On the Personality Cult and its Consequences

 
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On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (Russian: О культе личности и его последствиях), commonly known as the Secret Speech or the Khrushchev Report, was a report to the 20th Party Congress on February 24-25 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he criticized actions taken by the regime of Joseph Stalin, particularly the purges of the military and the upper Party echelons, and the development of the Stalin's personality cult, while maintaining support for the ideals of Communism by invoking Vladimir Lenin.

The speech was a milestone in the Khrushchev Thaw.[1][2] It was also a sign of an intense power struggle within the Soviet leadership in which Khrushchev made an effort to discredit those who had survived the long rule of Stalin, notably Lavrentiy Beria. Superficially, the speech was an attempt to draw the Communist Party of the Soviet Union closer to Leninism. Khrushchev's aim, however, was primarily to garner public support for the arrest and execution of Beria three years earlier,[3] as well as to legitimize his own recently consolidated power (seized from Stalin loyalists Viacheslav Molotov and Georgii Malenkov).

It was known as the "Secret Speech" because it was delivered at a closed session, and its actual text was printed only in 1989 (in the magazine "Известия ЦК КПСС" ("Izvestiya CK KPSS"; Reports of the Central Committee of the Party), no 3, March 1989), although many Party members had already been informed of the speech as soon as a month after Khrushchev delivered it.

In April 2007, The Guardian newspaper (UK) included the speech in their series on "Great Speeches of the 20th Century." [1]

Contents

History

The issue of mass repressions was recognized before the speech.

The inspiration for the Secret Speech came from both Khrushchev’s political savvy and the emerging facts about the Gulag camps and their population. High-ranking Party official Anastas Mikoyan, an ally of Khrushchev, had met with recently released Gulag prisoners and found that the phenomenon of baseless arrests was both more prevalent and widespread than had been recognized; he immediately conveyed this information to Khrushchev, who was preparing to make his political maneuvers.[4] Speaking to Mikoyan, one of the prisoners, Alexei Snegov, stated that “if you [Mikoyan and Khrushchev] do not disassociate yourselves from Stalin at the first Congress after his death, and if you do not recount his crimes, then you will become willing accomplices in these crimes.”[5] Another prisoner, Olga Shatunovskaya, recounted a story of her encounter with a Japanese spy, who commented that, while her crime was obvious, “you cursed Bolsheviks are in prison for no reason whatsoever.”[6]

The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (Pospelov (chairman), Komarov, Aristov, Shvernik), known as the Pospelov Commission, arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party central committee on January 31, 1955. The direct goal of the commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the 1934 XVII Party Congress.

The XVII congress was selected for investigations because it was known as "the Congress of Victors" in the country of "victorious socialism", and therefore the enormous number of "enemies" among the participants demanded explanation.

This commission presented evidence that during 1937–1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge) over one and a half million individuals were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,000 were executed.

While Khrushchev was not hesitant to point out the flaws in Stalinist practice in regard to the purges of the army and Party and the management of the Great Patriotic War, he was very careful to avoid any criticism of Stalin’s industrialization policy or Communist Party ideology. When discussing mass repressions, the absence of any commentary on the haphazard arrests of ordinary citizens is notable and, it must be assumed, purposeful, since occurrences like the brutality of collectivization served the interests of the Party and the State.[7] Khrushchev, after all, was still a staunch Party man, and he lauded Leninism and Communist ideology in his speech as often as he condemned Stalin’s actions. Stalin, Khrushchev argued, was the primary victim of the deleterious effect of the cult of personality,[8] which had, through his existing flaws, transformed him from a crucial part of the victories of Lenin into a paranoiac, easily influenced by the “rabid enemy of our Party,” Beria.[9]

Despite the denouncing of political repressions, the process of rehabilitation of victims of political repressions was slow, although the release of political prisoners from labor camps started soon after Stalin's death. Still, the victims of the Moscow Trials were cleared of all charges only in 1988.

Reports of the speech

Khrushchev began the speech shortly after midnight; it took some four hours to deliver. Shortly thereafter, reports of it were conveyed to the West by Reuters journalist John Rettie, who had been told about the speech by Kostya Orlov a few hours before Rettie was due to leave for Stockholm; it was therefore reported in the Western media in early March. Rettie believes the information came from Khruschev himself via an intermediary. [2]

On March 5, 1956, the Party Presidium ordered the reading of Khrushchev's Report at the meetings of all Communist and Komsomol organizations, with the invitation of non-members as well. Thus the contents of the report had become widely known in the country already in 1956, and the name "Secret Speech" is a misnomer. But as noted above, the full text was not officially released to the public until 1989. It is likely, although unprovable, that Mikoyan and Khrushchev were the architects of these local readings, as well as the leaking of the speech to Rettie through Orlov; Mikoyan's son, Sergo, and Khrushchev's son, Sergi, provide corroborating, although hardly definitive, statements of their fathers' intentions.[10][11]

However, the text of the speech was only slowly disclosed in the Eastern European countries. It was never disclosed to Western communist party members by their leaders, and most Western communists became aware of the details of the text after an American newspaper published a copy in mid-1956.

The content of the speech reached the west through a circuitous route. As noted above, a few copies of the speech were sent by order of the Soviet Politburo to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Shortly after the speech had been disseminated, a Polish journalist, Viktor Grayevsky, visited his girlfriend, Lucia Baranowski, who worked as a junior secretary in the office of the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Edward Ochab. On her desk was a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: "The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev." Grayevsky had heard rumors of the speech and, as a journalist, was interested in reading it. Baranowski allowed him to take the document home to read.

As it happened, Grayevsky, who was Jewish, and had made a recent trip to Israel to visit his sick father, decided to emigrate there. After he read the speech, he decided to take it to the Israeli Embassy and gave it to Yaakov Barmor who had helped Grayevsky make his trip to visit Grayevsky's sick father. Barmor was a Shin Bet representative; he photographed the document and sent the photographs to Israel.

By the afternoon of April 13, 1956, the Shin Bet in Israel had received the photographs. Israeli intelligence and United States intelligence had previously secretly agreed to cooperate on security matters. James Jesus Angleton was the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) head of counterintelligence and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. The photographs were delivered to him. On April 17, 1956, the photographs had reached the CIA chief Allen Dulles, who quickly informed U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June.[3]

Summary

The basic structure of the speech was as follows:

Excerpts

Aftermath

In 1956, a few months after the 20th Congress, Khrushchev's Secret Speech was published internationally. Khrushchev's speech was followed by a period of liberalisation known as Khrushchev's Thaw. In 1961 the body of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried outside the Kremlin wall.

This denunciation of such a prominent communist figure aroused fears within other communist leaders, those possessed of a similar personality cult, that they might face a similar threat to their legitimacy. Most notably, this can be said to have provided part of Mao Zedong's impetus for initiating the Anti-Rightist Movement.

In 2007, an American historian Grover Furr published a book where he maintained that most of "revelations" made by Khrushchev in the Secret Speech are false. Furr identified sixty-one assertions against Stalin and Beria in that Speech, and argued that at least forty-one of them are lies, i.e., Khrushchev had to have known he was making a false statement. In twenty other cases Khrushchev's statements are false but it is possible he did not know this. In one minor case Furr was not able to either verify or disprove a "revelation" by Khrushchev.[12]

References

  1. ↑ Tompson, William J. Khrushchev: A Political Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995
  2. ↑ William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2004
  3. ↑ Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 530-1.
  4. ↑ Tamara Eidelman, “Khrushchev’s secret speech,” Russian Life 49, no.1 (2006): 45, http://mutex.gmu.edu:2294/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=ITOF&docId=A140915270 &source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=viva_gmu&version=1.0
  5. ↑ Tamara Eidelman, “Khrushchev’s secret speech,” Russian Life 49, no.1 (2006): 45, http://mutex.gmu.edu:2294/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=ITOF&docId=A140915270 &source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=viva_gmu&version=1.0
  6. ↑ Tamara Eidelman, “Khrushchev’s secret speech,” Russian Life 49, no.1 (2006): 45, http://mutex.gmu.edu:2294/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=ITOF&docId=A140915270 &source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=viva_gmu&version=1.0
  7. ↑ William Henry Chamberlain, “Khrushchev’s War with Stalin’s Ghost,” Russian Review 21, no. 1 (1962): 3. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-0341%28196201%2921%3A1%3C3%3AKWWSG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D
  8. ↑ William Henry Chamberlain, “Khrushchev’s War with Stalin’s Ghost,” Russian Review 21, no. 1 (1962): 4. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-0341%28196201%2921%3A1%3C3%3AKWWSG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D
  9. ↑ Nikita S. Khrushchev, “The Secret Speech–On the Cult of Personality,” Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html. Accessed September 12, 2007.
  10. ↑ Tamara Eidelman, “Khrushchev’s secret speech,” Russian Life 49, no.1 (2006): 45, http://mutex.gmu.edu:2294/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=ITOF&docId=A140915270 &source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=viva_gmu&version=1.0.
  11. ↑ William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003), 283.
  12. ↑ Grover Furr, Антисталинская подлость ('Anti-Stalin Villany'), Moscow: Algoritm, 2007. ISBN:978-5-9265-0478-8],

See also

External links