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On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) 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 (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), "secret" is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organisations across the USSR. Khrushchev's speech sharply criticised the rule of the former General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin (died March 1953), 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 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.[failed verification] The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad received a copy of Khrushchev's speech from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski and leaked it to the West. It politically devastated organised communists in the West;[citation needed] the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members[why?] within weeks of its publication.
The speech helped to give rise in the Soviet bloc to the period of liberalisation known as the "Khrushchev Thaw", and to the process of de-Stalinization. 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, criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, for developing a personality cult, for distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and for "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's actions.
The issue of mass repressions was known to Soviet leaders well before the speech. The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (chairman Pyotr Pospelov, P. T. Komarov, Averky Aristov, and Nikolai Shvernik), known as the Pospelov Commission, arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee on 31 January 1955. The direct goal of the commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934.
The 17th Congress was selected 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 presented evidence that in 1937 and 1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge), over one-and-a-half million individuals, the majority being long-time CPSU members, were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,500 were executed.
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.
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On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) 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 (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), "secret" is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organisations across the USSR. Khrushchev's speech sharply criticised the rule of the former General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin (died March 1953), 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 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.[failed verification] The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad received a copy of Khrushchev's speech from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski and leaked it to the West. It politically devastated organised communists in the West;[citation needed] the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members[why?] within weeks of its publication.
The speech helped to give rise in the Soviet bloc to the period of liberalisation known as the "Khrushchev Thaw", and to the process of de-Stalinization. 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, criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, for developing a personality cult, for distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and for "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's actions.
The issue of mass repressions was known to Soviet leaders well before the speech. The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (chairman Pyotr Pospelov, P. T. Komarov, Averky Aristov, and Nikolai Shvernik), known as the Pospelov Commission, arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee on 31 January 1955. The direct goal of the commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934.
The 17th Congress was selected 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 presented evidence that in 1937 and 1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge), over one-and-a-half million individuals, the majority being long-time CPSU members, were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,500 were executed.
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.