Secret Speech

Background: why the party investigated its own past

The speech Khrushchev read at a closed session of the 20th Congress on 25 February 1956, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," was not a sudden event. After Stalin's death in March 1953, the arrest and execution of Beria widened knowledge of his crimes, and thousands of political prisoners and deported persons returned to the country.[P6] On 31 December 1955 Khrushchev set up a commission chaired by Pospelov to investigate how the members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected by the 17th Congress in 1934 had come to be targeted in the mass repressions.[P7][P48] The commission included Pospelov, Komarov, Aristov and Shvernik, and drew on staff from the KGB and the Soviet procuracy.[P49] Its evidence, presented to a Presidium meeting on 9 February 1956, showed that more than 1.5 million people were arrested in 1937-38 and about 680,000 were shot, and that of 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress 1,108 were repressed and 848 executed.[P8][P51] The document named Stalin's personal responsibility for torture in interrogation, extrajudicial reprisals and shootings, with sections on falsified cases, gross violations of legality and the arbitrariness of the military courts.[P50][P52] On 13 February the Presidium decided to put a report on the cult of personality to a closed session of the congress and named Khrushchev as rapporteur; over the following days he, Pospelov, Aristov and others wrote and edited the text.[P9][P53] The turn was a decision the party leadership took and sanctioned, and the material it rested on concerned repression against party and military cadres above all.

Eleven days of congress, a report after midnight

The open sessions, from 14 to 25 February, set out peaceful coexistence with capitalism, the thesis that war is not inevitable, and the line that the road to socialism could differ from country to country. The Middle East, Poland and the coming dispute with the Chinese party were already in view. The first crack in the open sessions came from Mikoyan, who attacked the Short Course history of the party but did not mention Stalin by name.[P55] After the public session closed on 24 February, delegates were told to return for an additional closed session. Journalists, guests and delegations of fraternal parties from outside the USSR were not invited; special passes were issued to those eligible, and about a hundred former party members recently released from the camps were added to the hall.[P11] Bulganin, who chaired, called the session to order and yielded the floor to Khrushchev, who began shortly after midnight on 25 February and spoke for four hours.[P12] The hall was stunned and some listeners became ill and had to be removed.[P12] When it ended, Bulganin proposed that there be no debate and no questions, and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept.[P13][P62] The delegates adopted two decisions approving the report's propositions and ordering its circulation to party organizations without publication in the open press.[P63] Recollections of the hall differ. One eyewitness remembered deep silence; another remembered Khrushchev departing from the prepared text many times and speaking off the cuff, and it was exactly those passages that drew the strongest reactions.[P57][P61] What was read and what was said aloud cannot be established with certainty, and the degree to which the printed text matched the oral delivery cannot be determined.[P59]

What the report criticized, and what it passed over

Khrushchev denounced Stalin and exalted Lenin. He cited Lenin's Testament and Krupskaya's remarks on Stalin's character, charged Stalin with violating the norms of collective leadership, and argued that Stalin had turned "enemy of the people" into a weapon of political struggle, before setting out in detail how the majority of Old Bolsheviks and the delegates of the 17th Congress were repressed.[P15][P18][P19][P20][P21][P22] The list of charges included arrests and executions carried out under Stalin's orders, the falsification of case records to meet quotas of enemies, Stalin's exaggeration of his own role in the Great Patriotic War, the wartime deportation of whole nationalities, and the Doctors' plot and the Mingrelian affair.[P25][P26][P27][P28][P29] What the report left out mattered too. It did not cover the deportations from Poland or the Baltic, the Katyn massacre, the Holodomor or dekulakization, matters that could not be attributed to Stalin's direct action alone.[P15] Non-party victims were not mentioned.[P15] The speech repeatedly lauded Leninism and communist ideology, and framed the cult of personality as a harmful phenomenon of which Stalin had himself been the primary victim.[P15] The collective responsibility of the leadership that had signed and carried out the repression, including many of the men listening in the hall, was not raised.

A secret that crossed borders

The document was classified, but the secrecy did not hold. On 1 March the text was distributed to senior Central Committee functionaries; on 5 March its classification was reduced from "Top Secret" to "Not for Publication," and the Central Committee ordered that it be read at all party and Komsomol units, a process through which more than 25 million people heard its contents.[P35] The report shocked party members; some listeners suffered heart attacks and there were suicides.[P4] In Poland thousands of copies were made and the speech was read out on the radio, and it spread beyond party control.[P38] It reached Western readers by several routes: Reuters journalist John Rettie filed from Moscow in mid-March, and intelligence services raced to obtain the text, Israel among the first.[P37][P86] On 5 June 1956 The New York Times and The Washington Post published the full text, and the speech became an international political document.[P39][P84] It was not published officially in the Soviet Union until 1989.[P35][P85]

A circulation that became a crisis

In March 1956 the third anniversary of Stalin's death and the speech brought crowds into the streets of Tbilisi; the Soviet Army broke up the protests on 9 March, leaving dead among the demonstrators. Official records give 15 killed and 54 wounded, figures regarded as highly suspect, and it is thought that hundreds may have been killed or wounded.[P43] That autumn, the Polish October and the Hungarian uprising followed, and Hungary was put down by Soviet troops.[P89] The Chinese and Albanian parties rejected both the assessment of Stalin and the line of peaceful coexistence as revisionism, the start of the Sino-Soviet split. At the 22nd Congress in 1961 Stalin's body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum.[P42] The Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956, "On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences," gave the party's official judgment; written under Suslov's guidance, it paid tribute to Stalin's services and did not carry Khrushchev's specific allegations.[P40][P85]

Where assessments divide

Khrushchev returned to the attack in public at the 22nd Congress in 1961.[P42] The line he set met opposition inside the leadership; Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov resisted it and were pushed out in the 1957 Anti-Party Group affair. Historians differ over what the speech was. Anne Applebaum argues Khrushchev told a half-truth, exposing Stalin's crimes while concealing his own part, and that the speech aimed not only at freeing his compatriots but at consolidating personal power and intimidating party rivals who had participated in the repression.[P92] That reading collides with the speech's own logic, which treated Khrushchev as simply a product of the cult. Others read it as a move to liberate party officials from fear. On either reading, the frame of criticism was the cult of personality, and the party's line, the system, and the shared responsibility of the leadership were left outside it. Reopening as a question about the system what the speech had narrowed to one man was left to perestroika, thirty years later.