On February 25, 1956. In his speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev read a secret report condemning the dictatorship and personality cult of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.
On February 25, shortly before midnight, all foreign guests and leaders of communist parties from other countries were asked to leave the hall.
At exactly zero o'clock, Khrushchev took the podium to address 1,400 Soviet delegates.
It is said that his speech shocked everyone present.
According to the American journalist who first spread the news to the West, the speech lasted four hours and in it Khrushchev described in detail the terrible crimes of Stalin - the man idolized by millions of communists around the world.
According to common rumors, Khrushchev accused Stalin of killing millions of people. Some whisper that many delegates cried while listening to the speech and pulled out their hair; some fainted, some had heart attacks, and at least two committed suicide after that night.
But not a word of Khrushchev's revelations was published in the Soviet media. Rumors spread from Moscow, parts of the speech were read behind closed doors by members of the highest party bodies. But the full text was kept as if it were a state secret.
A curious fact is the claim that the CIA offered a reward of 1 million dollars for the text of the speech, recalls dariknews.bg. It was believed that the publication of the text at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc could lead to political turmoil among the communist states and provoke an unprecedented crisis.
Hundreds of millions of communists inside and outside Russia blindly worshipped Stalin.
Exposing his crimes could destroy their faith and possibly even lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But all efforts to obtain the speech proved futile and it remains a mystery.
In his speech, Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality of the man glorified as the “Sun of the Nations”. He revealed the forced displacement of entire ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, which resulted in countless victims; he spoke of the “great purges” (1936-1937), when one and a half million communists were arrested and 680,000 of them were executed. On Stalin's orders, 848 people were executed from the 1966 delegates to the 17th Party Congress, and he did the same with 98 of the 138 candidate members of the Central Committee.
Khrushchev also talks about the so-called Doctors' Conspiracy - false accusations against several Jewish doctors who allegedly conspired to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders.
Khrushchev's report was perceived then and for many years afterwards (more in the East than in the West) as the embodiment of the power of self-criticism (one of the symbolic actions of the system, aimed at ensuring its "eternal youth" of renewal), as an act of restoring the "Leninist norms of internal party life" and as the beginning of a democratic post-Stalin stage in the development of socialism, the newspaper recalls. "Culture".
A whole generation has grown up without knowing another leader.
Several generations have grown up in the horror of his continuous repressions, which killed millions. His personal signature is under 357 lists for execution.
Especially after the victory in World War II, Stalin's name acquired almost mythical proportions and his influence extended from Maoist China through the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army and the communist parties in Western Europe to the left in the United States and Latin America.
The leader's body has been embalmed and prepared to be placed next to that of Vladimir Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square. Before that, it will be exhibited in the Hall of Columns in the House of Soviets in the capital. All flags were lowered to half-mast and a mourning ribbon was added, and the posters for performances and films on the streets were covered with white paper.
Stalin's body was laid in the mausoleum, where it remained until October 31, 1961. Then, by order of Khrushchev, it was secretly removed and reburied at night in front of the Kremlin wall. The memoirs of participants tell that the leader of the party and state ordered the Hero of the Soviet Union star, buttons and epaulettes to be cut off from the uniform. However, the soldiers refused to cut off the epaulettes of the former commander-in-chief.
Although de-Stalinization was already underway,
Khrushchev was so afraid of protests that Red Square was closed days before under the pretext of rehearsals for the parade on November 7, and during the action itself, armed companies were stationed at both ends of the square.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) was a Soviet politician who led the USSR after the death of Joseph Stalin.
At an early age he was a shepherd, and then, at the age of 14, he worked as a mechanic in the factories and mines of the Donbass from 1908, and later participated in the Civil War (1918-1920). In 1929, Khrushchev entered and studied until 1931 at the Moscow Industrial Academy, leaving it to work in the Moscow party apparatus (1931-1935).
In 1934, Nikita Khrushchev became a member of the Central Committee of the party, and from 1938 to 1947 he was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party.
During World War II, Khrushchev was a party commissar at the front and reached the military rank of lieutenant general in 1943. After the war, Khrushchev was elected Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party in December 1949 and simultaneously served as First Secretary of the Moscow Committee (MC) of the party from 1949 to 1953. As a senior party official, he was involved in the organization and implementation of mass repressions against party, state and military officials on the eve of World War II and after it.
In March 1953, Khrushchev was relieved of his duties as First Secretary of the MC of the party.
After Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR from 1958 to 1964. In 1959 received the Lenin Peace Prize.
Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office and retired by decision of the October Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1964. He died in Moscow on September 11, 1971. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow without state ceremonies.