Khrushchev denounces Stalin

On 25 February 1956 Soviet leader Khrushchev denounces Stalin in a closed session at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In this famous secret speech he details how Stalin caused mass terror in the 1930s, ordered torture and murder of innocent high-ranking party members, failed to prepare for the Nazi invasion and cultivated his own personality. This kind of criticism is unheard of in the Soviet Union, and the delegates are stunned, some get a heart attack, others reportedly commit suicide afterwards. Another address Khrushchev gave at the start of the Congress is also important as he rejects the notion that war between East and West is “fatalistically inevitable”.




Khrushchev addressing the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956.
Encyclopædia Britannica, AFP/Getty Images.

International reactions
A Reuters correspondent gets details of the speech from a Russian source and he breaks the story internationally in the beginning of March. Poland revolts in October; Khrushchev flies to Warsaw and allows them some freedom. In Hungary independent –minded people take matters into their own hands and break out of the Warsaw pact and hold free elections. The Soviet response is swift and brutal, and in the shadow of the Suez Crisis, they invade and crush the Hungarian uprising.
But for a time Khrushchev improves relations with the West and signs a Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963. Then an arms race starts. His mishandling of agricultural reforms in Russia and the Cuba missile crisis alarms the Soviet leadership, and they force him to resign in 1964.
Mao Zedong, the leader of China co-operated well and had a lot in common with Stalin. He rejects the speech and Khrushchev and this initiate the split between the two Communist giants. It was never healed, and US President Nixon widened the split by his visit to China in 1971.

Khrushchev in East Berlin, 1963.

Domestic policy
The speech is read to groups of Communist party activists, but not printed (until 1989). But it causes shock and disillusion to many who believed in Stalin and unity of the Communist party. But a period called the Khrushchev thaw starts with release of prisoners from the Gulag camps and less repression. Censorship is relaxed and some books like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” are permitted. Others, like Nobel Prize for literature winner Boris Pasternak who wrote “Doctor Zhivago” is ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers. He dies soon after, partly because of the harsh treatment he got.

Most of the minorities that Stalin deported during and after World War II, are welcomed back to their homelands. Those include the Chechen, Ingush and other national groups. But not the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars as Russians and Ukrainians had replaced them. In 1954 Khrushchev gives Crimea to Ukraine. Today in 2014 the Russians in Crimea are in conflict with Kiev and the Tatars in Crimea.




Author Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated in 1956. I
In 1974 he was deported, here in West Germany.

 

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Bjarte Bjørsvik