On The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences - Aftermath

Aftermath

The speech caused such shock to the audience that, according to some reports, some of those present suffered heart attacks, and others later committed suicide. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, bred on the panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in the Georgian SSR, Stalin's homeland, where the days of protests and rioting ended with the Soviet army crackdown on March 9, 1956.

Khrushchev's speech was followed by a period of liberalisation known as Khrushchev's Thaw. In 1961 the body of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

The speech was a major cause of the Sino-Soviet Split in which the People's Republic of China (under Mao Zedong) and Albania (under Enver Hoxha) condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the CPSU for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin.

In the West the "revisionist" historiographical school tended to take a somewhat critical view of the speech; historian 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. Khrushchev must have faced a sticky problem in damning 'excesses' in which he had participated.... His remarks are important as official condemnation of Stalin's 'willfulness' but are less than earthshaking from an analytical or scholarly point of view." Historian Robert W. Thurston similarly argued in 1996 that Khrushchev "had much to gain in the attacks he made on his predecessor" and that neither his attacks on Beria or his claims in regards to Stalin's involvement in Kirov's death are particularly reliable.

The historian Geoffrey Roberts has said of Khrushchev's speech that it 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... After Khrushchev's fall in 1964 memoirists were free to provide a more positive account of Stalin's role and to correct the simplistic and often incredible assertions of the secret speech; for example, that Stalin had planned military operations using a globe of the earth!" A 2011 book entitled Khrushchev Lied by American academic Grover Furr takes a strongly negative view of the speech, with one reviewer commenting that, "Furr identifies 61 allegations in Khrushchev's speech. He concludes that, with only one minor exception, every one of them is demonstrably false."