17/10/1961 moscow XXII congress of the soviet communist party and lazurkina speech

At the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, an old, devoted Bolshevik woman, Dora Abramovna Lazurkina stood up and said: * My heart is always full of Lenin. Comrades, I could survive the most difficult moments only because I carried Lenin in my heart, and always consulted him on what to do. Yesterday I consulted him. He was standing there before me as if he were alive, and he said: \\\“It is unpleasant to be next to Stalin, who did so much harm to the party.\\\“3 This speech had been pre-planned yet it was still very effective. Khrushchev followed by reading a decree ordering the removal of Stalin’s remains. * The further retention in the mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honorable Soviet people, and other activities in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.4 A few days later, Stalin’s body was quietly removed from the mausoleum. There were no ceremonies and no fanfare. About 300 feet from the mausoleum, Stalin’s body was buried near other minor leaders of the Revolution. Stalin’s body was placed near the Kremlin wall, half-hidden by trees. A few weeks later, a simple dark granite stone marked the grave with the very simple, \\\“J. V. STALIN 1879-1953.\\\“ In 1970, a small bust was added to the grave. The 22nd Congress of the CPSU was held from October 17 to October 31, 1961. In fourteen days of sessions (October 22 was a day off), 4,413 delegates, representing 9,176,000 party members, in addition to delegates from 83 foreign Communist parties within and outside the Soviet Bloc, listened to Khrushchev and others review policy issues and lay down a new line. Khrushchev dominated the scene. The occasion did not, however, mark his elevation to complete and unchallenged ascendancy. His attacks on Albania and on China by implication have brought responses that belied the official claim of bloc-wide unity. For several years, Soviet and Chinese leaders have differed over the degree of harshness to show toward the West, the Chinese generally being far more orthodox and bitter than Khrushchev. In his opening speech at the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev attacked the Communist regime of Albania for its unreformed Stalinist orthodoxy. A number of other Soviet and foreign Communist speakers joined the attack. However, Zhou Enlai, head of the Chinese Communist delegation, refused to agree and criticized Khrushchev for airing ideological differences in front of the world. \\\“To lay bare a dispute between fraternal parties openly in the face of the enemy,\\\“ he said, \\\“cannot be regarded as a serious Marxist-Leninist attitude.\\\“ Speakers for five other Communist parties (North Korea, North Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, and India) sided with China in refusing to criticize Albania. On October 21, Zhou Enlai placed two wreaths at the base of the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum, one of them \\\“To Joseph Stalin ? the great Marxist-Leninist,\\\“ and at the end of the next day he walked out of the Congress. Moscow said his departure for Peking on the 23rd was connected with an approaching session of the All-China Assembly, but when Mao Tse-tung and others met Zhou in Peking, no such meeting was mentioned. Although Khrushchev accompanied Zhou to the airport on the evening of his departure it was evident that there was a genuine ideological rift that could not be smoothed over.