Khrushchev

Today is the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev‘s historic “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress in which he denounced Stalin and his brutal ways. The American historian William Taubman notes the “unintended consequences” of the speech: Khrushchev’s goal was to “to save Communism, not to destroy it” (a generation later, Mikhail Gorbachev would try the same trick):

By cleansing it of the Stalinist stain, he wanted to re-legitimize it in the eyes of people not just in the Soviet sphere but around the globe. Yet within weeks after the secret speech, at Communist Party meetings called to discuss it, criticism of Stalin rippled way beyond Khrushchev’s, including indictments not just of Stalin himself but of the Soviet system that spawned him. Others sprang to Stalin’s defense, especially in his native Georgia, where at least 20 pro-Stalin demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police.

In Eastern Europe, the unintended consequences of Khrushchev’s speech were even more shattering. A huge strike in the Polish city of Poznan in June was put down at a cost of at least 53 dead and hundreds wounded. Then, of course, the revolution in Hungary in October was smashed by Soviet forces, leaving more than 20,000 Hungarians dead.

Of course, “the ‘secret speech’ was part of a reform program that included many worthy achievements that Khrushchev did indeed intend,” as Taubman notes:

He released and rehabilitated millions of Stalin’s victims. He allowed what became known as “the thaw,” with its partial rebirth of Russian culture. He revivified Soviet agriculture, which Stalin had ruined, and started a boom in housing construction that permitted hundreds of thousands to move out of overcrowded communal apartments.

Literaturnaya Gazeta takes a critical look at the speech and its place in Russian history under the general rubric “The 20th Congress Masquerade: Legends and Myths of the Famous Party Forum.” Several authors weigh in:

• Andrey Fursov, “Saturnalias of the Nomenklatura: The 20th Congress—Societal Myths and Realities”
• Valentin Tolstykh, “As Yet, There Are No Intelligible Answers to These Questions”
• Leonid Zhukhovsky, “The Country Began to Think”
• Aleksandr Tsipko, “People Breathed a Sigh of Relief” 

An online forum is linked to each of these articles, so it may take a while to digest it all …