Waiting for the American Khrushchev:
Who will deliver the “Cult of Personality” speech to Americans?
By Marina Gorbis, Institute for the Future Executive Director
My mother cried when she heard on the radio that Joseph Stalin passed away. A young, well-educated doctor who loved classical music and regularly recited Heinrich Heine’s poems in German, she was not alone. Millions of Soviet citizens of all backgrounds and walks of life mourned the death of a monster who, over a rein lasting almost three decades, murdered some twenty million of their neighbors, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, family members, literary heroes, and beloved artists. As people were disappearing from apartments, parks, and workplaces, sometimes under cover of darkness but often in broad daylight, their fellow citizens were told that the vanished were dangerous, “enemies of the people.” Traitors and saboteurs were hiding everywhere — in factories, on collective farms, at schools and universities, among party apparatchiks — and only Joseph Stalin, with his wisdom and strength, could protect the country from them. My mother’s best friend Lena, whose parents were privileged members of the Communist Party and who was regularly driven to school by a chauffeur in a luxury Chaika car given only to elite government officials, became an orphan overnight and vanished from my mother’s life for many decades. Both of Lena’s parents, early Bolsheviks, accused of a fantastic plot to undermine the Soviet regime, were removed from their home, imprisoned, and subsequently killed. Lena and her younger sister ended up in an orphanage — their surviving relatives were afraid to take in the children of the “enemies of the people.”
Years later, my mother told me that she and everyone around her (at least that’s what she thought as a teenager) believed that Lena’s parents were in fact dangerous saboteurs. They also believed that the murdered writer Isaak Babel was a counterrevolutionary, that senior members of the military have turned out to be traitors, that peasants who had a little extra food were responsible for starvation in cities and thus deserved to die.
Yale historian and student of tyranny Timothy Snyder defines the Big Lie as one which requires believers to reject evidence and commit to a vast conspiratorial story. Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels was one of the craft’s best practitioners. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,” he wrote, “people will eventually come to believe it…the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
My mother, along with millions of others bought into the Big Lie. Fanned by Joseph Stalin and his paranoia, the lie was given life by a much larger infrastructure of terror. It included multitudes of officials and acolytes, some true believers, some cowards, but most just ambitious functionaries looking to move up in the Soviet society — get a bigger apartment, a nice summer dacha by the sea, or a vacation in Crimea. All of them served as willing accomplices in Stalin’s campaigns of purges and terror.
A few years after his death, Stalin’s Big Lie was revealed to be just that by none other than one of his former enablers — Nikita Khrushchev who delivered the famous “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” speech at a closed meeting of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956. The speech was quickly leaked outside of the inner party ranks and ushered in a period of reforms, with accounts of purges, killings, and horrific conditions in Soviet gulags gradually becoming public. According to some sources, when Khrushchev revealed the truth about Stalin’s reign of terror, some of the ardent Big Lie believers suffered heart attacks, a few committed suicides, and some refused to acknowledge the truth. With Khrushchev initiating widespread rehabilitations of former enemies of the people and many of the exiles returning to their homes from labor camps in Siberia, truth, however, was increasingly difficult to deny. Stalin turned from a hero to a villain in the eyes of most Soviet citizens.
Unfortunately, revelations about the Big Lie were not complete. Complicit in Stalin’s crimes and under the threat of being personally caught up in purges, Khrushchev and the close-knit circle of Communist Party leaders focused their ire on Stalin and his closest associates. They never acknowledged their own parts in creating and sustaining the cult of personality. They failed to reveal and dismantle the infrastructure that enabled it. So, as quickly as the relative openness ushered in by Khrushchev came into being, it was as quickly followed by new repressions, albeit of a much milder variety, under the next Soviet leader — Leonid Brezhnev.
Trump is no Stalin, and the US is no Soviet Union, not even close. But like Stalin and many other dictators and wannabe dictators, Trump’s Big Lie about the elections — their integrity and their final winner — is believed by millions of Americans. In the process of propagating the Big Lie, he convinced many people to disregard evidence, hate their neighbors, and treat journalists and public servants who tell the truth as “enemies of the people.” With the supporting infrastructure of donors, friendly media outlets, a long list of corrupt and craven associates, many of whom got on his bandwagon to advance their careers and political prospects, he managed to convince people to see the world literally upside down: white is black, top is bottom, honest public servants are liars, liars are truth seekers.
This moment calls for an American version of Nikita Khrushchev to step to the podium and give an American version of the speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” And the consequences are many — undermining trust in American government, weakening our civil service, needlessly losing hundreds of thousands of people to COVID, putting lives of many people in danger, diminishing American reputation around the world, and of course, goading and applauding the insurrection into one of the most sacred symbols of American democracy, our Capitol.
Who in Trump’s inner circle has the trust of his followers and the guts to do this? Tucker Carlson? Don Jr? Hannity? Ivanka? Is there an American equivalent of the 1956 Soviet Politburo — a group of high-level Trump supporters and enablers who can sense their own destruction on the horizon and for reasons of pure self-preservation will be willing to reveal the Big Lie for what it is to Trump’s supporters and the American public?
Is there an American version of Nikita Khrushchev for this moment? I am waiting for him or her to speak up.
