Khrushchev Denounces Stalin (1956)
Sat Feb 25, 1956
"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" was an anti-Stalin speech delivered by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on this day in 1956.
Khrushchev's speech was sharply critical of the reign of the deceased Joseph Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which took place in the 1930s. The U.S. State Department received a copy of the speech from East European sources and quickly released it.
The speech marked a decisive turning point in not just Soviet history, but international communist history more broadly. It led, in part, to the Sino-Soviet Split (deterioration of relations between the USSR and communist China) and was an important milestone in the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw", a liberalization of social policies in the USSR.
Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin caused political turmoil throughout the international communist movement. Historian Lewis Siegelbaum notes that, in Tbilisi, Georgia, students demonstrated against the removal of a monument to Stalin, while in Poland, demonstrations by workers in Poznan over declining wages and deep divisions between recalcitrant Stalinists and anti-Stalinists within the Polish Workers’ Party threatened to engulf the country in crisis. In the West, the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication.
- Date: 1956-02-25
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, soviethistory.msu.edu, www.theguardian.com.
- Tags: #Communism.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org