The following article on de-Stalinization is an excerpt from Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding’s book A Brief History of the Cold War It is available to order now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Nikita Khrushchevâs dramatic âde-Stalinizationâ speech in February 1956 was a watershed moment in the Cold War. After a succession crisis following Stalinâs death in 1953, Khrushchev, as general secretary of the Communist Party, decided to open a box long closed even to party members. Although the speech before the Twentieth Party Congress was supposed to be secret, leaks soon occurred through the comments of foreign communist leaders who had been present. Its startling contents made headlines in the West.
In language that was blunt even for him, Khrushchev disclosed that torture had been extensively used to extract so-called confessions from former colleagues of Stalin, thousands of innocent persons had been executed at Stalinâs orders, and Stalin had been responsible for the ruthless mass deportation of ethnic minorities during World War II.
Khrushchev attacked Stalinâs âmegalomaniaâ and âself-glorification,â which led to the âcult of personality.â He derided Stalinâs military ability and wartime leadershipâheretofore praised to the skiesâand pointed out that the great leader had ignored repeated warnings in 1941 that the Germans were about to attack the Soviet Union. His comments led to a series political reforms that removed or dismantled the Gulag labor-camp, Stalin’s cult of personality, and other institutions that helped Stalin hold power.
Notwithstanding its anti-Stalin theme, Khrushchevâs de-Stalinization speech was not a repudiation of Soviet communism but a criticism of Stalinâs misuse of it. Khrushchev never publicly apologized for the mass murders he privately condemned before the Soviet Congress. In fact, as first secretary of the Moscow party organization, he had been part of the Great Terror of 1937â1938. As Ukraineâs first secretary, he had implemented Stalinâs forced famine in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. He never repudiated Stalinism, telling the Chinese in 1957 that to be a communist was âinseparable from being a Stalinist.â
Paradoxically, in the same year that he condemned Stalin for being Stalin, Khrushchev employed Stalinist tactics against dissidents in Poland and Hungary, ruthlessly crushing their attempts to obtain freedom. Some Soviets saw Khrushchevâs speech as a call for reform, but when they spoke out in favor of democratization and against Stalinist excesses, thousands were arrested and deported to the Gulag. The leading Western historian of Stalinist Russia, Robert Conquest, estimated that while several million prisoners in the labor camps were ârehabilitatedâ under Khrushchev, four million remained in the Gulag.
As to ideology, Khrushchev told fellow communists that âpeaceful coexistenceâ meant continuation of the Marxist-Leninist strategy of communizing the world by other means. He endorsed wars of national liberation in Africa and elsewhere. He even conducted his own purges, although they were less immediately terminal than Stalinâsâarmy officers not sufficiently loyal to him were summarily fired and given no hope of obtaining a civilian job or a pension.
In many aspects,de-Stalinization was carried out in word more than in deed. As Martin Malia has written, the fundamental structures of a totalitarian state remained in placeâthe party state, central economic planning, the political police (KGB), and a system of party cells at every level of societyâall subordinated to the goal âof building and defending âreal socialism.ââ
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"De-stalinization: Dismantling a Cult of Personality" History on the Net© 2000-2024, Salem Media.
March 27, 2024 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/de-stalinization>
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