Khrushchev's Secret Speech

In the early hours of February 25, 1956, at the end of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev spoke to a closed session of about 1,400 delegates. His report, titled On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, accused Stalin, who had died three years earlier, of building a cult of himself and of arresting and killing thousands of loyal Communists. Khrushchev said that of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected in 1934, 98 had been arrested and shot, and he described Stalin's wartime blunders and the deportation of whole peoples such as the Chechens and Kalmyks.¹²

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors ended the worst of the terror, released many prisoners from the Gulag and executed the police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Khrushchev won the struggle for leadership by 1955 and believed the Party needed to face its past to renew itself. He had himself taken part in the purges, so he blamed Stalin personally and left out collectivization, the famine and the wider system. The speech was not published in the USSR, but it was read aloud at Party and Komsomol meetings across the country in the following weeks.¹³

Its text soon leaked: Israeli and American intelligence obtained a copy through Poland, and The New York Times printed it in June 1956. The effects were swift. Many Soviet citizens were stunned, and prisoners were released and rehabilitated in large numbers. Riots in Poznan and the return of Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in Poland followed, and the Hungarian Revolution broke out in October. Western communist parties lost many members, and Mao Zedong's China began to criticize Moscow's approach, a source of the Sino-Soviet split. The de-Stalinization continued at the 22nd Congress in 1961, when Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum, but it was limited, and the speech itself was not officially published in Russia until 1989.¹³⁴