage was published a little earlier) workers, questions arise, including extremely unpleasant ones: how could other leaders of the party and government not know about Stalin’s lawlessness and shouldn’t they share responsibility? And what now to do with Marxist-Leninist theory?

The last question, which seemed key to many, is now somehow difficult to take seriously. As well as the “international communist movement”. But it seems that what finally finished him off was the question of his attitude towards the cult of Stalin and the Soviet regime in general. The last room of the exhibition shows this disintegration, this confusion. Like broken glass, cracks ran in all directions. Western communist leaders have their own problems, Stalin's henchmen in the socialist countries have theirs. The year 1956, which began in February with the 20th Congress of the CPSU, broke out in November with the Hungarian Uprising.

The uprising was suppressed, the smaller fragments were somehow glued together, the communist movement did not die immediately. But it became increasingly difficult to be deceived by the dream of communism. More and more clearly, as in the simple-minded creation of Mexican comrades, next to the solemn faces of the leaders, the grinning and smiling faces of demons appeared.

Olga OVEN