On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

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. 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, 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. He failed to mention nonparty members that were victims of Stalin. 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 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 (World War II). • 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 (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. The Soviet press officially published the full text of the speech in 1989, during the waning years of the USSR. 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. 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 [Stalin's] services" and was relatively guarded in its criticisms of him. ==Influence and impact==

Khrushchev's speech was followed by a period of liberalization, known as the Khrushchev Thaw, into the early 1960s. In 1961, the body of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The most direct impact of the speech, the 1956 Georgian Demonstrations, occurred in Tbilisi, Georgia, between 4-10 of March 1956. 5 March 1956 marked the third anniversary of Stalin's death, but there was no official recognition or celebration. The spread of the speech was also well underway, and it particularly impacted the people of Georgia as it was Stalin's homeland. At first, the protests were unofficial and largely peaceful as many in the crowds commemorated the memory of Stalin. Protesters organized around the Stalin monument on the Kura river. The Georgian government approved an official demonstration on the ninth. On the tenth, the government deployed the police and army on the protesters. It was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split of 1961 to 1989 by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) and by Albania (under First Secretary Enver Hoxha), who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin. In North Korea, factions of the Workers' Party of Korea unsuccessfully attempted to remove Chairman Kim Il Sung in August 1956, after criticizing Kim for not "correcting" his leadership methods, for developing a personality cult, for distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership and socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions of political opponents) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's actions. They were later purged and executed. ==Criticism==

Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski criticized Khrushchev in 1978 for failing to make any analysis of the system Stalin presided over, stating: Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the [allegedly] most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatever. All that was certain was that the Soviet system and the party itself remained impeccably pure and bore no responsibility for the tyrant's atrocities. Bangladeshi historian A. M. Amzad commented on the speech: It (the speech) was an undesirable, uncalled for and irresponsible act in terms of the ideology of the Soviet Union. It was designed to determine Khrushchev's political fate. Even before the Twentieth Congress, arrangements were made to resolve the ills of Stalin's dictatorship. Thus, such criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress was deliberate. Western historians also tended to take a somewhat critical view of the speech. J. Arch Getty commented in 1985 that "Khrushchev's revelations [...] are almost entirely self-serving. It is hard to avoid the impression that the revelations had political purposes in Khrushchev's struggle with Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich". The historian Geoffrey Roberts said Khrushchev's speech became "one of the key texts of western historiography of the Stalin era. But many western historians were sceptical about Khrushchev's efforts to lay all the blame for past communist crimes on Stalin". On 6 July 2025, a Communist Party of the Russian Federation congress adopted a resolution calling the 1956 report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" made by Nikita Khrushchev erroneous. ==See also==