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The Secret Speech is the common name of a speech given on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denouncing the actions of Josef Stalin. The speech was a report to 20th Party Congress "On the personality cult and its consequences".
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 the closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 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), #3, March, 1989), although the Soviet people were already informed about the speech one month after Khrushchev delivered it.
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) 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 1,500,000 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. 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.
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 the full text was not officially released to the public until 1989.
However, the contents of the speech were only slowly disclosed in the Eastern European countries. The contents were never disclosed to Western communist party members by their leaders, and most Western communists became aware of the contents of the speech after an American newspaper published a copy in mid 1956.
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.
Summary The basic layout 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 one thousand nine hundred and sixty six delegates, 1108 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
- Deportations of whole nationalities
- Doctors' plot
- Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names, etc.
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