Winter is eyeball-freezing cold in Moscow. It’s safe to assume that on February 24, 1956, when the public session of the Kremlin’s 20th Congress came to a formal end, the delegates longed to head for cozy homes, cigars, and perhaps pink champagne by a fire. But they trooped back obediently into the Great Hall at midnight, where they listened, aghast, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, harangued them for four hours.
That speech, which came to be known as “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences,” ripped into deceased general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev’s speech enumerated (among other crimes) Stalin’s purges of the innocent, his false accusations of citizens who disagreed with his views or his leadership, his inadequate defense preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and his mismanagement of the subsequent war.
In particular, Khrushchev accused Stalin of fostering a cult of personality, while ostensibly claiming to care about communism.
Stalin, he suggested, only cared about Stalin.
Stalin ruled over the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. People were brought up to believe that even though he destroyed all remnants of personal freedom, he was Mister Security; without him, they’d be lost.
Khrushchev’s speech literally punched the listeners in the solar plexus. Some of those present reportedly fell to the floor with heart attacks right there in the room; others went home and killed themselves when they realized that they had somehow been complicit in the colossal catastrophe of the Soviet Union’s recent history.
Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics of “Only Stalin,” felt lost and confused; protests and rioting broke out on the streets until a severe army crackdown put paid to that.
Netanyahu and Stalin: Personality cults and their dangers
HERE, IN the steaming summer of Israel’s disastrous year, in the seemingly impossible event that some brave Knesset member from the Likud would stand up and declare that our Supreme Leader, too, has woven for himself a cult of personality (though in a very different context), not too many listeners would drop dead from shock.
We know who we are dealing with: So far, this government has not been able to muzzle our press. We got the reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the height of this present war that we seem to be losing on all fronts, had the unspeakable gall to demand extra governmental funds to fix the swimming pool at his private residence in Caesarea.
We know that as he sends our sons and daughters endlessly into battle (except for the haredim, of course – he can’t afford to upset them even if the country falls over the cliff), his son sunbathes in Florida, sharing tweets that call for army insurrections, and hanging out with millionaires while our hard-earned taxes pay for his peculiar lifestyle.
We know that our Crime Minister has cobbled together a coalition that was born to be caricatured: a transportation minister who has her own, very unusual style of traffic lights; a finance minister who knows nothing about economics except how to pour money onto his pet projects while he holds up authorization of essential fighter jets; a national security minister who was considered a security risk to the army and not conscripted, and who has so many criminal charges against him that it would be funny, if it weren’t such an existential threat; and a communications minister who decided to mess with the Associated Press.
Each day dishes up a new “you can’t make this up” drama: a Likud MK kinda condoning tax evasion, ministers of weird and wonderful ministries getting more money and trying to redraw maps that would site Hebron in the Negev (and thus eligible for greater funding), while the North and South of our country crash and burn.
We watch the news and we despair. Can we survive our government, we wonder; the talk is of fear, loss, and foreign passports for children.
BUT, AMONG our coalition of goons and incompetents, there just have to be a few good souls. We have a precedent: When God threatened to destroy Sodom, his servant Abraham bargained him down. The good Lord, determined to obliterate the city of flagrant sinners, agreed to spare it for the sake of 50 good men; Abraham convinced him that 10 would suffice.
We don’t even need 10 decent parliamentarians to save us from destruction – only five would do the job. This doesn’t seem like such a big ask; surely every member of Knesset can see, as well as the public can, how our support is waning drastically throughout the world, how our recently vibrant economy is flailing, how our youth are getting killed and maimed, our security is up the creek, our North and South are abandoned, and how our citizens are desperate and depressed.
Yoav Gallant, our defense minister, seems to have seen the light. That’s one.
Yuli Edelson – you grew up on the Khrushchev outpouring. How do you feel knowing that some of the people who tirelessly campaigned for your release from Russia now think they messed up by bringing you here to bolster this unspeakable government? Come on! You’ve evidenced fortitude before … if not now, when?
Nir Barkat? You don’t need more money; you are a man of the world. What are you waiting for? If you ever want to lead this country, then now is the time to make sure this country survives. Save us from our government!
Avi Dichter? You used to know about security better than most. Can’t you see what’s happening here? Help!
And do we have one more hero?
The sane majority of the country, those of us who pay our taxes, educate our kids when they come out of the army, and expect rationality and decency from our leaders – we can’t do too much to topple the messianic, catastrophic crazies who are hurtling us into the void. We still go to demonstrations and wave our flags in exhaustion and pain, listening to ever more bereaved families, hostage hell, and unreal shenanigans of our tragic coalition. But you, the five good souls in the Knesset – you can bring redemption.
Please. Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Just do it.
The writer lectures at Reichman University. Peledpam@gmail.com