Tag #150657 - Interview #90536 (Tibor Gohman)

Later, after Khrushchev [13] spoke at the 20th Congress [14], I got rid of my illusions about Stalin. Of course, I believed Khrushchev instantly. I had heard before from my fellow comrades that people had been arrested without any grounds for a word spoken incautiously by someone else’s report. When I served in the army there was a KGB [15] officer in every unit. Our chief of this special department was captain Baranov. Everybody was afraid of him. There was a car mechanic from Mukachevo in our unit. His surname was Dashko. On 5 March, when Stalin died, Dashko was fixing a car lying under it. Captain Baranov came near and asked what he was doing. Dashko replied that he had to fix a car. ‘Haven’t you heard that Stalin died?’  Dashko replied that he was sorry, of course, but what could one do, his time had come… For just this phrase he was sentenced to 25 years in camps. He was released in 1956 after the 20th Party Congress, but he had spent few years in camps, anyway. This was a man I knew in person. I did suspect that there was something wrong about Stalin’s regime.  Then another incident proved my doubts was about Beriya. At the time, when Stalin was in power, Beriya was the second man in the state, but after Stalin’s death he all of a sudden became an enemy of the people, a spy and was executed on December 23, 1953. I gradually came to understanding that a party was associated with constant lies, but this understanding didn’t evolve at once.