Khrushchev’s secret speech & end of communism

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: In history, some events at first appear insignificant, or their significance is hidden, but they turn out to be earthshaking. Such a moment occurred 50 years ago, with Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called "Secret Speech" to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

At that moment, the communist movement appeared to be riding the tide of history, and not only for those in the Soviet Union. Capitalism seemed to be dying. The Twentieth Congress put an end to that. It was a moment of truth, a cleansing from within of the brutality of Stalinism. Khrushchev’s speech to the Congress inspired doubt and second thoughts throughout the worldwide movement.

Khrushchev’s motives as he took the podium on the morning of February 25, 1956, were, in his mind, moral ones. After his ouster from power, in the seclusion of his dacha, he wrote: "My hands are covered with blood. I did everything that others did. But even today if I have to go to that podium to report on Stalin, I would do it again. One day all that had to be over."

Khrushchev had, of course, been an intimate part of Stalin’s repressions, but he also didn’t know half of what was going on. The whole Stalinist system of government was built on absolute secrecy, in which only the general secretary himself knew the whole story. It wasn’t terror that was the basis of Stalin’s power, but his complete monopoly on information. Khrushchev, for example, was stunned when he discovered that in the 1930’s and 1940’s, some 70% of Party members were annihilated.

Initially, Khrushchev didn’t plan to keep his denunciation of Stalin a secret. Five days after the Congress, his speech was sent to all the leaders of the socialist countries and read at local party meetings across the Soviet Union. But people didn’t know how to discuss it. And with good reason, for the problem with the de-Stalinization process was that, although the truth was partly revealed, no answer regarding what to do was offered. After the Congress, it became clear that the communist gospel was false and murderously corrupt. But no other ideology was offered, and the crisis that began with Khrushchev’s speech lasted another 30 years, until Mikhail Gorbachev took up his mantle of change.