While these maneuvers in the Kremlin were bringing Khrushchev to the top, the leader was carrying on in secret a complete revision of the Stalin era policies of repression. The news of Stalin’s death and the first reforms provoked revolts in the GULAG in 1953 and 1954 that were put down by the military, but the process of release began, from the camps and labor colonies as well as from the special settlements. Almost a million were released by the beginning of 1955. Equally important were the various investigations that the authorities launched under the aegis of the USSR Supreme Court to examine the more egregious cases of execution and imprisonment back to the 1930s. Their findings were overwhelmingly that in the cases of these victims they found “an absence of the components of a crime” (otsutstvie sostava prestupleniia), leading to their release and the posthumous rehabilitation of the dead. Rehabilitation was not merely symbolic, for it meant that the families of those who perished were no longer enemies of the state, and if they had languished in the camps, they were released. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of people found themselves with a ticket home and papers allowing them to live normal lives, returning to families some had not seen for fifteen or more years, and whose families did not even know if they were alive. For the time being, the release and rehabilitation of the prisoners and the dead took place in silence. Nothing appeared in the newspapers.
At the end of 1955 Khrushchev convinced his colleagues, even those who had been Stalin’s closest associates like Molotov and Kaganovich, to establish a party commission to look into Stalin’s “violations of socialist legality,” particularly the extermination of most of the party elite in 1937–38. The head of the commission was P. N. Pospelov, a former editor of Pravda and to all appearances a fervent Stalinist. His commission’s report became the basis of Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech, with additions from himself and editorial work by another party ideologist, M. M. Suslov, came at the end of the Congress. As everyone was packing to go home, the announcement came to the Soviet and foreign Communists that there would an additional session. There, Khrushchev read his speech for four hours (with a short break) to a stunned and silent audience. In it he blamed all the crimes of the 1930s and after on Stalin personally, with some room for Beria. He focused primarily on the destruction of the Central Committee in 1937–38, seventy percent of whose members had perished, and on Stalin’s conduct of the war. Neither of his accounts was fully honest, for in blaming Stalin for the terror he omitted the role of Molotov and other leaders, including himself, to say nothing of the thousands of enthusiastic denouncers of wreckers and spies from among the population. Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s role in the war was simply wrong, giving rise to numerous legends that came to be refuted only after 1991. He said almost nothing about collectivization, which ultimately involved more people and more deaths than the terror. The point, however, was to shift the blame onto Stalin for all the crimes of the past and to underscore the importance of the collective leadership of the party, to avoid “the cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. To prevent a recurrence of such horrors, the need was for collective leadership and the preservation of “socialist legality.”
The leadership had debated how much to publicize the speech, and the result was a compromise. It was not published in the Soviet Union (it appeared only in 1989) but was circulated among party organizations where it was read in its entirety to party members, some seven million people, and the whole of the Komsomol, more than eighteen million. As it was also circulated to foreign Communists, the speech got to the West through Poland and was quickly printed in many translations. Khrushchev’s lurid depictions of torture and execution (taken directly from Pospelov’s report) were a tremendous shock to foreign leftists, especially in the West, but elsewhere reaction was mixed. In China Mao Tse-tung never really approved of it, and Stalin’s works remained canonical in the Chinese party. In the Soviet Union itself the report produced pro-Stalin riots by thousands of students in Tbilisi and Gori in Stalin’s native Georgia, and it caused outbursts of violent criticism of the regime among Moscow intellectuals. Mostly, however, the population was more concerned with meat prices and accepted the new policies, even if many harbored more positive views of the Soviet past than those now propagated by Khrushchev.
The main effects of the secret speech were in Eastern Europe, leading to riots in Poland and the Hungarian revolution in the fall of 1956. Khrushchev survived these threats with his power intact, and moved on with more reform projects. In the late 1950s the release of prisoners and special settlers grew to a flood. The deported nationalities from the North Caucasus returned home, their autonomous republics restored. (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and some other groups, however, did not return, though their personal legal statuses were restored.) By 1960 the GULAG had come to an end. More change was in the works. Soviet industry was doing much better than agriculture, but the pressure to build a fully modern society, now in competition with the United States, mandated greater progress in both manufacturing and agriculture. Khrushchev publicly called on Soviet agriculture to surpass US production in meat and milk products. For industry the solution he adopted early in 1957 was to decentralize the economy, creating “Councils of the National Economy” on the regional level instead of the central industrial ministries that had managed the economy since the 1930s.
Before this plan could be implemented, a new crisis arose, this time in the central leadership of the party. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich had been discontented with Khrushchev for some time. Molotov was unhappy with the partial reconciliation with Tito, the increasing talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, and with the increased priority given to agriculture and consumer goods. His allies shared these doubts, and also opposed the growing personal power of Khrushchev. Behind these particular concerns was the looming issue of de-Stalinization: how far would Khrushchev go? The lesson of Hungary was that the process could get out of hand, and even without that, as the main survivors of Stalin’s old guard they were themselves acutely vulnerable. In the early months of 1957 they lobbied the members of the Presidium, gaining seven votes – themselves, the aging Voroshilov, Bulganin, and two important economic managers – out of eleven for ousting Khrushchev from power. The plotters then told Khrushchev that they needed to meet to discuss a joint appearance in Leningrad for its anniversary, but when he arrived on June 18, he learned that they wanted to replace him as the leader of the party. Furious debate raged and Mikoyan, alone of the Stalin old guard in support of Khrushchev, left the room briefly and went to Leonid Brezhnev and Elena Furtseva (the only woman ever to play a role in Soviet leadership), both candidate members of the Presidium. He told them to contact the Minister of Defense and a candidate member of the Presidium, Marshal Zhukov, who was absent because the plotters had sent him off on maneuvers. Brezhnev raced to the telephone and summoned the Marshal, who arrived in the Kremlin while the debate still raged. Molotov had his seven votes, but all but one of the candidate members stuck by Khrushchev. Mikoyan and others had also contacted the Central Committee members resident in and near Moscow, and by the party statute the ultimate arbiter of such decisions was the Central Committee (CC). Molotov and the others at first refused to meet with the CC members, but soon realized that they had no choice, especially with Zhukov unwavering in opposition to their plans. He had been the man who had arrested Beria and had the loyalty of the armed forces. The full Central Committee convened on June 22, 1957, the sixteenth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.