1956 Khrushchev's Speech Denouncing Stalin
Khrushchev denounced Stalin in his speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered at the closed session of the 20th Party Congress, behind closed doors, after midnight on February 25, 1956. In this speech, Khrushchev described the damages done by Joseph Stalin's Personality Cult, and the repressions, known as the Great Purge that killed millions and traumatized many people in the Soviet Union. After the delivery of the speech, it was officially disseminated in a shorter form among members of the Soviet Communist Party across the USSR starting March 5, 1956. Then Khrushchev initiated a wave of rehabilitations that officially restored the reputations of many millions of innocent victims, who were killed or imprisoned in the Great Purge under Stalin. Further, tentative moves were made through official and unofficial channels to relax restrictions on freedom of speech that had been held over from the rule of Stalin.
Khrushchev's 1956 speech was the strongest effort ever in the USSR to bring reconciliation and healing to the people, at that time, after several decades of fear of Stalin's rule, that took millions of innocent lives. Khrushchev's speech was published internationally within a few months, and his initiatives to open and liberalise the USSR had surprised the world. Khrushchev's speech had angered many of his powerful enemies, thus igniting another round of ruthless power struggle within the Soviet Communist Party.
Read more about this topic: Khrushchev Thaw
Famous quotes containing the words speech, denouncing and/or stalin:
“We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I’ve thought about how, were we to suddenly receive the freedom about which we talk so much when we spar with one another, we would not know what to do with it at first. We would expend it on denouncing one another in the newspapers for spying, for love of the ruble, we would frighten society with protestations that we have no people, no science, no literature, nothing at all!”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)