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"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian:«О культе личности и его последствиях»,romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) was a report bySoviet leaderNikita Khrushchev,First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956.[1] Though popularly known as theSecret Speech (Russian:секретный доклад Хрущёва,romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), "secret" is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party andKomsomol organizations across theUSSR.[2] Khrushchev's speech sharply criticized the rule of the former General Secretary andPremierJoseph Stalin (died March 1953), particularly with respect to thepurges which had especially marked thelater years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered aleadershipcult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals ofcommunism.
The speech produced shocking effects in its day.[3] Reports state that some listeners suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of thegovernment and of the previously revered figure of Stalin.[2] The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised onpanegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent inGeorgia, Stalin's homeland, wheredays of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956.[4] The Israeli intelligence agencyMossad received a copy of Khrushchev's speech from thePolish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski and leaked it to the West.
The speech is central to the period of liberalization known as the "Khrushchev Thaw" in theSoviet bloc and to the process ofde-Stalinization.[5] It was cited as a major cause of theSino-Soviet split of 1961 to 1989 byChina (under ChairmanMao Zedong) and byAlbania (under First SecretaryEnver Hoxha), who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed theanti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path ofLenin and Stalin.[6] InNorth Korea, factions of theWorkers' Party of Korea unsuccessfullyattempted to remove ChairmanKim Il Sung in August 1956, criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, for developing a personality cult, for distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and for "distortions of socialist legality"[7] (i.e. usingarbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms ofStalinism against Kim Il Sung's actions.
The issue ofmass repressions was known to Soviet leaders well before the speech. The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (chairmanPyotr Pospelov, P. T. Komarov,Averky Aristov, andNikolai Shvernik), known as thePospelov 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 the17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934.
The 17th Congress was selected for investigations because it was known as "the Congress of Victors" in the country of "victorious socialism" and so the enormous number of "enemies" among the participants demanded explanation. The commission presented evidence that in 1937 and 1938 (the peak of the period known as theGreat Purge), over one-and-a-half million individuals, the majority being long-time CPSU members, were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,500 were executed.[8]
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 theKremlin for an additional "closed session" to which journalists, guests and delegates from "fraternal parties" from outside the Soviet Union were not invited.[2] Special passes were issued to those eligible to participate, with an additional 100 former party members, who had been recently released from the Soviet prison camp network, added to the assembly to add moral effect.[2]
PremierNikolai Bulganin, chairman of theCouncil of Ministers of the Soviet Union and then an ally of Khrushchev, called the session to order and immediately yielded the floor to Khrushchev,[2] who began his speech shortly after midnight on 25 February. For the next four hours, Khrushchev delivered "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" before stunned delegates.[2] Several people became ill during the tense report and had to be removed from the hall.[2]
Khrushchev read from a prepared report, and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept.[2] No questions or debate followed Khrushchev's presentation and delegates left the hall in a state of acute disorientation.[2] The 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.[2]
On 1 March, the text of the Khrushchev speech was distributed in printed form to senior Central Committee functionaries.[2] That was followed, on 5 March, by a reduction of the document's secrecy classification from "Top Secret" to "Not for Publication".[2] The Party Central Committee ordered that Khrushchev's Report be read at all gatherings of Communist andKomsomol local units, with non-party activists invited to attend the proceedings.[2] Therefore, the "Secret Speech" was read publicly at thousands of meetings, making the colloquial name of the document something of a misnomer.[2] The full text was officially published in the Soviet press in 1989.[2]
Shortly after the conclusion of the speech, reports of its delivery, and its general content, were conveyed to the West byReuters journalistJohn Rettie, after a Soviet acquaintance briefed him about the speech a few hours before Rettie left forStockholm on holiday. It was therefore reported in Western media in early March. Rettie came to believe the information came from Khrushchev himself, via the intermediary.[9]
The content of the speech reached the West through a circuitous route. A few copies of the speech were sent by order of theSoviet Politburo to leaders of theEastern Bloc countries. Shortly after the speech had been disseminated, aPolish-Jewish journalist, Wiktor Grajewski, visited his girlfriend, Łucja Baranowska, who worked as a junior secretary in the office of theFirst Secretary of the Polish United Workers' 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 rumours of the speech and, as a journalist, was interested in reading it. Baranowska allowed him to take the document home to read.[10][11]
As it happened, Grajewski had made a recent trip toIsrael to visit his sick father, and resolved 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 undertake his trip. Barmor, aShin Bet representative, took photographs of the document and sent them to Israel.[10][11][12]
By the afternoon of 13 April 1956, the Shin Bet in Israel had received the photographs. Israeli intelligence and United States intelligence had secretly agreed previously to co-operate on security matters. The photographs were delivered toJames Jesus Angleton, theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) head of counterintelligence, and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. On 17 April 1956, they reached the CIA chief,Allen Dulles, who quickly informed US PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower. After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech toThe New York Times in early June.[11]
"...the speech, never published in the U.S.S.R., was of great importance for theFree World. Eventually the text was found – but many miles from Moscow, where it had been delivered. ... I have always viewed this as one of the major coups of my tour of duty in intelligence."
— Allen Dulles[13]
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 theGreat Patriotic War, the Soviet Union's involvement inWorld War II, he was very careful to avoid any criticism ofStalin's industrialization policy or party ideology. Khrushchev was a staunch party man and 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,[14] which, through his existing flaws, had transformed him from a crucial part of the victories of Lenin into a paranoiac man who was easily influenced by the "rabid enemy of our party",Lavrentiy Beria.[15]
The basic structure of the speech was as follows:
On 30 June 1956, the Central Committee of the party issued a resolution, "On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences",[16] which served as the party's official and public pronouncement on the Stalin era. Written under the guidance ofMikhail Suslov, it did not mention Khrushchev's specific allegations. "Complaining that Western political circles were exploiting the revelation of Stalin's crimes, the resolution paid tribute to [Stalin's] services" and was relatively guarded in its criticisms of him.[17]
Khrushchev's speech was followed by a period of liberalization, known as theKhrushchev Thaw, into the early 1960s. In 1961, the body of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried in theKremlin Wall Necropolis.
Polish philosopherLeszek Kołakowski criticized Khrushchev in 1978 for failing to make any analysis of the system Stalin presided over, stating:
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 [allegedly] 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 and the party itself remainedimpeccably pure and bore no responsibility for the tyrant's atrocities.[18]
Bangladeshi historian A. M. Amzad commented on the speech:
It(the speech) was an undesirable, uncalled for and irresponsible act in terms of the ideology of the Soviet Union. It was designed to determine Khrushchev's political fate. Even before the Twentieth Congress, arrangements were made to resolve the ills of Stalin's dictatorship. Thus, such criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress was deliberate.[19]
Western 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 withMolotov,Malenkov, andKaganovich".[20] The historianGeoffrey Roberts said Khrushchev's speech 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".[21]
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