Nikita Khrushchev's coruscating speech laid waste to the cult of Joseph Stalin
When Stalin died in March 1953 there seemed to be, as far as we can ascertain, a great outpouring of genuine grief across the USSR.
The ‘man of steel’, the nom de guerre adopted by Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, had been supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for more than a quarter of a century as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1922 to 1952 and as premier from 1941 until his death.
As Vozhd, a Slavic term meaning ‘leader’, he had presided over the defeat of Nazism and the transformation of his country into a military superpower, if not exactly an industrial one.
In the absence of alternative sources of information, a high proportion of the Soviet population unquestioningly swallowed decades of propaganda projecting the image of Stalin as a wise, peaceful, and benign leader at face value.
Three years later on February 25 1956 at a closed session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU Nikita Khrushchev, who had emerged as the new Soviet leader in the power struggle following Stalin’s demise, delivered a four-hour-long speech entitled ‘On the Personality Cult and its Consequences’.
Khrushchev began with vague references to the harmful consequences of elevating a single individual so high that he took on the ‘supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god’.
Khrushchev then became more specific, quoting Lenin’s warning in 1922 that Stalin was not fit for the position of party general secretary.
He then denounced Stalin's brutal ‘personality cult’, his paranoia and egotism which had ‘trampled on the Leninist principle of collective Party leadership’ in building his personal dictatorship.
Stalin was responsible, aided by Yezhov and Beria, successive heads of the KGB between 1936 and 1945, for the purges and mass executions of loyal party members and military leaders on completely fabricated charges. Khrushchev did not spare the delegates graphic accounts of torture and execution.
Stalin had ignored warnings of an imminent German invasion in 1941 and his wartime leadership was responsible for calamitous strategic errors.
The speech systematically demolished Stalin's image, urged a return to Leninist principles and initiated De-Stalinization.
Khrushchev’s peroration condemned ‘the cult of the individual as alien to Marxism-Leninism’ and urged the 1,500 delegates ‘to restore completely the Leninist principles of Soviet socialist democracy’ (whatever they might be).
Flying in the face of years of relentless party propaganda, the speech was greeted with shocked and stunned silence. Delegates did not know what to think. Apparently, some delegates had heart attacks. The Polish communist leader Bolesław Bierut died of a heart attack after reading the speech. Others committed suicide.
Although usually described as ‘the secret speech’, it was not secret for long. Nor was it intended to be. It was widely circulated within the CPSU. Khrushchev even used the KGB to disseminate its content.
The Polish Communist Party played a significant role in spreading the message internationally.
The central thrust of the speech was fully reported in the New York Times as early as June.
The speech sparked political upheaval and an appetite for reform across the Soviet bloc, contributing to strikes and serious unrest In Poland, especially in Poznań, and the Hungarian Uprising in the autumn.
In the West the US Communist Party lost 30,000 members in the weeks immediately following the speech’s publication. The Communist Party of Great Britain lost between a quarter and a third of its membership.
What was Khrushchev’s motive in delivering this completely unexpected and astonishing speech?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a beneficiary of De-Stalinization, thought the speech was prompted by Khrushchev’s conscience. As Khrushchev actively supported the Great Purge and approved thousands of arrests, this seems highly improbable.
Slightly more plausibly, historian Martin McCauley has suggested that Khrushchev wished to ‘liberate Party officials from the fear of repression’, believing that if the CPSU was stripped of the brutal abuse of power by any individual, it could transform the Soviet Union as well as the entire world.
The most likely explanation was that Khrushchev wished to exonerate himself and the party of responsibility by pinning the blame for crimes and injustices solely on Stalin. The CPSU, in other words, had been a victim of Stalin, not an accessory to his crimes.
Did De-Stalinization amount to much?
‘The secret speech’ did not fundamentally change Soviet society but millions of political prisoners were released and thousands of those who had perished were rehabilitated.
In the Khrushchev era perceived ‘political troublemakers’ only lost their jobs, were expelled from the CPSU or were sent to psychiatric hospitals.
Khrushchev had no qualms about the brutal military suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. De-Stalinization most emphatically did not mean relinquishing the Soviet Union’s firm grip on eastern Europe.
In 1957, Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, three disgruntled rivals of Khrushchev, mounted a failed coup. Accused of factionalism and complicity in Stalin's crimes, they were expelled from the Central Committee and Presidium. Molotov was sent as ambassador to Mongolia and the other two were demoted to head industrial facilities far from Moscow. In the Stalinist era they would have had a swift rendezvous with a firing squad.
Greater emphasis was placed on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry.
Up to a point, De-Stalinization allowed greater freedom of expression. However, Khrushchev sanctioned the repression of Boris Pasternak’s novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1957) within the Soviet Union and refused to allow Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
On the other hand, Khrushchev permitted the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s sweeping denunciation of Stalinist repression in ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ (1962).
Despite supposedly allowing greater freedom of expression, in 1959 De-Stalinization intensified persecution of religion.
Monuments to Stalin were removed, his name was removed from places, buildings, and the state anthem, and his body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum (known as the Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum between 1953 and 1961).
Also in 1961 Stalingrad reverted to being called Volgograd.
The assessment of Anne Applebaum, the US journalist and historian (and wife of the current deputy prime minister of Poland), is accurate: ‘The era which came to be called the “Thaw” was indeed an era of change, but change of a particular kind: reforms took two steps forward, and then one step – or sometimes three steps – back.’