On The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences - Summary

Summary

While Khrushchev was not hesitant to point out the flaws in Stalinist practice in regard to the purges of the army and Party and the management of the Great Patriotic War, he was very careful to avoid any criticism of Stalin’s industrialization policy or Communist Party ideology. When discussing mass repressions, the absence of any commentary on the haphazard arrests of ordinary citizens is notable and, it must be assumed, purposeful, since occurrences like the brutality of collectivization served the interests of the party and the state. Khrushchev was a staunch party man, and he lauded Leninism and Communist ideology in his speech as often as he condemned Stalin’s actions. Stalin, Khrushchev argued, was the primary victim of the deleterious effect of the cult of personality, which had, through his existing flaws, transformed him from a crucial part of the victories of Lenin into a paranoiac, easily influenced by the "rabid enemy of our party," Beria.

The basic structure of the speech was as follows:

• Repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality
  • Quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, which denounced the "cult of an individual", especially the Karl Marx letter to a German worker which stated his antipathy toward it
  • Lenin's Testament and remarks by Nadezhda Krupskaya, the former People's Commissar for Education (and wife of Lenin), about Stalin's character
  • Before Stalin, the fight with Trotskyism was purely ideological; Stalin introduced the notion of the "enemy of the people" to be used as "heavy artillery" from the late 1920s
  • Stalin violated the Party norms of collective leadership
    • Repression of the majority of Old Bolsheviks and delegates of the XVII Party Congress, most of which were workers and had joined the Communist Party before 1920. Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were declared "counter-revolutionaries", 848 were executed, and 98 of 139 members and candidates to the Central Committee were declared "enemies of the people".
    • After this repression, Stalin ceased to even consider the opinion of the collective.
  • Examples of repressions of some notable Bolsheviks were presented in detail.
  • Stalin ordered that the persecution be enhanced: NKVD is "four years late" in crushing the opposition, according to his principle of "aggravation of class struggle"
    • Practice of falsifications followed, to cope with "plans" for numbers of enemies to be uncovered.
  • Exaggerations of Stalin's role in the Great Patriotic War (World War II)
  • Deportations of whole nationalities
  • Doctors' plot and Mingrelian Affair
  • Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names, etc.
    • Lyrics of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union (first version, 1944–53) which had references to Stalin
• The non-awarding of the Lenin State Prize since 1935, which should be corrected at once by the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers