Word: kremlins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dark. In the immediate sense, the big news from Budapest was that the Kremlin could no longer paper over or conceal the splits and fissures in the Communist monolith (see FOREIGN NEWS). Beyond that, Budapest was a new vindication of the old proposition that government, however strong, cannot indefinitely have its way without the consent of the governed, however it might seem to be dulled. "The soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night," Winston Churchill once said memorably, citing this proposition, "can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where...
What took place in six tense hours in Warsaw last week was an open defiance of the Kremlin, not by the oppressed people of Poland, but by their Communist rulers, who in an anxious testing moment acted as Poles first and dutiful Communists second. And for the first time in eleven hard years of Communist rule, these Communist rulers-tough, unloved Marxists-found themselves national heroes to the Poles...
This was independence with a vengeance. The Kremlin's new leaders might be willing to bend with the times, to grant the satellites some easements in order to make their own control more secure. But now the Poles were asking them to loosen their tight hold on Poland. Of course, the Russians would not do so willingly; but perhaps they would have to. In making his submission to Tito, Khrushchev had acknowledged that there could be "other roads to socialism." He had, at Tito's urging, rehabilitated satellite lead ers (sometimes posthumously) who had once defied Stalin...
...moment, Gomulka had control of the Polish apparatus, but his difficulties were not over. Would a simple change to a Polish-style Communism satisfy Poland's restless millions? The day might come when Gomulka would need the Kremlin's help as badly as he now needed to defy it. This awareness lay behind his offer of a continued collaboration with Moscow. But could Nikita Khrushchev accept Gomulka's cooperation on these terms? Khrushchev by his hasty flight to Warsaw had staked his own prestige on the event, and had suffered a rebuff...
Kaganovich in Warsaw beside Khrushchev and Mikoyan, and of the fact that the Red army, obviously concerned about its supply line to East Germany, was backing Khrushchev. Whatever differences there were in the top Soviet leadership, the Kremlin men apparently felt the need of standing together now. While developments in Poland bore out Tito's forecast that the "democratization" movement in the satellites could not be halted, one of his top aides expressed the opinion that "sudden changes can be dangerous." Some Yugoslavs thought the time had come for President Tito to make clear at long last just where...