On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences


"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Though popularly known as the Secret Speech, "secret" is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organizations across the USSR. Khrushchev's speech sharply criticized the rule of the former General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the later years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism. The speech is central to the period of liberalization known as the "Khrushchev Thaw" in the Soviet bloc and to the process of de-Stalinization.
The speech produced shocking effects in its day. Reports state that some listeners suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the government and of the previously revered figure of Stalin. The most direct impact of the speech occurred in Tbilisi, Georgia, between 4-10 of March 1956. The 1956 Georgian demonstrations took place during the 3rd anniversary of Stalin's death in reaction to the Secret Speech by Pro-Stalin protestors and rioters. On 9 March 1956, the Soviet Union deployed its army on the protestors; the number of persons killed and wounded is highly debated, with low numbers in the dozens and high numbers in the hundreds. The Georgian demonstrations are accounted as the lone violent incident defending Stalin, while other instances in cities and gulags did take place in protest of Stalin.

Background to the Speech

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, created by Khrushchev on 31 December 1955, had investigated the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party 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, 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.
After hearing the contents of the Pospelov Commission's report, Khrushchev decided he had an obligation to expose the crimes of Stalin. On February 13th, the Secret Speech was authorized. In the following days before the speech, Khrushchev, Pospelov, Aristov, and other party members created, contributed, 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 travesties during the Stalin era that were not a result of Stalin's singular direct action. 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.
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, 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 declared "counter-revolutionaries"; 848 were executed, and 98 of 139 members and candidates to the Central Committee were declared "enemies of the people".
  • ** After the repression, Stalin ceased even to consider the opinion of the collective 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".
  • ** Practice of falsifications followed to cope with "plans" for numbers of enemies to be uncovered.
  • * Exaggerations of Stalin's role in the Great Patriotic War.
  • * Deportations of whole nationalities.
  • * Doctors' plot and Mingrelian affair.
  • * Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names and so on.
  • ** Lyrics of the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, 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 of the Speech

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. 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.
On 30 June 1956, the Central Committee of the party issued a resolution, "On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences", which served as the CPSU's official and public pronouncement on the Stalin era. Written under the guidance of Mikhail Suslov, it did not mention Khrushchev's specific allegations. "Complaining that Western political circles were exploiting the revelation of Stalin's crimes, the resolution paid tribute to services" and was relatively guarded in its criticisms of him.