Editor's Introduction

Abstract

"After Stalin" is a memoir of events of the 1950s and 1960s written by a self-described "house serf inside the CPSU Central Committee headquarters. While serving as a "consultant" to its Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries, Fedor Burlatskii, now a member of the Congress of People's Deputies and an outspoken advocate of Gorbachev's reforms, worked closely with his department head, Iurii Andropov, later head of the KGB and General Secretary of the CPSU. For countless hours on hundreds of occasions, he sat next to Andropov pouring over drafts of Party documents and speeches to be delivered by members of the Politburo. Burlatskii is thus able to sketch the portrait of a Soviet apparatchik who enjoyed intellectual-political work and who, "in striking contrast" to other Soviet leaders, was kind and affable (at least to consultants). Leaving aside what might have been a less charitable view of Andropov on the part of Hungarian party leaders executed after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion prior to which Soviet Ambassador Andropov assured them that Moscow harbored no aggressive intentions toward Hungary, Burlatskii offers several harsh judgments of Soviet political culture. Coarse flattery and the willingness to believe secret denunciations of rivals, he suggests, may be "the distinguishing feature of a Russian political person," even of "the most intelligent and penetrating" leaders. He attributes the authoritarianism of past CPSU leaders to "traditional notions of leadership within the peasant household," ranging from patriarchal infallibility to "intolerance of the opinions of others—all these things together comprised the typical collection of centuries-old ideas concerning power in Russia."