The Stalin Era

I THINK THAT, looking back, men will call it "the Stalin Era.” Tens of millions of people built the world’s first socialist state, but he was the engineer. He first gave voice to the thought that the peasant land of Russia could do it. From that time on, his mark was on all of it, on all the gains and all the evils. It is too soon to sum up the era, and yet one must try to. For controversy has arisen over it and the beliefs of many around the world are being torn. It is the very best people who are most disturbed by Khrushchev’s revelations of thousands of brutal injustices and harsh repressions when socialism was for the first time built. They are asking: Was this necessary? Is that always the path to socialism? Or was it the evil genius of one man?