what were some of khrushchev’s consequences from his speech at the twentieth party congress?

Question by Rebecca T: what were some of khrushchev’s consequences from his speech at the twentieth party congress?
i have an final tomorrow in history, and im stuck on this question and also…
how was tito able to remove yugoslavia from Stalin’s grip without suffering the fate of the czech?
could you please help me thanks guys

Answers and Views:

Answer by A. T.
One of the consequences was that people began to look at a lot deeper not only at Stlain’s betrayal of socialism, but at the CPSU, and how it had helped to develop the “cult of personality.”

“The fact of the existence of a revisionist majority in the leadership of the CPSU was effectively concealed by the ‘cult of personality’ that was built up around Stalin. Stalin himself criticised and ridiculed this ‘cult’ on numerous occasions. Yet it continued. It follows that Stalin was either an utter hypocrite, or he was unable to put a stop to this ‘cult.’ The initiator of the ‘cult of personality’ around Stalin was, in fact, Karl Radek, who pleaded guilty to treason at his public trial in 1937.

Why should the revisionists have built up this ‘cult of personality’ around Stalin? It was, I suggest, because it disguised the fact that not Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists, but they — concealed opponents of socialism — who held a majority in the leadership. It enabled them to take actions — such as the arrest of many innocent persons between 1934 and 1938 (when they controlled the security forces) and subsequently blame these ‘breaches of socialist legality’ upon Stalin.

Clearly, Stalin’s ‘pathological suspicion’ of some of his colleagues, of which Khrushchev complained so bitterly in his secret speech to the 20th Congress, was not pathological at all! On one allegation both Stalin and the revisionists are agreed — that in Stalin’s time miscarriages of justice occurred in which innocent people were judically murdered. The revisionists, of course, maintain that Stalin was responsible for these miscarriages of justice. But there is a contradiction here. Krushchev himself said in his 1956 secret speech (and I quote):

“The question is complicated here by the fact that all this was done because Stalin was convinced that this was necessary for the defence of the interest of the working class against the plotting of ememies. He saw this from the position of the interests of the working class, of the interest of the victory of socialism.” But only a person who was completely insane could possibly imagine that the arrest of innocent people could serve socialism. And all the evidence shows that Stalin retained his full mental faculties right to his death. However, the contradiction resolves itself if these judicial murders were carried out, not at the behest of Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists, but at the behest of the revisionist opponents of socialism.

As for Josip Broz, or “Tito:”

Following the Russian liberation of Belgrade in 1944, the military might of the Yugoslavian Army was such that Tito felt sufficiently confident to secure the immediate departure of the Red Army from Yugoslavia. On 7 March, 1945, Tito became premier and minister of defense and in 1953 was elected president. Tito’s loyalty to Moscow was real but was not based on subservience. Thus, as the war came to an end he prodded the patience of Stalin further when staking Yugoslavia’s claims to Trieste without delay in opposition to Soviet policies (Neal; 339). This put Tito and Stalin on a collision course that would not find remedy. Stalin wanted to bring the Yugoslav regime into line with the other much more subservient governments and parties in Eastern Europe. He believed Tito himself and his immediate subordinates must be replaced by more pliable characters. This was the essence of the matter.

Despite his independent and confrontational demeanor towards the Soviets, however, the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his authorization of the 1946 execution of Mihajlovic as a Nazi collaborator, imprisonment of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, his support of the Communists in the Greek Civil War, and the shooting-down of two US planes over Slovenia. Tito’s continued defiance to Soviet economic and political demands on Yugoslavia coupled with his rather unorthodox methods of operating politically within his country soon resulted in his condemnation from Stalin. On 28 June, 1948, he was officially denounced and his party, the CPY, was ejected as a member of the Cominform. In order to bring the mutinous state and its leader into compliance with the Soviet directive, Stalin concocted an economic blockade, sedition, border incidents, and threats of military invasion all to no avail, as these threats served only to further unite the Yugoslav people behind Tito (Auty; 804).

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