RUSSIAN television planned last week to mark the 50th anniversary of a turning point in Soviet history with a documentary. For reasons that are not very clear, the project was abandoned before it could be aired. “I don’t feel they want very much to mark this date,” commented Rada Adzhubei. “One of my friends wanted to make a film about it, but then he was told, ‘It’s safer not to.” The only references I hear on the radio to my father are comic ones...”

Adzhubei’s father was, once upon a time, the head of the Soviet Communist Party, and the event in question is a four-hour speech he delivered to the 20th party congress on February 25, 1956. The unscheduled peroration was a blistering indictment of his predecessor Josef Stalin.

Although the assumption that the excoriation was an individual initiative on the part of Nikita Khrushchev that shocked the party hierarchy as much as it rocked the rank-and-file membership has long been discounted, it is still referred to as the “secret speech”. That’s because it had been decided not to publish it. “We cannot let this matter get out of the party,” Khrushchev had noted. “We should not give ammunition to the enemy; we should not wash our dirty linen before their eyes.”

There is, however, some anecdotal evidence that Khrushchev at least was not particularly averse to making it known internationally that he had given the party’s dirty Stalin a thorough going-over. John Rettie, a Moscow correspondent at the time for the Reuters news agency, recalls being offered details of the speech by a Russian acquaintance who, he is convinced, worked for the KGB. What’s more, he strongly suspects that this was done at Khrushchev’s behest.

Rettie’s scoop — because of Soviet censorship, he filed his report from Scandinavia, and did so anonymously — was overtaken before long by the full text of the speech, which was leaked to Israeli intelligence by a source in Poland and subsequently delivered to the CIA. It was published in The New York Times, and Britain’s The Observer devoted almost an entire edition to Khrushchev’s words. In the Soviet Union, the complete text was not published until 1988, the heyday of glasnost.

No one with even a vague idea of the realities — or even the fantasies — of the Stalinist era can seriously wonder why Khrushchev’s 26,000 words were of earth-shattering significance to both friends and foes of Soviet communism. Stalin, after all, was no ordinary party leader. He was deified by millions of Soviet citizens. Likewise in the eyes of millions of communists and fellow travellers in the rest of the world, he could do little wrong.

It may seem mind-boggling now, but at the time the show trials whereby he had eliminated virtually every potential political rival were taken at face value by many communists. Reports of purges and other forms of mass repression that appeared in the West were frequently dismissed as propaganda by those who didn’t want to believe them. This wasn’t all that hard to do, because there was indeed a great deal of propaganda on both sides, intended either to discredit communism as cruel, morally degenerate and unworkable, or to hail it as the way of the future, incomparably superior to capitalism. All too often it was a no-holds-barred contest.

Then, in February 1956, Stalin’s successor personally delivered the coup de grace to the red tsar’s reputation, in effect admitting that for nearly 30 years the Soviet Union had been ruled by a ruthless and paranoid megalomaniac. The consequences of this moment of truth were bound to be profound, and they ranged from heart attacks among members of Khrushchev’s audience to, within months, moves towards democratization in parts of Eastern Europe.

So, what exactly did Khrushchev say? He started off by reiterating a theme that had echoed throughout the congress: a critique of the cult of personality. “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics,” he noted. Vladimir Lenin figured time and again in his discourse, partly as a paragon to measure Stalin against. But he also found it useful to bring up a letter Lenin had written to the party’s central committee in 1922, suggesting that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary, which had been suppressed at the time.

Stalin’s despotism came next: his refusal to consult his colleagues, contrary to Leninist tradition, and his marked tendency towards repression, which invariably entailed one of two options for the victims: elimination or internal exile. Possibly in order to guard against his diatribe from being characterized as a Trotskyite backlash, Khrushchev was at pains to point out that Stalin had dealt admirably with the “Trotskyite-Zinoviev bloc” and the “Bukharinites”, as well as with class enemies. The problem was that he had continued with his tactics long after the Left oppositionists and Right deviationists (jargon of this nature was commonplace in communist discourse) lost their influence.

Many of those persecuted as “enemies of the people” — all too often they were executed after being tortured into signing confessions — were passionate communists, Khrushchev pointed out: “of the 139 members and candidates of the central committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons ... were arrested and shot”. He cited many individual cases, but perhaps the most devastating part of the indictment was his denigration of Stalin’s role as a war leader: not only because the ranks of the Red Army had been purged and intelligence about an impending Nazi attack was disregarded, leaving the USSR criminally under-prepared, but also because Stalin became catatonic in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion, fearing that all had been lost.

Various other errors, miscalculations, human rights violations and deviations from Marxism-Leninism were cited, and Khrushchev tried to explain away the reluctance or inability of party stalwarts to challenge Stalin during his lifetime by claiming, in effect, that they were too petrified to even contemplate a confrontation.

This cowardice cost the Soviet Union dearly, but it was a natural enough reaction to the intolerance of the times. It has been said that Khrushchev’s speech was driven by a desire to clear his own name, given that he had, under Stalin, played a leading role in the waves of repression. That’s unlikely, given that it would have been all to easy to carry on in Stalin’s vein. Breaking away from that morbid model took courage, and those behind the move may well have been motivated by an urge to rescue the Bolshevik project from the excesses of totalitarianism.

Khrushchev later noted that he needed to get all this out of his system not least because his own arms were “covered with blood up to the elbows”. His true motives can, of course, be debated endlessly, and probably inconclusively, but the need to redeem himself, to metaphorically wash the blood off his hands, seems to me as reasonable an explanation as any that history is likely to yield.

Stalin’s policies are believed to have resulted in untold millions of deaths. Many of the survivors walked out of the gulags into a less oppressive and less claustrophobic Soviet Union. “My life changed,” recalls Marina Okrugina, now 95. “I got a decent job and pension. We former prisoners were very thankful for Khrushchev’s bravery.”

The thaw that followed Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin allowed a restricted cultural reawakening, but when Soviet tanks crushed Hungary’s push for breathing space later in 1956, it served as a reminder that the system that had allowed Stalin to concentrate all power in his hands very much remained in place. For thousands of communists in the West, the unnatural demise of Imre Nagy’s government proved to be the last straw. Like the invasion of Afghanistan two decades later, the intervention in Hungary followed a vigorous debate within the party; in both cases, the hawks won.

Shortly after Khrushchev reinvigorated the de-Stalinization process in the early 1960s, he was swept aside and more or less written out, along with his speech, from Soviet history. However, thanks in part to his own initiatives, he lived in obscurity but relative peace until he died of old age. The drab and uninspiring neo-Stalinism of the Brezhnev era never veered anywhere close to the levels of repression that the moustachioed dictator had favoured.

According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “I don’t think a concept like perestroika could have appeared” without that liberating act of apostasy.

In Russia nowadays, it is not uncommon to blame Khrushchev and Gorbachev for the demise of the USSR. The allegation may not be entirely without merit. But to assume that the alternative, the Soviet Union of Stalin and Brezhnev, was indeed the best that the Russian Revolution could have led to, as many anti-communists have long held, amounts to a wholesale indictment of the Bolshevik project.

In fact, the Soviet Union did have its redeeming features, and I would count Khrushchev and Gorbachev among them. The fact that, according to a recent opinion poll, 50 per cent of Russians today regard Stalin’s role in their nation’s past as either “very positive” or “somewhat positive” suggests chiefly that the teaching of history has not improved since 1991. A far more rational approach to memories of the tyrant emerges in the recollections of the aforementioned Marina Okrugina. “When Stalin died in 1953,” she says, “we closed the door tight and danced with joy.”

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