What Was the Impact of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech?

I am Philip Bubier.

I'm an Emeritus Reader in History at the University of Kent,

and I have taught Russian and Soviet history at Kent for the

better part of three decades.

In February nineteen fifty six at the twentieth party congress,

the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered his so

called secret speech,

arguably one of the most important speeches of the

twentieth century.

Now Khrushchev had come to power soon after Stalin's death

in nineteen fifty three after a brief power struggle,

and he remained at the helm until he was ousted in October

nineteen sixty four.

He was a contradictory figure facing a number of sometimes

competing challenges.

One of them was to give people a fresh vision for the country

after the dark Stalin years.

Another was the imperative to consolidate his power and keep

rivals at bay.

These elements were both present in the secret speech,

a speech worth studying both what Khrushchev said and what

he implied between the lines.

He was walking a tightrope.

He wanted to condemn Stalin without destroying people's

belief in the revolution itself and undermining the system that

had brought him to power.

He also had to be careful not to implicate himself,

for he had himself been a participant in some of Stalin's crimes.

The tactic he adopted was to attack Stalin personally,

to attack what he called Stalin's cult of personality,

but not Stalin's policies of collectivization and

industrialization.

He also insisted that the Bolshevik revolution had been

broadly right, and he was the man to fulfill its potential.

It was Stalin then who had distorted the original vision

and who was responsible for the terror that had engulfed the

communist party in the nineteen thirties and resulted in many

innocent victims being killed.

Another person who Khrushchev blamed was Lavrenti Beria,

a sinister character associated with the secret police and the labor camps.

After Stalin died,

Beria was effectively Khrushchev's main rival,

and he clashed with Beria.

And Beria was ousted and killed.

Beria was also criticized in the speech.

Now it is true that Stalin and Beria deserved condemnation,

but here there was also a power building intent.

For Khrushchev was trying to appeal here to a communist

party audience longing for stability after the

turbulent Stalin period.

The speech was a way of saying to them that he would keep the

show on the road while protecting them against

arbitrary rule.

At a time of crisis,

when a leader is seeking to forge a new path,

where does authority and legitimacy come from?

This was a very real question for Khrushchev.

He sought to ground his authority in Lenin,

the man who had founded the USSR.

And he presented himself as a champion of Lenin and Leninism.

This was an awkward balancing act too because Lenin,

like Stalin, was a ruthless leader.

Khrushchev justified Lenin's methods by insisting that Lenin

only sanctioned violence to defend the revolution.

Although a reformer,

we should not think of Khrushchev as a soft and cuddly character.

He was wary of any threats to his own and Soviet rule.

This was immediately,

evident later in nineteen fifty six with the suppression of the

Hungarian uprising.

A lot of people were prosecuted for dissent under Khrushchev.

Demonstrations in the city of Nowber Cherkask

over working conditions were violently repressed in nineteen sixty two.

The persecution of religion was also strong under Khrushchev.

Another thing to note is that the USSR was faced with the

growing power of China,

which had a communist revolution in nineteen forty nine.

And in this context,

Khrushchev wanted to assert his own primacy in the communist world.

This was an underlying motivation for Khrushchev in

the Cuban Missile Crisis in nineteen sixty two when we see

his tendency to brinkmanship in evidence.

In a broad sense, we can see him as a person trying to make

Soviet ideology attractive and fit for purpose.

The Communist Party program of nineteen sixty two promised

that communism would be built by nineteen eighty.

That was a tall order.

In other words, the communist project was on track.

Although Stalin was heralded by some for his making the Soviet

Union into a superpower,

there were many who were uneasy about the terroristic methods he had used.

Khrushchev's attack on the cult of personality was an

acknowledgment of that.

Others in the communist world were asking awkward questions too.

A good example was a book of nineteen fifty seven by leading

Yugoslav communist Milovan Jilas,

The New Class.

Jilas suggested that communism,

far from freeing people from capitalist exploitation,

had simply replaced one oppressive class with another.

The search for new values in the communist world was also

evident in nineteen sixty eight when the Czechoslovak communist

party tried to introduce democratization

and radical reform,

what they called socialism with a human face.

But this was crushed by Soviet tanks.

In the late nineteen seventies,

Khrushchev's successor Leonid Brezhnev sought to explain why

communism was proving hard to implement by saying that the

country was making significant progress

and had reached the stage of what he called developed socialism,

I e, it it it was not far off,

and they they were getting near it.

Gorbachev's reform process known as perestroika,

launched in the late nineteen eighties,

was another attempt to salvage the revolutionary project.

This was more radical,

but it also had hints of Khrushchev's approach in that

Gorbachev sought to hold to Leninism as a guiding principle.

But Gorbachev did not want to question the revolution either.

And to begin with, at least,

he did not want to abandon the idea of a one party communist state.

This all began to unravel at the end of the nineteen eighties.

Back on Khrushchev's secret speech,

we should not think of Khrushchev's attack on Stalin

as representing a kind of dissent.

Some even suggested that it created a framework for

avoiding radical reform.

It was quite successful initially in encouraging to

people to believe that a more humane version of socialism was

possible, and it did have some appeal for

Soviet intellectuals.

But it was full of ambiguity.

It was an attempt at truth telling at one level,

but it also offered a way of avoiding the truth in the sense

that it was evasive and had as a motive the desire

to keep the show on the road without confronting more

difficult questions.