Seventy years ago today, on Feb. 25 1956, then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took to the podium in Moscow’s Palace of Congresses and spoke for over four hours on “The Cult of Personality and its Consequences.”

In an address that quickly (if inaccurately) became known as the “Secret Speech,” Khrushchev attacked his predecessor Josef Stalin for orchestrating state terror, held him personally responsible for the imprisonment, deportation, torture or death of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens and mocked his leadership of World War II and foreign policy. 

The revelations profoundly shocked listeners: senior communists asked to stay behind beyond the end of open proceedings of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Many were left in tears and at least one suffered a cardiac arrest. 

The speech soon ceased to be a secret, if it ever had been. It was fiercely debated at party meetings and around kitchen tables across the Soviet Union. A version of the text then leaked abroad, making headline news globally. Over the rest of 1956, it set off pro-Stalinist unrest in Georgia and anti-Stalinist protest in Poland and most famously in Hungary, where Soviet troops had to be deployed to restore order. 

As Russian media last week marked the seventieth anniversary of the opening of the Twentieth Congress, its concluding speech has been likened to the Tsar-bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested in the U.S.S.R. It “blew up the image of Stalin,” claimed Komsomolskaya Pravda. Yet state media outlets also insist that “the court of history still has not passed a definitive judgement on Stalin” and that “the cult of Stalin did not disappear with its ‘dethroning’.”  

Both these assessments have some truth to them. They capture why the speech continues to matter, seven decades after it was performed and nearly four decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, amid sharper criticism of the Soviet past.

It is impossible to imagine Russian leaders today condemning Stalin and Stalinism so strongly, as signs of the reappearance of the Stalin cult are increasingly visible nationwide. But the supposed secrecy of the speech, its limited criticisms of Stalin, and Soviet anxieties about the explosive potential of de-Stalinization all resonate with the Putin regime’s cautious handling of the Stalin question.

The Gulag History Museum........

© The Moscow Times