On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе

личности и его последствиях», «O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh») was a
report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made to the 20th Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Khrushchev's speech
was sharply critical of the reign of deceased General Secretary and Premier Joseph
Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last
years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership
personality cult despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals ofcommunism.

The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that the audience reacted with
applause and laughter at several points.[2] There are also reports that some of those
present suffered heart attacks, and others later committed suicide.[3] The ensuing
confusion among many Soviet citizens, bred on the panegyrics and permanent praise
of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland,
where the days of protests and rioting ended with the Soviet army crackdown on
March 9, 1956.[4] In the West, the speech politically devastated the organised left; O kulcie jednostki i jego
the Communist Party USAalone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its następstwach, Warsaw, March 1956,
publication.[5] first edition of the Secret Speech,
published for the inner use in the
The speech was a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split, in which the People's PUWP. The CIA Director Allen Dulles
Republic of China (under Mao Zedong) and Albania (under Enver Hoxha) remembered: "the speech, never
condemned Khrushchev as arevisionist. In response, they formed theanti-revisionist published in the U.S.S.R., was of
great importance for theFree World.
movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Soviet Communist Party for
[6]
Eventually the text was found — but
allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin.
many miles from Moscow, where it
had been delivered. (…) I have
The speech was a milestone in the "Khrushchev Thaw". As a whole, the speech was
always viewed this as one of the
an attempt to draw the Soviet Communist Party closer to Leninism. However it major coups of my tour of duty in
possibly served Khrushchev's ulterior motives to legitimize and consolidate his intelligence.".[1]
control of the Communist party and government, after political struggles with
Georgy Malenkov and firm Stalin loyalists such as Vyacheslav Molotov, who were
involved to varying degrees in the purges. The Khrushchev report was known as the "Secret Speech" because it was delivered at an
unpublicized closed session of Communist Party delegates, with guests and members of the press excluded. The text of the
Khrushchev report was widely discussed in party cells already in early March, often with participation of non-party members;
however the official Russian text was openly published only in 1989 during the glasnost campaign of Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev.

Contents
Background
Reports of the speech
Summary
Influence
Footnotes
External links
Background
The issue of mass repressions was recognized before the speech. The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special
party commission (chairman Pyotr Pospelov, P. T. Komarov, Averky Aristov, and Nikolay Shvernik), known as the Pospelov
Commission, arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee on 31 January 1955. The direct goal of the
commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress, in 1934, of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.

The 17th 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 1937–38 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge) over one and a half
[7]
million individuals were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,500 were executed.

Reports of the speech

The public session of the 20th Congress had come to a formal end on 24 February 1956 when word was spread to delegates to return
to the Great Hall of the Kremlin for an additional "closed session", to which journalists, guests, and delegates from "fraternal parties"
from outside the USSR were not invited.[8] Special passes were issued to those eligible to participate, with an additional 100 former
ef [8]
Party members, recently released from the Soviet prison camp network, added to the assembly to add moralfect.

Nikolai Bulganin, chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and then an ally of Khrushchev, called the session into order and
immediately yielded the floor to Khrushchev,[8] who began his speech shortly after midnight. For the next four hours Khrushchev
delivered the "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" speech before stunned delegates.[8] Several people became ill during
[8]
the tense report and had to be removed from the hall.

Khrushchev read from a prepared report and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept.[9] No questions or debate
followed Khrushchev's presentation and delegates left the hall in a state of acute disorientation.[9] That same evening the delegates of
foreign Communist parties were called to the Kremlin and given the opportunity to read the prepared text of the Khrushchev speech,
which was treated as a top secret state document.[9]

On 1 March the text of the Khrushchev speech was distributed in printed form to senior Central Committee functionaries.[10] This
was followed on 5 March by a reduction of the document's secrecy classification from "Top Secret" to "Not For Publication."[11] The
Party Central Committee ordered the reading of Khrushchev's Report at all gatherings of Communist and Komsomol local units, with
non-Party activists invited to attend the proceedings.[11] The "Secret Speech" was therefore publicly read at literally thousands of
meetings, making the colloquial name of the report something of a misnomer.[11] Nevertheless, the full text was not officially
published in the Soviet press until 1989.[12]

Shortly after the conclusion of the speech, reports of its having taken place and its general content were conveyed to the West by
Reuters journalist John Rettie, who had been informed of the event a few hours before he was due to leave for Stockholm; it was
therefore reported in the Western media in early March. Rettie believed the information came from Khrushchev himself via an
intermediary.[13]

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 the nomenklatura, and most Western communists only became aware of the details of the text after the
New York Times (5 June 1956), Le Monde (6 June 1956) and The Observer (10 June 1956) published versions of the full text.

The content of the speech reached the west through a circuitous route. 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, Wiktor
Grajewski, visited his girlfriend, Lucja Baranowska, 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." Grajewski had heard rumors of the speech and, as a journalist, was interested in reading it.
[14][15]
Baranowska allowed him to take the document home to read.

As it happened, Grajewski was a PolishJew who had made a recent trip to Israel to visit his sick father and 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 Grajewski make
[14][15]
his trip. Barmor was aShin Bet representative; he photographed the document and sent the photographs to Israel.

By the afternoon of 13 April 1956, the Shin Bet in Israel 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 reached the CIA chief Allen Dulles, who quickly informed U.S. President Dwight D.
The New York Times in early June.[15]
Eisenhower. After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech to

Summary
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 (i.e., the USSR's involvement in World War II), 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.[16] Khrushchev was 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,[16] which had, through his existing flaws, transformed him from a crucial part of the
Lavrentiy Beria.[17]
victories of Lenin into a paranoiac, easily influenced by the "rabid enemy of our party",

The basic structure of the speech was as follows:

Repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality

Quotations from the classics ofMarxism–Leninism, which denounced the "cult of an individual", especially the
Karl Marx letter to a German worker which stated his antipathy toward it
Lenin's Testament, and remarks by Nadezhda Krupskaya (former People's Commissar for Education, and wife of
Lenin), about Stalin's character
Before Stalin, the fight withTrotskyism was purely ideological; Stalin introduced the notion of theenemy
" of the
people" to be used as "heavy artillery" from the late 1920s
Stalin violated the Party norms ofcollective leadership

Repression of the majority ofOld Bolsheviks and delegates of the XVII Party Congress, most of which were
workers and had joined the Communist Party before 1920. Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were declared
"counter-revolutionaries", 848 were executed, and 98 of 139 members and candidates to the Central
Committee were declared "enemies of the people".
After this repression, Stalin ceased to even consider the opinion of the collective of the party
Examples of repressions of some notableBolsheviks were presented in detail.
Stalin ordered that the persecution be enhanced:NKVD is "four years late" in crushing the opposition, according
to his principle of "aggravation of class struggle"

Practice of falsifications followed, to cope with "plans" for numbers of enemies to be uncovered.
Exaggerations of Stalin's role in theGreat Patriotic War (World War II)
Deportations of whole nationalities
Doctors' plot and Mingrelian Affair
Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names, etc.

Lyrics of the State Anthem of the Soviet Union(first version, 1944–53) which had references to Stalin
The non-awarding of theLenin State Prize since 1935, which should be corrected at once by the Supreme Soviet
and the Council of Ministers
Repudiating the socialist realist literary policy under Stalin, also known as
Zhdanovism, which affected literary works
Influence
On June 30, 1956, the Central Committee of the CPSU issued a resolution titled "On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its
Consequences" which served as the party's official and public pronouncement on the Stalin era. Written under the guidance of
Mikhail Suslov, it did not mention Khrushchev's specific allegations. "Complaining that Western political circles were exploiting the
[18]
revelation of Stalin's crimes, the resolution paid tribute to [Stalin's] services" and was relatively guarded in its criticisms of him.

Khrushchev's speech was followed by a period of liberalisation known as Khrushchev's Thaw, into the early 1960s. In 1961 the body
of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried in the
Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski criticized Khrushchev in 1978 for failing to make any analysis of the system Stalin presided
over. "Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how,
and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country
of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the most progressive and democratic system
of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatever. All that was certain was that the Soviet system
[19]
and the party itself remained impeccably pure and bore no responsibility for the tyrant's atrocities."

Western revisionist historians also tended to take a somewhat critical view of the speech. J. Arch Getty commented in 1985 that,
"Khrushchev's revelations... are almost entirely self-serving. It is hard to avoid the impression that the revelations had political
purposes in Khrushchev's struggle with Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich."[20] Historian Robert W. Thurston similarly argued in
1996 that Khrushchev "had much to gain in the attacks he made on his predecessor" and that neither his attacks on Beria nor his
claims in regards to Stalin's involvement in Kirov's death are particularly reliable.[21] A 2011 book titled Khrushchev Lied by
American pro-Stalin author Grover Furr takes an even stronger negative view of the speech, dissecting the speech itself directly.
According to Furr, all 61 allegations made in Khrushchev's speech "with only one minor exception" were "demonstrably false."[22]
However, Furr's book has been subject to heavy criticism for not adequately meeting the burden of proof. [23][24] Grover has
responded to such criticism, but has generally never addressed the points [25]
raised.

The historian Geoffrey Roberts has said in 2006 of Khrushchev's speech that it became "one of the key texts of western
historiography of the Stalin era. But many western historians were sceptical about Khrushchev's efforts to lay all the blame for past
communist crimes on Stalin".[26]

Footnotes
1. Allen Dulles: The Craft of Intelligence; 1963; p. 80.
2. Francis X. Clines (6 April 1989)."Soviets, After 33 Years, Publish Khrushchev's Anti-Stalin Speech" (https://www.nyti
mes.com/1989/04/06/world/soviets-after-33-years-publish-khrushchev-s-anti-stalin-speech.html) . New York Times.
Retrieved 29 February 2016.
3. From Our Own Correspondent. BBC Radio 4. 22 January 2009.
4. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; pp. 303–305.
5. Vivian Gornick. "When Communism Inspired Americans"(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when
-communism-inspired-americans.html). New York Times. Retrieved 1 May 2017.
6. "1964: On Khrushchov's Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the W
orld" (http://www.marxists.org/refer
ence/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm). marxists.org.
7. William Taubman: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era; 2003; Chapter 11.
8. Roy Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy
. Ellen Dahrendorf, trans.
Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 102.
9. Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p. 103.
10. Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p. 103-104.
11. Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p. 104.
12. The text was published in the magazineИзвестия ЦК КПСС (Izvestiya CK KPSS; Reports of the Central
Committee of the Party), #3, March 1989.
13. John Rettie, "The day Khrushchev denounced Stalin"(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_corres
pondent/4723942.stm), BBC, 18 February 2006.
14. "‫( "יש איזשהו נאום של חרושצ'וב מהוועידה‬http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=691848). ‫הארץ‬.
15. Melman, Yossi. "Trade secrets" (https://web.archive.org/web/20080217092411/http://www
.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/
ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=692298), Ha-aretz, 2006.
16. Chamberlain, William Henry. “Khrushchev’s War with Stalin’s Ghost” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/126780), Russian
Review 21, #1, 1962.
17. Khrushchev, Nikita S. "The Secret Speech–On the Cult of Personality"(http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khr
ushchev-secret1.html), Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook . Accessed September 12, 2007.
18. McClellan, Woodford. Russia: A History of the Soviet Period. Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1990. p. 239.
19. Kołakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth, and DissolutionVol. III. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1978. pp. 451-452.
20. Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938
. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985. p. 217.
21. Thurston, Robert W. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. p.22, 118.
22. Sven-Eric Holmstrom (2012). "Book Reviews: Khrushchev Lied".Socialism and Democracy. 26 (2): 120.
doi:10.1080/08854300.2012.686278(https://doi.org/10.1080%2F08854300.2012.686278) .
23. "Khrushchev Lied But What Is the Truth?" (https://mltoday.com/khrushchev-lied-but-what-is-the-truth). Retrieved
2017-03-28.
24. "A Pathetic Defence of Stalinist Repressions - Mainstream W
eekly" (http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3616.ht
ml). www.mainstreamweekly.net. Retrieved 2017-03-28.
25. "A Rejoinder to Grover Furr: Points Not Met - Mainstream W
eekly" (http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article4143.ht
ml). www.mainstreamweekly.net. Retrieved 2017-03-28.
26. Geoffrey Roberts. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. London: Yale University Press. 2006. pp.
3-4.

External links
Complete text of the speech (in English) in a contemporary pamphlet, with the original commentary by Nicolaevsky
Complete text of the speech (in Russian) in a contemporary pamphlet
The Personality Cult and Its Consequences(from a supplement byThe Guardian newspaper)
"Khrushchev's speech struck a blow at the totalitarian system"– Mikhail Gorbachev's commentary on the Secret
Speech from The Guardian's supplement
A "Stalinist" rebuttal of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", 1956
The day Khrushchev denounced Stalin: former Reuters correspondent John Rettie recounts how he reported
Khrushchev's speech to the world

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