"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" () was a speech given by Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, on February 25, 1956. It was formally a report by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (a position held by Khrushchev) to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Translation.
It is popularly known as the Secret Speech () because the session was not open to journalists or non-party members, and the Central Committee classified it as "not for publication". Copies of the speech were read out at thousands of local meetings of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Komsomol organizations across the USSR, so its general content was widely known. The full text circulated informally and was published in the West within weeks, but was not published in the Soviet Union until 1989.Medvedev, Roy, and Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. Translated by Ellen Dahrendorf. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 2003; pp. 102-104
Khrushchev's speech sharply criticized the rule of Joseph Stalin, the previous Soviet leader who had died in March 1953. Khrushchev condemned Stalin's purges, particularly the Great Purge of the late 1930s. He also charged Stalin with having fostered a cult of personality in himself as national leader, while ostensibly supporting communist ideals. The speech initiated the period of liberalization known as the "Khrushchev Thaw" in the Soviet bloc and the process of de-Stalinization.
The speech shocked party members. Contemporary reports state that some listeners suffered heart attacks and inspired suicides, due to the shock Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the Communist government under Stalin, a previously revered figure. In Tbilisi, Georgia (Stalin's native country) widespread demonstrations by pro-Stalin protestors took place from March 4–10, 1956. They began on the 3rd anniversary of Stalin's death in reaction to the Secret Speech. On March 9, 1956, the Soviet army fired on the protestors; casualty numbers are disputed in the range of dozens to hundreds.Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; pp. 303–305. Other (less violent) popular demonstrations against Stalin's legacy took place in cities and gulags across the Soviet Union.
Background
After Stalin's death, thousands of political prisoners and deported persons returned to the USSR, and Stalin's influential police chief Lavrentiy Beria's arrest and execution expanded knowledge of Stalin's crimes. Khrushchev was a key figure in exposing information about Stalin's crimes and working to undo some of his injustices, such as false imprisonments.
The issue of mass repressions was known to Soviet leaders well before the speech. The Pospelov Commission (chairman Pyotr Pospelov, P.T. Komarov, Averky Aristov, and Nikolai Shvernik), created by Khrushchev on December 31, 1955, had investigated the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934. The speech's content was based on the special commission's findings.
The Pospelov Commission targeted the 17th Congress 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 met in early 1956 and presented evidence that in 1937 and 1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge), Stalin had over one-and-a-half million individuals arrested for "anti-Soviet activities," of whom over 680,500 were executed, the majority being long-time CPSU members.William Taubman: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era; 2003; Chapter 11,12.
After hearing the contents of the Pospelov Commission's report, Khrushchev decided he had an obligation to expose the crimes of Stalin. On February 13, the Secret Speech was authorized. In the following days before the speech, Khrushchev, Pospelov, Aristov, and other party members created, contributed to, and edited the speech.
Speech 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 the Kremlin for an additional "closed session" to which journalists, guests and delegates from "fraternal parties" from outside the Soviet Union were not invited. 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.
Premier Nikolai Bulganin, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union and then an ally of Khrushchev, called the session to order and immediately yielded the floor to Khrushchev, 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. Several people became ill during the tense report and had to be removed from the hall.
Khrushchev read from a prepared report, and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept. No questions or debate followed Khrushchev's presentation and delegates left the hall in a state of acute disorientation. 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.
Summary Khrushchev presented to the Congress a speech which denounced Stalin and exalted Lenin. He began his speech with a recount of the conflict between Stalin and Lenin. He presented on the contents of the Pospelov report and mass repression. He accused Stalin of many errors from the time before and during World War II. He touched on the exiles of entire peoples during the war as well. He also accused Stalin of foreign policy and agricultural policy failures. Khrushchev did not report on deportations from Poland or the Baltic, the Katyn Massacre, Holodomor, Dekulakization, and other atrocities during the Stalin era that were not a result of Stalin's singular direct action.Chamberlain, William Henry. "Khrushchev's War with Stalin's Ghost", Russian Review 21, #1, 1962. He failed to mention nonparty members that were victims of Stalin. 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, 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.Khrushchev, Nikita S. "The Secret SpeechOn the Cult of Personality", Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook. Accessed 12 September 2007.
The basic structure of the speech was as follows: Repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality. Quotations from the classics of Marxism–Leninism which denounced the "cult of an individual", especially the Karl Marx letter to a German worker that stated his antipathy toward it. Lenin's Testament and remarks by Nadezhda Krupskaya (former People's Commissar for Education and wife of Lenin), about Stalin's character, and Lenin's recommendation to remove Stalin from his position as Secretary General of the party. Before Stalin, the fight with Trotskyism was purely ideological; Stalin introduced the notion of the "enemy of the people" to be used as "heavy artillery" from the late 1920s. Stalin violated the party norms of collective leadership. Repression of the majority of Old Bolsheviks and delegates of the 17th Congress, most of whom were workers and had joined the party before 1920. Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were later declared "counter-revolutionaries"; 848 were executed. 98 of the 139 delegates who had become members or candidate members of the Central Committee were declared "enemies of the people". After the repression, Stalin ceased even to consider the collective opinion of the party. Examples of repression of some notable Bolsheviks were presented in detail. Stalin's order for the persecution to be enhanced: the NKVD was "four years late" in crushing the opposition, according to his principle of "aggravation of class struggle". Falsification of evidence and records to meet Stalin's "plans" for the number of enemies to be uncovered. Stalin's exaggeration of his role in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Deportations of whole nationalities. The Doctors' plot and Mingrelian affair. Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names and so on. Lyrics of the State Anthem of the Soviet Union (first version, 1944–1953), which had references to Stalin. The non-awarding of the Lenin State Prize since 1935, which should be corrected at once by the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers. Repudiating the socialist realist literary policy under Stalin, also known as Zhdanovism, which affected literary works.
Circulation
On 1 March, the text of the Khrushchev speech was distributed in printed form to senior Central Committee functionaries. That was followed, on 5 March, by a reduction of the document's secrecy classification from "Top Secret" to "Not for Publication". The Party Central Committee ordered that Khrushchev's Report be read at all gatherings of Communist and Komsomol local units, with non-party activists invited to attend the proceedings. More than 25 million people heard the speech's contents through this process.Matitiahu Mayzel (2003). "Israeli Intelligence and the leakage of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech"". Journal of Israeli History. 32 (2): 257–283. doi:10.1080/13531042.2013.822730. S2CID 143346034. The Soviet press officially published the full text of the speech in 1989, during the waning years of the USSR.
The CPSU was not the only group circulating the speech. While the Central Committee determined that the speech must stay a secret as it had the ability to threaten the regime, Khrushchev could only gain from its circulation. The speech would insulate his power and force a policy of de-Stalinization across the communist world. Khrushchev's circulation of the speech had to be covert, so he used a method of "controlled, gradual, limited leaks" using the KGB.
The spread of the speech began immediately. Shortly after the conclusion of the speech, a Soviet acquaintance urgently briefed Reuters journalist John Rettie, then stationed in Moscow, about Khrushchev's speech and its general content. After consulting with his boss at Reuters, together they decided the leaked information was credible. He subsequently published a story on the Secret Speech, requesting that his name and Moscow byline be removed. In mid-March Rettie confirmed the rumors spreading concerning the Secret Speech to the western press. In retrospect, Rettie believes that the leak was authorized by Khrushchev himself.
The Polish government also held a crucial role in the spread of the speech. They made thousands of copies, contacted news outlets, and played the speech in its full length on the Polish radio. Due to the widespread dissemination of the speech throughout the Soviet world, it is highly likely that multiple copies reached the CIA and western media, and that it wasn't one singular leak that reached outside of the east.
The speech was known worldwide within two weeks, and The New York Times published the report in its entirety on 5 June 1956. Once it was published by The New York Times the speech was translated and published in countries across the globe. Therefore, the "Secret Speech" as a colloquial name is a misnomer.