25/02/2014
Pablo Guerrero is an international analyst, FAES Foundation
On the 25th of February 1956, fifty-eight years ago now, Nikita Khruschev, the then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), delivered his historic ‘”secret speech” on the occasion of the 20th Congress of the Party. One thousand four hundred and thirty-six shocked soviet delegates, who were forbidden to take notes, witnessed how Khruschev denounced Stalin’s personality cult and the mistakes the soviet dictator made during the early phase of the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s bloody struggle with Hitler’s Germany. In addition to blaming Stalin for the creation of the odious notion of the “enemy of the people”, Khruschev considered him responsible for the violation of the principles inherent in collegiate direction and, by extension, of Leninist principles.
Although popularly considered as “secret”, part of the speech was distributed inside the USSR by official channels, and shortly after the closure of CPSU’s 20th Congress copies of it were already circulating among senior officials of the Eastern Bloc’s Communist parties. In contrast, the Western Bloc was initially unaware of the speech, until the CIA, in cooperation with Israeli intelligence, managed to get a copy of it, which was published in the New York Times on June the 5th 1956. The Soviet populace had to wait until 1988, and thanks only to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost or openness,to read the full version of the speech.
Notwithstanding the release from the Gulag of around 5 million prisoners between 1953, the year Stain died, and 1956, the speech triggered a process of timid liberalization of the Soviet system known as “de-Stalinization”, which continued until Khruschev’s fall and the rise to power of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964. This period, also known as the Khruschev Thaw, saw the taming of political repression (the remaining “counterrevolutionaries” were released in the years following Khruschev’s speech) and of censorship, along with the establishment of the principle of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States of America. Measures that, along with the rapprochement with Tito’s Yugoslavia, made of Khruschev a “revisionist” in the eyes of Mao Zedong and contributed decisively to the Sino-Soviet split.
Anyway, Khruschev’s attack on Stalinism was biased and incomplete. The Soviet leader made reference to Stalin’s “positive” role in the struggle against “Trotskyites, right-wingers and bourgeois nationalists”, and omitted any negative reference to infamous and big-scale terror events such as the repression of the Kulaks, the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, the massive deportations, or the execution of 22.000 Polish officers and civilians conduced in the Katyn forest in 1940. All of them were crimes against humanity, and Khruschev was an enthusiastic accessory to them.
The speech’s main purpose was to bury Stalin and his excesses, without compromising neither the system forged under Stalinist terror nor the monopoly of power enjoyed by the CPSU. Thus Khruschev, by then in a primus inter pares position after the execution of Lavrentiy Beria and the ousting of Georgy Malenkov, consolidated his leadership and got carte blanche to both reform the Soviet economy and liberalize the terror apparatus.
Khruschev’s words had a huge impact in Eastern Europe, since they seemed to imply that from then on Moscow would adopt a favourable attitude to the “different roads to socialism” and that it would also renounce, once and for all, the use of terror and repression in its satellite states. In Poland the 1956 Poznan protests were severely repressed, but served as prelude to the “Polish October” and the return to power of Wladyslaw Gomulka. He was a moderate communist, formerly ousted due to alleged “right-wing deviationism” and rehabilitated in the wake of Khruschev’s speech. In Hungary, in contrast, the October 1956 uprising against the Soviet yoke was bloodily crushed by the Red Army.
Hungarians, Poles and the remaining peoples of Europe would have to wait more than thirty years to see their freedoms and full independence restored. An achievement to which Gorbachev’s reformist policies, although unwittingly, contributed in a decisive way. Gorbachev himself referred to his perestroika as a continuation of the historic speech Khruschev delivered before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.