It turned out to be our Father...
On the anniversary of Khrushchev's report "On the cult of personality and its consequences"
Author: Sergey Tashevsky
Exactly 70 years ago, on the morning of February 25, 1956, a crucial event in Russian history occurred: Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, delivered a four-hour report, "On Stalin's Personality Cult and Its Consequences." Naturally, the report was classified, though it served as the icing on the cake of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which was taking place in Moscow at that time. Khrushchev delivered it "at the end," on the last day of the congress (or rather, after the main program, after the election of the party's governing bodies, when the delegates were preparing to have a drink, collect their "special rations" and other party gifts, and quietly depart for their homes). And, in general, the course of the congress did not foreshadow anything of the sort. For five days, all that was heard from its podium were the usual cheers for communism and its leaders around the world, the standard condemnation of "American militarism" and the mistakes of Chinese communist comrades... Just like in the editorials of Pravda newspaper. And then suddenly...
As Alexander Galich later wrote, "Beijing and Laos were mentioned during the debate, but the question of Father and Genius came up most prominently." Right on the morning of February 25, the delegates were suddenly informed that there would be another, "closed" session. Without the presence of the invited representatives of foreign communist parties and other "foreign comrades," so as not to air their dirty linen in public. And Khrushchev planned to do quite a bit of dirty linen.
The report was prepared in strict secrecy for almost a year. At the General Secretary's behest, it was worked on not only by top party officials, Central Committee secretaries, and other high-ranking figures (such as Shvernik, who served as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet under Stalin and Khrushchev), but also by KGB leaders and generals, including its chairman, Serov. This means they had complete access to all classified materials, the likes of which no historian has ever had. Naturally, the report focused not on the crimes of the communists and the KGB-NKVD, but exclusively on Stalin himself. Khrushchev hoped to weaken the influence of the "Stalin lobby" and protect himself from conspiracies. He hoped, if possible, to put an end to the bloody power struggle within the Central Committee (the final chapter of which, with the execution of Beria, he himself had a direct hand in) and generally change the rules of the game for the Soviet nomenklatura, so that life in power would become more peaceful. And at the same time, concentrate power in their own hands and shift all the blame for the bloody decades solely onto Stalin.
To ensure that the congress delegates immediately sided with Khrushchev, at the very beginning of his speech, he read out Lenin's now-famous letter to the 13th Congress of the RCP(b), in which he warned against appointing Stalin as General Secretary. He also recounted how, even during Lenin's lifetime, Stalin had tried to conceal the leader's opinion from his colleagues by rudely threatening his wife and secretary, Nadezhda Krupskaya. In fact, the refrain of the first part of Khrushchev's speech was that Lenin was "not like" Stalin and had bequeathed a different behavior. But this was, as they say, "just to warm things up." Then came facts and figures that were sure to make the audience's hair stand on end. And—they did.
Of course, Khrushchev was careful not to offend any of his living colleagues, and his report was about "a spherical Stalin in a vacuum"—and about some abstract (or concrete, like Zhdanov, who was already dead) villains who had indulged him. However, when citing examples of specific cases of repressed party members, Khrushchev did so in great detail. He insisted that it was honest communists, ordinary party members, who were subjected to repression. For example, the same congress delegates—he claimed that 70 percent of the participants in the 17th Congress were exterminated... And the delegates of the 20th Congress listened to him as if spellbound, mentally imagining the fate of their executed colleagues for themselves.
Naturally, the report didn't mention the repressions against the intelligentsia, nor the extermination of scientists and leading artists. It focused primarily on how Stalin exterminated "his own"—Communists and those close to him. Nevertheless, the key "historical milestones" of Stalinism after 1937—from the mass repressions and executions with millions of victims to the infamous "Doctors' Plot"—were presented to the stunned audience as if on a silver platter.
It must be admitted that rereading the transcript of that interminable four-hour speech today is quite difficult. The Communists couldn't even speak of their own crimes in anything other than stilted, bureaucratic language. To make the transcript seem more lively, standard remarks like "Movement in the hall" were inserted at regular intervals throughout the text. However, everyone who was present at Khrushchev's speech claimed that for the first hour, there was absolute deathly silence in the hall, as if the congress delegates had turned to stone and their physiological processes had ceased. No one even went to the restroom. "There was not a creak of a chair, not a cough, not a whisper. No one looked at each other—either from the surprise of what had happened, or from confusion and fear. The shock was unimaginably profound." Only gradually did some movement begin, especially in the front rows, where Zhukov, Voroshilov, Molotov, and other "initiates" who knew the contents of Khrushchev's speech in advance sat. They whispered about every moment when the General Secretary improvised, deviated from the text, or added something emotional.
Khrushchev, after all, loved dramatic gestures. And although he didn't take off his shoes that day, he often theatrically clasped his hands or exclaimed something like, "Just think!" Toward the end, he managed to get the room going a bit—cheers of approval began to emanate from time to time, and at the end of the speech, a loud applause erupted (turning into an ovation, as the transcript records). The nomenklatura bigwigs in the front rows exchanged satisfied glances—the speech had gone off without a hitch. The General Secretary had, figuratively speaking, successfully cut off one head of the "Party of Lenin and Stalin" in the Grand Kremlin Palace. But the Party itself didn't yet realize it.
"People descended the grand staircases silently, gloomily. They went home in silence. In the cloakroom, while they were sorting out their coats, I didn't hear a single voice. People were depressed. They couldn't understand what this was all about or how to perceive it all now," recalled one eyewitness of those events.
Yes, people were "oppressed" because they didn't understand what was now permissible and what wasn't. This meant that this had to be urgently explained without shaking their faith in the Soviet system. And literally the next day, a new and astonishing form of propaganda was born in the USSR—the "secret report," which became known to absolutely everyone.
Yes, it's true that rumors in the Soviet Union spread not only faster than sound, but sometimes even faster than knock. However, precision was essential—and so Khrushchev's report was immediately printed in several thousand copies, which were sent to "responsible officials" for discussion in local Party organizations. Of course, the word "discussion" was not meant to mislead anyone. All they had to do was listen silently, nod, and take note of what the General Secretary was "confidentially announcing to the whole world."
This is how writer and historian Roy Medvedev recalled it: “In the rural area where I worked, they gathered activists, all the party members, all the Komsomol members, directors of collective and state farms. A regional party committee instructor came to the red corner, took out a little red booklet, and said: ‘I will read you Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s secret report to the 20th Congress. Don’t ask me any questions, there will be no discussion, don’t take any notes.’ For four hours in early March, we listened to this report. There were veterans of the Great Patriotic War who idolized Stalin, there were people there.” like me, whose father was repressed and died in prison, who knew about torture and camps...
Khrushchev's report was intended for "internal use" in the USSR, but an abridged version was also secretly sent to "friendly" communist parties in socialist countries and to Chinese communists. As is well known, the Chinese comrades were extremely displeased with it, and their attitude toward the Soviet Union and Comrade Khrushchev personally became, to put it mildly, far from comradely. In Eastern Europe, on the contrary, the report was a success and even inspired among many the delusional feeling that "big brother" the USSR was ready to grant others a little freedom. By November 1956, after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, it became clear that this was far from the case.
And finally, Khrushchev's report "leaked" to the West. True, it arrived there via the East. The first to obtain a copy was the Israeli Mossad, which had a well-established residency among the Polish communists. By early March, the full text was lying on Ben-Gurion's desk, who uttered the historic phrase: "If this isn't a forgery, not deliberate disinformation planted before us, take my word for it—in twenty years the Soviet Union will no longer exist." Of course, he was off by 15 years, but he got the gist of it right.
However, for now, the Soviet Union was still very much alive and studying Khrushchev's report. Despite its "secret" nature, it almost instantly became the main topic of kitchen conversations, and then of every day interaction. Stalin's name (which people still feared to mention in vain) now began almost every conversation. Even in the camps, where the release of "politicals" was already underway, the camp commanders didn't hesitate to break the scandalous news to the prisoners, as Galich wrote in that same song: "The godfather finished his cucumber and finished with flour: 'Our father turned out not to be a father, but a bitch...'" And on the outside, people asked increasingly bold questions of the party leadership. For example, in Novosibirsk, at meetings, they were already asking: "Does Stalin deserve the label of 'enemy of the people' for such actions?"
A very valid question, as the Generalissimo himself would say.
Gradually, exactly what Khrushchev had hoped for happened: the "masses" took the initiative and suggested what to do next.
After all, they, the masses, were no strangers to this. They knew how to deal with enemies of the people. Stalin himself had taught them. This was done with Trotsky, Kamenev, Zhdanov, and many others. If there were portraits hanging in offices, the portraits had to be taken down. If there were books in the library, the books had to be thrown out. If there were monuments, the monuments had to be torn down!
This is also mentioned in Galich's song: "Full, brothers, atatouille! A memorial service with dancing! And the order was given to remove the statues at the station overnight." But, of course, this is a poetic exaggeration. Even in Magadan in 1956, no one tried to tear down the Stalin monument, much less with the help of prisoners. And anyway, not everything happened so quickly.
The "Thaw" was just beginning, and for another five years, plaster and bronze statues of the Generalissimo stood in hundreds and thousands of cities and towns across the USSR. These were mostly identical monuments of varying scale, the colossal example of which stood on the dam of the Moscow Canal (dug, incidentally, by Gulag prisoners). It stood until 1962. For a long time, the city remained known as Stalingrad, avenues and squares named after Stalin remained, and he himself lay comfortably in the mausoleum next to Lenin, unashamed of his former rudeness to Lenin's wife. All this ended only in 1961, after the 22nd Congress, which "consolidated" Khrushchev's de-Stalinization. The monuments were torn down, the mausoleum (albeit only partially) cleared of corpses. Cities and streets were renamed.
And then it seemed that it was forever.
But in the USSR, as in today's Russia, any "forever" was and is at the discretion of the authorities. Only the authorities can grant freedom, or they can take it away. And they will do so as unobtrusively as if "by the will of the masses." So it's no surprise that in July 2025, Russian communists suddenly "awoke" and passed a resolution declaring Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU "erroneous and biased." They approached Putin with a proposal to rename Volgograd back to Stalingrad, and he graciously promised to consider it. Incidentally, Volgograd Airport has already been renamed Stalingrad. And while the president mulls it over, new monuments to Stalin are appearing in many cities, here and there, and memorials to the victims of Bolshevik terror are being destroyed. Just a few days ago, as if specifically for the anniversary of the 20th Congress, the Gulag History Museum was closed.
Apparently, we shouldn't hope for a new thaw until a new leader comes to the Kremlin and tells us about the crimes of the previous one. And we, as always, "will be oppressed and won't be able to immediately understand what this is and how to perceive everything now."
