Something extraordinary happened in Moscow late in the evening of February 25, 1956. The delegates to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party were preparing to go to bed when they were suddenly ordered back to the assembly hall. “Quick! Hurry!”
St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin was at that time the Soviet Union’s most important political meeting chamber. There the party’s First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, was waiting for them. The doors were closed, and before he mounted the podium, the delegates were strictly instructed not to take notes of the speech.
“Comrades,” Khrushchev said, surveying the hall. Over the next four hours he would shake the party, the Soviet Union, and the world. It did not take long before he began to lash out at his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. Stalin! The greatest man under heaven, Lenin’s faithful disciple, the Marxist-Leninist genius, the father of nations, and much more.
Three years had passed since Stalin’s death. No successor had been formally appointed, but in the ensuing power struggle Khrushchev had emerged on top. He himself had taken part in purges, signed death warrants, and survived by adapting. Precisely for that reason, he had gained insight into the dangers of the system.
Now, while the proletarians of the Soviet Union crept under their woolen blankets, the moment had come to settle accounts with the Stalin era—above all with the unbridled cult of Stalin.
“We must seriously consider the question of the cult of personality,” Khrushchev declared. “But we cannot allow what I am about to say to leak out, especially not to the press. That is precisely why we are discussing this here, at a closed session. We must not give ammunition to the enemy or wash our dirty linen before their eyes.”
The delegates quickly realized they were listening to a historic reckoning. For years they had praised Stalin. Several grew uneasy, and according to contemporary accounts some had to be carried out after fainting.
Khrushchev pointed out that before his death in 1924, Lenin had expressed grave concern about Stalin’s character and conduct. Lenin had even suggested replacing him with someone else—someone with “greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater kindness, and a less capricious temperament.” But that had not happened. Instead, Stalin had succeeded in amassing even more power. By the time he finally passed away in 1953, he had held the country in an iron grip for nearly thirty years.
At the same time as Stalin fostered a boundless cult of himself, he grew increasingly suspicious of others. Khrushchev accused him of persecuting and killing people, including party comrades, long after the revolution had triumphed. As an example, he noted that 98 of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected at the 1934 Congress had been arrested and executed. Most of the executions had taken place in 1937 and 1938, when the country was haunted by the “Moscow Trials.”
The same fate befell the majority of the delegates at that congress. Of the 1,966 who took part, 1,108 were later arrested and charged with counterrevolutionary crimes. Many were liquidated. “This fact alone shows how absurd, wild, and contrary to reason the accusations were,” he thundered.
Khrushchev went on to point out that the Red Army had also been subjected to Stalin’s purges, “literally from the level of company and battalion commanders up to the highest military centers.” Even after Hitler had attacked Poland and unleashed the Second World War, the purges continued unabated until 1941. The result was a severely weakened army that proved unable to withstand Nazi Germany when it mattered most.
“In many of our novels, films, and scholarly historical studies, Stalin’s role in the Great Patriotic War is portrayed in a completely improbable manner,” Khrushchev continued. People had been told that even before the outbreak of war Stalin had devised a grand strategic plan to defeat Hitler. The plan supposedly involved allowing the Germans to advance all the way to Moscow and Stalingrad before launching a counteroffensive and crushing the enemy. But the truth was different, Khrushchev said, claiming that Stalin and the party leadership had taken the threatening signals from Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo far too lightly before the war.
“We must analyze this question very thoroughly, because it has enormous significance,” he emphasized.
For many Soviets, the Second World War was the collective heroic deed that legitimized Stalin’s postwar regime. To suggest that he bore primary responsibility for the catastrophe of 1941 was, for many, the most shocking part of the speech.
When the war ended, Stalin committed new mistakes, Khrushchev continued—not only at home but also in foreign policy. He mentioned Yugoslavia as an example.
“I remember the first days when the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was artificially inflated. Once, when I came from Kiev to Moscow, I was invited to see Stalin. He pointed to a copy of a letter recently sent to Tito and asked me, ‘Have you read this?’ Without waiting for my answer, he said, ‘I will shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito. He will fall…’
But Tito did not fall. However much Stalin shook—not only his little finger, but everything he could shake—Tito did not fall. Why? Because Tito had behind him a people who had gone through a hard school in the struggle for freedom and independence, and who supported their leaders. You see what Stalin’s megalomania led to. He had completely lost his sense of reality; he displayed his suspicion and arrogance not only toward individuals in the Soviet Union but also toward entire parties and nations.”
When Khrushchev concluded his speech, there was no applause. “It was as if the floor had disappeared beneath us. Not because we loved Stalin—but because our entire reality had been built around him,” one listener later wrote in his memoirs.
The delegates rose slowly and left the hall without speaking to one another. They had been told that the speech was strictly secret and was not to be discussed outside approved party meetings. Yet already in early March it began circulating internally in Eastern Europe, and on June 4 the New York Times published it in full.
In the West it was initially received with skepticism. Was it really authentic?
After examining both language and content, the CIA concluded that it was credible. Reactions in Eastern Europe pointed in the same direction. Meanwhile, China’s Mao Zedong responded with anger and alarm. For Mao, Khrushchev’s reckoning was dangerous for several reasons. He himself was the object of a growing personality cult. If Stalin could be condemned posthumously by his own party, could the same not one day happen to Mao in China?
Mao believed Khrushchev was undermining the authority of the party and giving “the enemy” ideological ammunition. In Eastern Europe, the speech indeed created expectations of reform and greater national autonomy. In Poland it led to a political thaw, and in Hungary it helped spark the uprising later that year, which ended with Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Budapest.
Khrushchev’s speech marked the beginning of the split between Moscow and Beijing. China now had an opportunity to present itself as the standard-bearer of the “true” socialism—and seized it eagerly. In the following years the two communist parties gradually drifted apart. At an international communist conference in Moscow in 1960, it became clear to all that the era of unity was over.
The conflict intensified in the following years with a bitter public polemic. Meanwhile, Stalin’s embalmed body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and buried by the Kremlin Wall. Busts and statues of him were also taken down. The work was carried out as discreetly as possible, often at night, for the party leadership was well aware that Stalin still had his supporters.
In China, by contrast, the cult of Mao rose to unprecedented heights. During the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and ended ten years later, he was hailed as “the Sun of Mankind” and “the Great Leader of all the world’s peoples.” His Little Red Book was distributed in nearly a billion copies and published in 65 languages. Meanwhile, the Chairman’s frenzied Red Guards ran amok across the country. Stalin, too, was celebrated as “a great Marxist-Leninist and proletarian revolutionary,” though he did not reach the same exalted heights as Mao.
When Mao finally passed away in September 1976, millions of Chinese breathed a sigh of relief. So did the Soviet leaders, who now hoped China would become a more rational neighbor. As one Soviet diplomat later put it: “We sent flowers, but shed no tears.”
