Khrushchev's speech was supposed to be kept secret. However, the ruling Presidium approved distributing it to local party committees; local authorities read the text to millions of party members and others around the country; and Polish Communist leaders allowed thousands of copies to circulate, one of which reached the US Central Intelligence Agency The US State Department eventually released the text to the New York Times, which published it on 4 June 1956.
'I very much doubt Father wanted to keep it secret', recalled Khrushchev's son Sergei. 'He wanted to bring the report to the people. The secrecy of the session wasonlyaformalconcessiononhispart...'[102] Yet, at numerous meetings at which the speech was read and discussed, criticism of Stalin exploded way beyond Khrushchev's. Why had it taken so long to admit Stalin's crimes? Had not current leaders been his accomplices? Why had Khrushchev himself kept silent for so long? Was not the Soviet system itself the real culprit? Some meetings tried to call for rights and freedoms, and for multi-party elections to guarantee them.[103] In April 1956, the KGB reported that portraits and busts of Stalin had been defaced or torn down, that Communists at one party meeting had declared him 'an enemy of the people', and at another had demanded his body be removed from the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum. On the other hand, those who defended Stalin included not only unreconstructed party officials but ordinary citizens, some of whom hailed Stalin for 'punishing' the party and police officials who had oppressed them.[104] In Stalin's native Georgia, some 60,000 people carried flowers to his monument, and when some of them marched on the radio station, at least twenty demonstrators were killed in the clashes with troops.[105]
Not long after his 'secret' speech, 'Khrushchev sensed the blow had been too powerful, and ... increasingly he sought to limit the boundaries of critical analysis, lest it end up polarising society .. .'[106] His retreat climaxed in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June which blamed Stalin at most for 'serious errors'.[107] However, the retreat came too late to prevent turmoil in Poland and a revolution in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at a cost of some 20,000 Hungarian and 1,500 Soviet casualties.
Personality and history
The year 1956 was pivotal in the Khrushchev period. De-Stalinisation was at the heart of his effort to reform Soviet Communism. But in the years that followed, virtually all his reforms were marked by the kind of alternating advance and retreat that occurred in 1956. What triggered the burst of change that was central to the Khrushchev years? What limited it? Why did the reforms of the Khrushchev period go as far as they did, but no further? Answers to these questions can be found at the intersection of personality and history, of Khrushchev and his character, on the one hand, and, on the other, impersonal forces such as Stalin's legacy, the nature of the Soviet system, the influence of the world outside the USSR, even the nature of nuclear weapons.
Three conditions justify singling out a political leader and his or her personality as decisive influences on events. Obviously, such a leader must have the sheer political power to affect those events. Second, a leader who acts idiosyncratically, rather than doing what others would do in his position, is not simply reacting to the dictates of a situation, or reflecting values that he and his colleagues share. Thirdly, actions that are particularly costly and self- destructive are likely to be products of internal drives and compulsions rather than of external circumstances.[108]
Khrushchev fits all three criteria. Stalin's successor may have wielded less power than his former master, but more than enough to allow him to initiate reforms and then throttle them back. Perhaps his most important decisions (to unmask Stalin in 1956, to dispatch nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962 and then suddenly to remove those missiles) were moves which, in all probability, no other Soviet leader of his time would have made. In a sense, Khrushchev's life is a stunning success story (if one does not count the corpses over which he clambered on his way to the top), but no sooner had he survived and succeeded Stalin, and assumed full power himself, than he began making devastating miscalculations, which ended in his unceremonious removal in October 1964.
Yet, Khrushchev also acted in a historical context that shaped and limited him. Having come to political maturity under Stalin and served for years in the dictator's inner circle, Khrushchev himself was a Stalinist before he became a 'de-Stalinist'. In addition, Stalin's legacy - a dysfunctional economy, a super-centralised polity and a self-isolating foreign policy - was nearly insurmountable. Martin Malia goes so far as to contend that the Soviet system which Khrushchev tried to reform was essentially unreformable.[109] Kremlinologists like Myron Rush, Carl Linden and Michel Tatu have portrayed Kremlin power struggles that determined Khrushchev's policies.[110] Stephen F. Cohen pointed to the 'larger political forces in Soviet officialdom and society', particularly the 'friends and foes of change', which influenced the pace and pattern of de-Stalinisation.[111] Not to mention the effect of Russian inertia, explicated, for example, by Tim McDaniel in The Agony of the Russian Idea,[112] but characterised more crudely by Khrushchev in a 1963 conversation with Fidel Castro: 'You'd think I, as first secretary, could change anything in this country. Like hell I can! No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia's like a tub full of dough, you put your hand in it, down to the bottom, and you think you're master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That's what Russia is like!'[113]
The outside world posed both mortal threats and irresistible opportunities to a superpower on the make like the USSR. Pursuing 'expansion and coexistence'[114] simultaneously was difficult for any Soviet leader. As Alexander Yanov has argued, the United States 'consistently [tried] to undermine a Soviet reformist leader, thus practically shutting one of the rare Russian windows into political modernity and inviting a ferocious arms race'.[115] But Khrushchev himself was also at fault: the awesome power of nuclear weapons reinforced his conviction that war with the United States would be an unmitigated catastrophe, but it also tempted him to engage in nuclear bluff and blackmail that ended up endangering Soviet security as well as his own.
Biography
Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in the poor southern Russian village of Kalinovka, and his childhood there profoundly shaped his character. His parents dreamed of owning land and a horse but did not obtain either. His father, who later worked in the mines of Iuzovka in the Donbass, was a failure in the eyes of Khrushchev's mother, a strong-willed woman who invested her hopes in her son. That made it all the more important for Khrushchev to outdo his father, yet the very success he craved risked evoking guilt at succeeding where his father had not. The fact that Khrushchev had no more than two to four years of elementary education not only equipped him ill to cope with governing a vast transcontinental state, it also explains the insecurity he felt, especially when jousting with the intelligentsia, and the super-sensitivity to slight which made him vindictive towards those he thought had demeaned or betrayed him. His parents' religiosity helps to account for his sense of rectitude and for the conscience that endured even after he violated his own moral code by becoming Stalin's accomplice in terror.
102
Sergei N. Khrushchev,
103
See Iurii Aksiutin, 'Popular Responses to Khrushchev', in William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason (eds.),
105
V A. Kozlov,
107
Resolution translated in
108
See SidneyHook,
109
Martin Malia,
110
Michel Tatu,
111
Stephen F. Cohen,
112
Tim McDaniel,
114
Adam B. Ulam,
115
Alexander Yanov, 'In the Grip ofthe Adversarial Paradigm: The Case ofNikitaSergeevich Khrushchev in Retrospect', in Robert O. Crummey (ed.),