by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] It was the morning of February 25, 1956, the last day of the 20th Congress of the CPSU. More than 1,300 delegates, representing the 7-million-member ruling and only party of the Soviet Union, had gathered in one of the halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Everyone was awaiting First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's closed-door speech. And he did not disappoint.
In fact, the report "On the Cult of Stalin's Personality and Its Consequences" turned the reporting and election event into a historical event that predetermined the remaining 35 years of the Soviet Union's existence.
"The hall was profoundly silent. Not a creaking chair, not a cough, not a whisper was heard. No one looked at each other—either from the surprise of what had happened, or from confusion and fear. The shock was unimaginably profound." This is how the "architect of perestroika" Alexander Yakovlev, a "simple" instructor in the CPSU Central Committee in 1956, recalled his impressions of Khrushchev's four-hour speech.
"PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION OF SENIOR OFFICIALS"
The First Secretary began his speech by saying that there was no sensation here: after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Central Committee “began to strictly and consistently pursue a course of explaining the inadmissibility of the glorification of one individual, which is alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, turning him into some kind of superman.”
This somewhat surprised the delegates. Yes, the regime had changed, but the body of the "leader of the people" lay in the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. The country's map was dotted with place names honoring the late General Secretary: Stalingrad, Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), Stalino (Donetsk), Staliniri (Gori, the Generalissimo's birthplace). And the unofficial anthem of the CPSU remained a song glorifying "the party of Lenin, the party of Stalin, the wise party of the Bolsheviks."
But not after the death of the “master,” but precisely now—on February 25, 1956—the general line of the “wise party” turned 180 degrees.
After the passage about the superman, Khrushchev briefly paid tribute to his predecessor's achievements: "Stalin's role in preparing and carrying out the socialist revolution, in the civil war, in the struggle to build socialism in our country is well known." Stalin's role in the Great Patriotic War was not mentioned, which also went unnoticed by the delegates.
Then Khrushchev began dropping information bombs. He cited the numbers of repressed loyal Leninists, "who bore the brunt of the civil war and the first, most difficult years of industrialization and collectivization."
Khrushchev, however, did not mention the peasants—victims of collectivization, non-party intellectuals, workers, soldiers, and priests killed during the Great Terror.
He cited instances of falsified execution cases and discussed the mechanisms by which they were fabricated. He spoke of the "mass expulsion of entire peoples from their homelands" and specifically addressed the "Doctors' Plot" and other trials from 1946 to 1953.
But the main social group to suffer, according to Khrushchev, was not ordinary citizens, but party workers—loyal Leninists, architects of the revolution and the merciless (but, as the speaker emphasized, forced) Red Terror. Under Stalin, "anyone who... attempted to prove the correctness of their own views was doomed to be removed from the ranks of leadership, and subsequently... destroyed."
The executives in the audience could have imagined such a fate for themselves—and they were clearly uneasy. "There wasn't a single person in the room who wasn't shaken by that report," recalled Nikolai Baibakov, then an employee of the USSR Council of Ministers and, from the Brezhnev years until the beginning of perestroika, the chairman of the Union's State Planning Committee.
The shock was understandable. Those whom the party had branded "enemies of the people" were now being proclaimed innocent victims by that same party.
Trotsky, however, remained a silent figure—but even for the recent "arch-traitors" Kamenev and Zinoviev, Khrushchev had words of approval. And all with reference to the almost divine authority of Lenin. After all, it was the great Ilyich—and Khrushchev especially emphasized this—who considered Stalin a boor, unfit for the role of General Secretary.
During the reading, there was a deathly silence, then whispers began, and, as eyewitnesses testify, there were both angry shouts and approving applause.
However, "when Khrushchev looked up from his text and, gesticulating passionately, said, 'And he, Stalin, directed the fronts using a globe,' everyone was silent, even the military commanders," recalled Vasily Isayev, a delegate from the Leningrad party organization. Although, he noted, the generals and marshals clearly could have objected.
When, at the end of his speech, Nikita Sergeyevich called for the "nationalization" of the names of cities, factories, plants, collective and state farms—in other words, the de-Stalinization of the country's map—the stenographers added the following remark: " Laughter, applause. Shouts of 'Correct!'"
Eyewitness accounts make no mention of laughter. "We descended from the balcony without looking at each other's faces, either from a sense of surprise, shame, or shock," testified Alexander Yakovlev.
No debate was planned after Khrushchev's report. The report was circulated to local party organizations for review (but not to non-party members and certainly not to the outside world). No filming or television coverage was conducted, and no "outside the box" publications followed. The 55 representatives of the world's communist parties who had attended the 20th Congress were not allowed to attend this final session.
"YOU CAN'T BULLY ME LIKE THAT!"
But foreign comrades in Moscow could not help but learn of the ideological shift that had taken place. Spanish Communist Party leader Dolores Ibárruri praised the Russian communists for their honesty. But the head of the Chinese delegation to the 20th Congress, Deng Xiaoping, the future overseer of China's purely economic perestroika of the 1980s, was outraged:
"The report is confused and illogical. Stalin is an international figure. To treat him this way is outrageous! You can't treat the revolutionary leader Stalin like that."
The consequences of Khrushchev's report for the socialist camp were "tectonic": from the uprising in Hungary and the lesser-known mass protests in Poland in the autumn of 1956 to the sharp expansion of the split with Maoist China, which by 1960 had reached a phase of acute confrontation.
When Deng Xiaoping and his team began revising and dismantling the late Mao Zedong's legacy in the late 1970s, they heeded the Soviet lesson, refraining—for the sake of regime stability—from debunking the personality cult. The "Great Helmsman" was credited with "70% great achievements and 30% mistakes." His CPC comrades had no issues with Deng, a comrade of Mao's, albeit one who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.
But Khrushchev—who from the 1930s to the early 1950s made a party and government career without deviating from Stalin's general line (Nikita Sergeyevich rose from the head of the Kyiv regional committee to the secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) / CPSU)—was accused behind his back of hypocrisy and almost treason.
Nikita Sergeyevich's role in the repression of innocent communists, which he himself had condemned, was no secret to the party's leadership. In 1936–1937, Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), oversaw the work of the capital's NKVD (during which time 50,000 people were repressed) and demanded that his subordinates more actively and ruthlessly identify enemies of the people.
And in 1938, as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, he "personally consented to the arrests of a significant number of party and Soviet workers," and insisted that the pace of the struggle should not be reduced. Soviet society learned of this during yet another party self-exposure, this time under Mikhail Gorbachev, from a memo released in 1988 by a commission of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee.
It was an open secret that the destroyer of the personality cult himself was part of that personality's inner circle. But why did Khrushchev decide to attack his late predecessor, clearly realizing the threat of upheaval within the party, the country, and the socialist camp?
It is unlikely that it was simply a matter of wanting to restore justice and “return to Leninist norms.”
FIND THE "EXTREMES"
There is evidence that Stalin himself spoke of the need for some kind of condemnation of "excesses" in the final years of his life. According to Andrei Zhdanov's son, Yuri, in January 1947, at a closed meeting with members of the Politburo in the Kremlin apartment, the "great leader" declared : "The war showed that there weren't as many internal enemies in the country as we were told and as we believed. Many suffered in vain. The people should have kicked us out for this. With a kick in the ass. We must repent."
From the words of Yuri Zhdanov it follows that Stalin reserved for himself the appointment of those responsible for the repressions of the 1930s–50s.
In this case, this appointment was conceived by him in the early 1950s as an operation to purge the then entourage, which included Marshal Lavrenty Beria, the head of the USSR Council of Ministers Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev.
After the death of the "Father of the People" on March 5, 1953, Malenkov attempted to act in a similar manner—condemning the mistakes of the past (by presenting them as the mistakes of others) for the sake of personal power. The Soviet "Prime Minister" sought to consolidate power in his own hands. It is known that as early as July 1953, the "pretender to the throne" spoke of the need to "end the policy of the personality cult and move toward collective leadership of the country."
True, Malenkov made this statement in a small circle of the Politburo, without bringing it to the podium of the All-Union Congress.
Khrushchev, who by 1955 had eliminated Beria and pushed Malenkov from power, acted in a similar vein. The transition from the status of first among equals to the possession of absolute power required the removal of other figures from the political arena. And the best option would have been to accuse him of deviating from what was sacred—from Leninist norms.
PREEMPTIVE PLAY
Stalin's "colleagues" in his inner circle— Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, and even Malenkov—remained in the game. And they remained a threat.
The trend was picked up by Anastas Mikoyan, a long-time political veteran who chose Khrushchev's side (he entered high politics under Lenin and left under Brezhnev ; people joked about him: "From Ilyich to Ilyich, without a heart attack or paralysis").
Unexpectedly, Mikoyan delivered a harsh critique of Stalin's ideological brainchild, the textbook "Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)," and his work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR." According to memoirs, Mikoyan's speeches were met with "noise and discontent" (including among comrades abroad), but the desired line was pushed through.
Khrushchev's final showdown with other representatives of the old guard occurred a year after the 20th Congress, in 1957, when the figures declared an "anti-party group" were removed from the board.
But the sensational closed report at the 20th Congress was a decisive move in Khrushchev's game. A team of experts, led by academician and Central Committee Secretary Pyotr Pospelov, began working from December 31, 1955. The commission included senior party officials, representatives of the KGB, and the prosecutor's office. Its goal was to answer questions about "how mass repressions became possible."
A week before the congress, the files were presented at a secret meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. The documents sparked heated debate and scandal among the Presidium members. They were peppered with terms like "violation of the law" and "arbitrariness of the prosecutor's office." The logical chains of causes for the deaths of over 600,000 active communists led to Stalin and his associates—not to Khrushchev.
And finally, the version of “repentance” that the first secretary needed was presented to the party masses at the congress.
THE FIRST, BUT NOT THE LAST BLOW TO THE SYSTEM
Ultimately, the report served Khrushchev as a weapon to achieve his own power interests: toppling prominent Stalinists from the political Olympus and strengthening his personal power.
Tactically, Khrushchev fully achieved his goals. But the young managers he had nurtured—Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexander Shelepin, KGB head Vladimir Semichastny, Politburo member Nikolai Podgorny, and Central Committee Secretary Leonid Brezhnev—overthrew their patron in October 1964.
The collective leadership (in which Leonid Ilyich quickly sidelined the other "conspirators") essentially reversed de-Stalinization. And the new General Secretary, Brezhnev, in his fight against Khrushchev's "voluntarism," began to assert his authority, adopting several effective methods from Stalin's arsenal.
Executions were replaced by deportation abroad and forced treatment in psychiatric clinics. Instead of political charges against the erring elite, unofficial exiles to the periphery, with deteriorating living conditions, and so on, were used.
The large-scale celebrations of Brezhnev's anniversaries, the nationwide study of his literary works, and the countless awards presented to him, including the Order of Victory, awarded to military leaders of the Great Patriotic War, which Colonel-political officer Brezhnev, however, did not belong to, seemed like a "light version" of the personality cult.
But the propaganda machine, having survived several "stress tests," no longer functioned with its former effectiveness. The continuity of power and state "mythology" had already been disrupted under Khrushchev. Gorbachev's campaign of harsh criticism of Brezhnev's stagnation was already entirely predictable. But the Soviet system, already experiencing systemic crises, did not survive another transformation in the 1980s.