Khrushchev's Secret Speech (1956): Stalin Denounced in Moscow

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech was the address in which Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Communist Party, denounced Joseph Stalin before a closed session of the party’s 20th Congress in Moscow on 25 February 1956. Titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, it accused the dead dictator of mass arrests, torture and the killing of loyal communists. Barely three years after Stalin’s death, it shattered his image as an infallible leader and set off shockwaves across the communist world.

Background

Stalin died in March 1953 after almost three decades in power (see death of Stalin). His successors quickly arrested and executed the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, released some prisoners and quietly dropped the most extreme forms of Stalin worship. Yet in public Stalin was still honoured as Lenin’s heir, and millions of people remained in labour camps or exile.

Khrushchev, who had become First Secretary in September 1953, was competing with rivals such as Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. In late 1955 the party leadership set up a commission headed by Pyotr Pospelov to study the repression of party members. Its findings on the scale of the killings in 1937–38 shocked even those who had served under Stalin, and Khrushchev pressed for them to be presented to the congress despite objections from Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov.

What Khrushchev said

The 20th Congress met from 14 to 25 February 1956. On the final day, after the formal sessions ended and foreign guests were excluded, Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet delegates for several hours. He read from Lenin’s so-called Testament of 1922–23, which had called Stalin too rude and suggested removing him as General Secretary, a document long suppressed in the Soviet Union.

He then laid out evidence of crimes. Of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress in 1934, he said, 98 had been arrested and shot, most of them in 1937–38. Of the 1,966 delegates to that congress, 1,108 had been arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes. Confessions had been extracted through torture, which Stalin had personally sanctioned.

Khrushchev also blamed Stalin for the Soviet Union’s lack of preparation for the German invasion of 1941 and for costly decisions during the war, for the mass deportation of whole peoples such as the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Balkars, for the “Leningrad Affair” purge of the late 1940s and for the fabricated Doctors’ Plot of 1953. He condemned the “cult of personality” that had raised one man above the party.

According to later accounts by people present, the delegates listened in near silence, broken by occasional gasps; some were visibly shaken. No discussion followed. The congress simply resolved, without publishing the report, to approve it and to instruct the Central Committee to overcome the cult of personality and its consequences.

What he left out

The speech was carefully limited. Khrushchev did not question the one-party system, forced collectivisation or the famines of the early 1930s. He did not rehabilitate Stalin’s old rivals such as Nikolai Bukharin or Leon Trotsky, and he dated the abuses mainly from 1934, after the destruction of the opposition. He focused on the suffering of loyal communists rather than of ordinary citizens.

He also passed over his own role. As party chief in Moscow and then Ukraine in the 1930s, Khrushchev had himself taken part in the purges. The speech presented the surviving leadership as people who had been unable to resist Stalin, not as participants.

How the speech spread

The speech was not printed in the Soviet press, but it was hardly a secret for long. In the weeks after the congress its text was read aloud at thousands of party, Komsomol and workplace meetings across the Soviet Union, often provoking heated discussion. Copies were sent to the leaderships of the Eastern European parties.

In Poland, where many copies were made, the journalist Wiktor Grajewski obtained one in April 1956 and passed it to Israeli intelligence, which forwarded it to the United States. The US State Department released the text in early June 1956, and it was printed in full in The New York Times and other papers worldwide. In the Soviet Union itself the full text was published only in 1989, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost.

Key people

• Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), First Secretary of the Communist Party, who delivered the speech.
• Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), Soviet dictator from the late 1920s until his death, the target of the speech.
• Pyotr Pospelov (1898–1979), party ideologist whose commission gathered the evidence used in the speech.
• Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Stalin’s long-time foreign minister, who opposed the denunciation.

Consequences

Inside the Soviet Union the speech opened the period known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Commissions were sent to the camps, and hundreds of thousands of prisoners were released and rehabilitated in 1956–57. Censorship eased for a time. But the speech also caused confusion and anger: in Tbilisi, in Stalin’s native Georgia, protests in his defence in March 1956 were broken up by troops, with dozens killed.

In Eastern Europe the effect was explosive. The Polish leader Bolesław Bierut died in Moscow in March 1956, shortly after the congress, and the debate unleashed in Poland led to the Poznań workers’ revolt in June and the return of Władysław Gomułka in October. In Hungary criticism of Stalinism grew into the Hungarian Revolution, crushed by Soviet troops in November. Western communist parties lost members, especially after Hungary.

Mao Zedong was angered that Moscow had attacked Stalin without consulting other parties and saw the speech as a sign of “revisionism”, one of the roots of the Sino-Soviet split. At home, Khrushchev’s rivals tried to remove him in June 1957, but he defeated this “Anti-Party Group”. At the 22nd Congress in October 1961 he renewed the attack on Stalin, and Stalin’s body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum.

Legacy

The speech had limits that later historians stress. Rehabilitation was selective, the party kept its monopoly of power and the full scale of Stalin’s terror, including the millions of ordinary victims of the Gulag, collectivisation and famine, was not officially discussed until the late 1980s. Under Leonid Brezhnev, who replaced Khrushchev in 1964, criticism of Stalin was quietly reduced.

Yet the speech could not be undone. It shaped a generation of Soviet citizens, later called the “children of the Twentieth Congress”, who included many of the reformers of the Gorbachev era. Survivors returning from the camps wrote memoirs, and works such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 with Khrushchev’s approval, became possible only because the taboo had been broken.

Timeline

• 1953, 5 March: Stalin dies.
• 1953, September: Khrushchev becomes First Secretary of the party.
• 1955, December: The Pospelov commission is set up to examine the purges.
• 1956, 14 February: The 20th Party Congress opens in Moscow.
• 1956, 25 February: Khrushchev delivers the Secret Speech at a closed session.
• 1956, March: Pro-Stalin protests in Tbilisi are suppressed.
• 1956, June: The text is released in the West.
• 1961, October: Stalin’s body is removed from the Lenin Mausoleum.

Why it matters

The Secret Speech was the first official admission by Soviet leaders that their system had committed mass crimes against its own people. Though limited and self-serving, it freed hundreds of thousands of prisoners, weakened Stalinist rulers across Eastern Europe and showed that communist orthodoxy could be questioned from the top. Its effects, from Budapest to Beijing, shaped the Cold War for the next decade.