De-Stalinization
탈스탈린화
De-Stalinization was a process of political reform in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953, comprising a series of measures aimed at dismantling the cult of personality and rolling back the legacy of state terror. The watershed moment was Khrushchev's 1956 'Secret Speech' to the 20th Party Congress, 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,' which catalysed mass releases and rehabilitations of political prisoners, the downsizing of the Gulag system, and the removal of Stalin monuments and place names. De-Stalinization sought to return the party and state from personal dictatorship to a norm of collective leadership, but its pace and scope remained inconsistent throughout the Khrushchev years, stalled under Brezhnev, and resumed only with Gorbachev's perestroika.
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- Wikipedia (EN) overview of de-Stalinization as a series of political reforms after Stalin's death, including the Secret Speech, rehabilitation, Gulag downsizing, renaming, and removal of Stalin's body
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian article confirming the three 'waves' of de-Stalinization (Khrushchev, Gorbachev, post-Soviet) and the earliest 1953 steps by Malenkov and Beria
- britannica.com the Secret Speech as 'nucleus of a far-reaching de-Stalinization campaign,' with details on Khrushchev's specific charges against Stalin and the speech's role in the Hungarian and Polish revolts
- rferl.org RFE/RL 50th-anniversary retrospective with historians Medvedev and Gorbachev on the speech's 'colossal historical significance,' prisoner releases, and limits of the 1956 thaw