Flutterby™! : Buried

It's been fifty years since Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20^th Party Congress in the Kremlin, in which he denounced Stalin, acknowledged flaws in the Soviet System, and started trying to reform the U.S.S.R. (despite the fact that he was part of the worst of Stalinism: "My hands are covered with blood. I did everything that others did."). The speech is worth reading today because of what it tells us about a strong centralized government, about politics of personlaity, and a history that so many seem completely willing to forget.

Nina Khrushchev, his great granddaugher, talks a bit about the speech that she calls "the third most important event in 20th century Russia":

Just as Russia sits between the East and the West geographically, Russian politics is also in between: always on a narrow line between black and white, right and wrong, reform and dictatorship. Russians have lived for generations under an essentially despotic system of government that is constantly trying to modernize itself through more (Peter the Great, Stalin) or less (Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev) authoritarian means.

But even our reformers are only lesser dictators. At bottom, our people and our leaders share a belief that only authoritarian rule can protect the country from anarchy and disintegration. They support a "strong" state, in which decisions come from the top and citizens are left to tremble with respect and fear.

Roy Medvedv's commentary points out that:

...the problem with the de-Stalinization process was that, although the truth was partly revealed, no answer regarding what to do was offered. After the Congress, it became clear that the communist gospel was false and murderously corrupt. But no other ideology was offered, and the crisis that began with Khrushchev’s speech lasted another 30 years, until Mikhail Gorbachev took up his mantle of change.

Repeat after me, kids: Government is an illusion in the mind of the governed. Dictators don't take power, they are given power. This is one of the reasons that the First World War was followed by the Second, and this is why our current struggles in Iraq haven't been as simple as "wipe out the existing command structure". Because that command structure, that government, that dictatorship occurs when people believe in it, believe that the alternative to that evil is even worse.

Although sometimes "worse" revolves around boo-ya nationalism that's just an extension of fat guys on a couch talking about sports teams as "did we win?".