On the Personality Cult and its Consequences

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On the Personality Cult and its Consequences , commonly known as the Secret Speech was a report to the 20th Party Congress on February 25 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he denounced the actions of Joseph Stalin.

It was the first major break by Soviet leadership from the long domination of Stalinism. It was presented as an attempt to draw the Communist Party of the Soviet Union closer to Leninism. Stalin was condemned for violating Leninist principles and Communist Party norms.

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 TseKa KPSS" - Reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU), no 3, March 1989), although many Party members had already been informed of the speech one month after Khrushchev delivered it.

Contents

1 History
2 Reports of the speech
3 Summary
4 Excerpts
5 See also
6 External links

History

The issue of mass repressions was recognized before the speech. In fact, the speech was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (Pospelov, Komarov, Aristov, Shvernik (chairman)), known as the Shvernik Commission, arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party central committee on January 31 1955. A direct goal of the commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the XVII Party Congress. This commission presented evidence that during 1937–1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge) over one and a half million Party members were convicted for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,000 were executed. These numbers were compiled from the execution lists signed by Stalin. The actual death toll of the Great Purge was much larger, when accounting for the repressions of peasants and other citizens. 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.

Despite the denouncing of political repressions, the process of rehabilitation of Old Bolsheviks 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

Shortly after the speech was made, reports of it were conveyed to the West by Reuters journalist John Rettie, who had been told about the speech the night a few hours before he 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.[link]

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.

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 girl friend, 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 was Jewish and, after a recent trip to Israel to visit his sick father, had decided to immigrate 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. Unbeknownst to Grayevsky, Barmor was a Shin Bet representative. Barmor 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 CIA's 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 President Dwight Eisenhower. After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June. [link]

Summary

The basic structure of the speech was as follows:

Repudiation of Stalin's personality cult
*Quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, which denounced the "cult of an individual" (i.e. the cult of personality, see above)
*Lenin's Testament and remarks by Nadezhda Krupskaya about Stalin's character
*Before Stalin, the fight with the Trotskyists was purely ideological; Stalin introduced the notion of the "enemy of the people" to be used as "heavy artillery"
*Stalin violated Party norms of collective leadership
**Repression of the majority of Old 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.
*Examples of repressions of some notable Bolsheviks are presented in detail
*Stalin ordered that the persecution be enhanced: "NKVD is four years behind the schedule"
**Practice of falsifications followed, to cope with "plans" for numbers of enemies to be uncovered.
*Exaggerations of the role of Stalin in the Great Patriotic War (World War II)
*Deportations of whole nationalities
*Doctors' plot
*Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names, etc.

Excerpts

"After Stalin's death, the Central Committee began to implement a policy of explaining concisely and consistently that it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior."
"We have to consider seriously and analyze correctly this matter in order that we may preclude any possibility of a repetition in any form whatever of what took place during the life of Stalin, ... who practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything which opposed him, but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts. Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed these concepts or tried to prove his [own] viewpoint and the correctness of his [own] position was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation."
"Stalin originated the concept 'enemy of the people.' This term automatically made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven. It made possible the use of the cruelest repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent… On the whole, the only proof of guilt actually used, against all norms of current legal science, was the 'confession' of the accused himself. As subsequent probing has proven, 'confessions' were acquired through physical pressures against the accused. This led to glaring violations of revolutionary legality and to the fact that many entirely innocent individuals… became victims."
"Vladimir Ilyich demanded uncompromising dealings with the enemies of the Revolution and of the working class and when necessary resorted ruthlessly to such methods… Lenin used such methods, however, only against actual class enemies [and] only in the most necessary cases, when the exploiting classes were still in existence and were vigorously opposing the Revolution… Stalin, on the other hand, used extreme methods and mass repressions at a time when the Revolution was already victorious, when the Soviet state was strengthened, …when our Party was politically consolidated and had strengthened itself both numerically and ideologically."
"Many thousands of honest and innocent Communists have died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such 'cases' …as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others. In the same manner were fabricated the 'cases' against eminent Party and state workers -- Kosior, Chubar, Postyshev, Kosarev, and others… The vicious practice was condoned of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons… whose sentences were prepared in advance… Mass repressions had a negative influence on the moral-political condition of the Party, created a situation of uncertainty, contributed to the spreading of unhealthy suspicion, and sowed distrust among Communists."
"In the same vein, let us take for instance our historical and military films and some [of our] literary creations. They make us feel sick. Their true objective is propagating the theme of praising Stalin as a military genius. Let us recall the film, The Fall of Berlin. Here only Stalin acts. He issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty Chairs. Only one man approaches him to report something to him -- it is Poskrebyshev, his loyal shield-bearer. [laughter] And where is the military command? Where is the Politburo? Where is the Government? What are they doing, and with what are they engaged? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody, he does not reckon with anyone. He asks no one for advice. Everything is shown to the people in this false light. Why? To surround Stalin with glory-- contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth."
"All the more monstrous are those acts whose initiator was Stalin and which were rude violations of the basic Leninist principles [behind our] Soviet state's nationalities policies. We refer to the mass deportations of entire nations from their places of origin, together with all Communists and Komsomols without any exception… Thus, at the end of 1943, when there already had been a permanent change of fortune at the front in favor of the Soviet Union, a decision concerning the deportation of all the Karachays from the lands on which they lived was taken and executed. In the same period, at the end of December 1943, the same lot befell the Kalmyks of the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic. In March 1944, all the Chechens and Ingushi were deported and the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was liquidated… Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, [Stalin] would have deported them also." [laughter]
"I recall the first days when the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began to be blown up artificially. Once, when I came from Kiev to Moscow, I was invited to visit Stalin, who, pointing to the copy of a letter recently sent to Tito, asked me, 'Have you read this?' Not waiting for my reply, he answered, 'I will shake my little finger -- and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.' We have paid dearly for this 'shaking of the little finger.' This statement reflected Stalin's mania for greatness, but he acted just that way: 'I will shake my little finger -- and there will be no Kosior'; 'I will shake my little finger once more and Postyshev and Chubar will be no more'; 'I will shake my little finger again -- and Voznesensky, Kuznetsov and many others will disappear.' But this did not happen to Tito. No matter how much or how little Stalin shook, not only his little finger but everything else that he could shake, Tito did not fall. Why? The reason was that, in this instance of disagreement with [our] Yugoslav comrades, Tito had behind him a state and a people who had had a serious education in fighting for liberty and independence, a people who gave support to its leaders. You see what Stalin's mania for greatness led to. He completely lost consciousness of reality. He demonstrated his suspicion and haughtiness not only in relation to individuals in the USSR, but in relation to whole parties and nations."
"We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all; we must… return to and actually practice in all our ideological work the most important theses of Marxist-Leninist science about the people as the creator of history and as the creator of all material and spiritual good of humanity... [We must] continue systematically and consistently the work done by the Party's Central Committee during the last years, a work characterized by minute observation in all Party organizations, from the bottom to the top, of the Leninist principles of Party leadership... characterized by the wide practice of criticism and self-criticism. [We must] to restore completely the Leninist principles of Soviet socialist democracy, expressed in the Constitution of the Soviet Union, to fight willfulness of individuals abusing their power. The evil caused by acts violating revolutionary socialist legality which have accumulated during a long time as a result of the negative influence of the cult of the individual has to be completely corrected."

External links

[Annotated Text of the Secret Speech]
[A "Stalinist" rebuttal of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" from the CPUSA, 1956]
[The day Khrushchev denounced Stalin]: former Reuters correspondent John Rettie recounts how he reported Khrushchev's speech to the world