Question by SCUFC: Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth-Party Congress?
Why would Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth-Party Congress develop an unprecedented air of optimism within the Soviet Union? Was this air optimism warranted, or was it premature and why?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Spellbound
The reason for Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and his de-Stalinisation policy is that when Stalin died in 1953 there was no clear successor to him.
The country was initially run by a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov but machinations among the Politburo led to Khrushchev being elected First Secretary of the Party in September of 1953.
Khrushchev’s position was still very weak and he needed to find a way of isolating and removing his political rivals – he couldn’t use Stalin’s tactics of having them arrested by the NKVD as Beria had been in charge of that and loyalties ran deep (he and Malenkov had worked together to remove Beria, having him arrested in June 1953).
What he decided to do was to present himself as a down to Earth, folksy, peasant. By doing this he sought to isolate Malenkov, a sophisticated man, but seen as a drab bureaucrat – he achieved this by beginning to reform the country, economically as well as politically. His reforms proved popular, at first, and they seemed to give communism a new direction.
He still needed to reform the party, and to ensure that the Stalinists could not come back to power. This was the reason for both the 1956 “Secret Speech” where he denounced Stalin and the terror of his regime, and for Molotov’s removal from office in 1956 – he was removed from the Presidium (the enlarged and renamed Politburo) in 1957.
It was radical because it removed two of the major underpinnings of the Soviet state – the use of terror as a political tool, and the cult of personality surrounding Stalin; effectively claiming that from the purges onwards, with the exception of WWII, everything Stalin did or said was incorrect, and a perversion of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The reason for the optimism was that Khrushchev loosened the restrictions on art, literature and cinema – allowing, among others, the (very) critical novel Dr Zhivago to be published. He also did away with arbitrary state terror – lessening the excesses of Stalinism. He also continued the massive apartment building programme begun to house the people and to help alleviate the hardship caused by the war.
For the religious, however, he undertook a massive clampdown on the church. People were required to register to attend, and church-going would bar you from party membership, from promotion, from better housing and your children would not be able to get into the better schools. He also undertook to destroy many churches – notably the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and the destruction of three cathedrals in Lenin’s birthplace of Ul’ianovsk.
Was the optimism premature? Not really. The “thaw” was a genuine thaw, and the closing of the Gulag – with the political rehabilitation of most of the victims – living and dead – of Stalin’s terror, signalled a new, legal basis for the Soviet regime. One of the consequences of the thaw was a renewed enthusiasm for the communist project. Coupled with the victories in space, the USSR looked, even to its own citizens, like it was catching the USA, and even surpassing them in some areas.
See:
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era – William Taubman
Khrushchev Remembers – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
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