Khrushchev: On the Cult of Personality

In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev gave a speech On the Cult of the Individual defaming Stalin. It began by accusing Stalin of creating a personality cult, then accused him of various evil deeds in a historical nihilist attempt to 'blackwash' Stalin's era.

This speech is the reason for the universal Cold War-style demonization of Stalin in the West. Prior to this, only Trotskyists and the bourgeois made these allegations against Stalin, like claiming the Moscow Trials were fake. Most workers saw Stalin positively, especially after WWII. Khrushchev changed everything, rewriting history, retroactively legitimizing Trotskyism when it would've otherwise been dead and buried. Communist parties around the world saw mass exoduses, and even those that remained generally accepted revisionism in the tradition of Kautsky and Bernstein in the name of "de-Stalinization".

The speech was strategically placed on the last day of the Congress so that it could not be debated or voted on. Instead, Khrushchev imposed it as accepted fact, distributing copies to national and local Party meetings all across the Soviet Union, and violently suppressing communists who objected. Khrushchev thus made it formally "secret" but de facto publicized, so that when it immediately leaked through an Israeli spy to the Western press, the CIA-controlled Western media could label it as the "Secret Speech", presenting it as an "admission of guilt" by the "Stalinists". In reality, it was a highly factional, sensationalized set of accusations by an enemy of Stalin who had managed to lie, cheat, and kill his way to the leadership of the Soviet Union.

Grover Furr did a deep dive into the speech in his book Khrushchev Lied : The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) "Crimes" in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False.

Use by revisionists

The speech was used to advance historical nihilism.

After the 20th Congress, in an ultra-narrow circle of our closest friends and associates, we often discussed the problems of democratization of the country and society. We chose a simple - like a sledgehammer - method of propagating the "ideas" of late Lenin. A group of true, not imaginary reformers developed (of course, orally) the following plan: to strike with the authority of Lenin at Stalin, at Stalinism. And then, if successful, - to strike with Plekhanov and Social Democracy - at Lenin, and then – with liberalism and "moral socialism" - at revolutionarism in general... The Soviet totalitarian regime could be destroyed only through glasnost and totalitarian party discipline, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism. ... Looking back, I can proudly say that a clever, but very simple tactic - the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism – has worked.

- Alexander Yakovlev, senior advisor to Gorbachev

Effect on communists

Although it has been debunked today, at the time most communists believed it, because Khrushchev appeared to be an honest communist. This led to massive self-criticism by communist parties around the world, where they were pressured by Moscow to "admit" their "Stalinist" mistakes, essentially saying Trotsky was correct. This was huge material for anticommunists, and immediately caused mass exodus of members from communist parties in the West.

America

Main article: Collapse of the CPUSA#Background

The Speech was what really destroyed communism in America, not McCarthyism. It began the degeneration of the CPUSA into DSA-type revisionism.

Soviet Union

Communists in the Soviet Union, especially in Georgia and Russia, protested against the defamatory speech, claiming that the Soviet leadership had betrayed the people. Soviet troops violently broke up the protests, killing some in Georgia.

Poland

Polish communist leader Boleslaw Bierut mysteriously dropped dead in Moscow after the speech. It is speculated that Khrushchev killed him.

The Speech led to the bourgeois-backed liberal Poznan Protests in Poland.

Hungary

With the communists weakened by the speech, in 1956 Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi was forced to fully resign by Khrushchev. (3 years earlier, Beria had forced him to partly resign.) In his place, Moscow promoted Imre Nagy.

Imre Nagy, a liberal "socialist", would later allow CIA thugs to cross into Hungary and start the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, where they lynched communists and Jews, and the USSR was forced to invade.

See also

• Historical nihilism
• Nikita Khrushchev

Full text

• Marxists.org https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm