Cautiously, Russians began to appreciate the change. They slowly shed the heavy overcoat of fear they had been wearing through decades of Stalinist terror. A few even spoke to foreigners, which had been unusual. One man asked me with wonder in his eyes whether I had ever been to Detroit—and driven a Chevrolet? Many were just then being released from Siberian prisons, eager to reacquaint themselves with their families, careers, and lives. I heard defiant university students openly raise questions in the Lenin Library about the Soviet political leadership, even about the continued viability of communism. American artists such as the violinist Isaac Stern and the tenor Jan Peerce, participating in a new East-West exchange program, performed at the Moscow Conservatory before rapturous audiences. Long lines of Muscovites eager to buy tickets blocked traffic on the busy Arbat. Hope, often in such short supply, was again in the air. Nirvana had not yet arrived; many questions remained about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, but Stalinism as a way of life and government was clearly on the way out.
Sergei Khrushchev had suspected that his father really wanted to publicize his “secret speech,” and Sergei was right.
On the night of February 25–26, only hours after Khrushchev had delivered the speech, communist leaders of Soviet bloc countries, who had attended the just concluded 20th Party Congress but had not been invited to hear the secret speech, were summoned to a special midnight briefing at Central Committee headquarters. Trusted Russian officials were told to read the speech to them very slowly so they could take notes. They were not given copies. A few days later, on March 1, Khrushchev sent an edited copy of the speech to his closest colleagues. He wanted it checked and wanted to know “if there arise no objections to the text,” distributed to party and Komsomol members all over the country, all 25 million of them (Komsomol was the Communist Party youth organization). The speech had been labeled “top secret”; now it was downgraded to “not for the press.” Khrushchev wanted to “acquaint all Communists and Komsomol members, and also nonparty activists including workers, white-collar personnel, and collective farmers,” with the essential message of the 20th Party Congress. He also wanted to stimulate broad public support for the new party line and leader.
All of this took place behind closed doors, but rumors quickly sprouted all over Moscow, like weeds in spring. Once a Komsomol leader in Kazan had been briefed on the secret speech, it was only a matter of time before a cabdriver in Leningrad would pick up the theme of Khrushchev’s stunning denunciation of Stalin, once the saint, now a killer. The Polish communist leader Boleslav Beirut, who had just been briefed and who routinely would inform the editor of the Polish communist newspaper about all major developments, told the editor about the midnight briefing. Naturally, over drinks, the editor would then share the news with reporters from other Polish newspapers, and they in turn with their Western colleagues. In communist times secrets were sacred, and most were kept, but this was one that the Kremlin leadership clearly wanted leaked to the public. This was hot news, and hot news traveled through the Soviet empire by rumor, by whisper, by sensible deduction, and, on occasion, by official proclamation.
At the U.S. embassy we could feel the political ground trembling beneath us, and, in the embassy courtyard, where we thought we were safe from Soviet electronic eavesdropping, we would swap stories and impressions. Khrushchev was now the boss, clearly, towering over Stalin’s corpse, but what next? In Moscow’s rarefied social circles, at dinner parties and receptions, we would share gossip, rumor, and occasionally facts. At the theater we might by chance bump into a Soviet official we had met elsewhere, and in a brief conversation pick up a phrase, a look, a reference to a Pravda article. At the JPRS, where I spent most of my time, I had the added benefit of being able to listen to Anna Holdcroft, a genuine expert on reading Soviet tea leaves and, it seemed to me, Khrushchev’s mind. She was a remarkable resource, and on more than a number of occasions her insights would end up in my Moscow diary, but never with her name attached to them. I decided, shortly after starting my diary, that I would not include names, conversations, or incidents that might be harmful to American interests or to innocent Russians. I kept my diary, which was not classified, in my room at American House, where I imagine anyone could have read it.
By March 19, a day after stories appeared for the first time in Western newspapers about a secret speech, I noted in my diary that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Khrushchev, had “launched dramatic charges against the memory and legacy of Joseph Stalin.” I cited no specific source, but mentioned four of the charges.
“Stalin is said to have ‘murdered’ three-quarters of the membership of the 1934 Congress of the Communist Party.”
“He is said to have brutally slaughtered nine-tenths of the Red Army officer corps in the great purges of the 1930’s and thereby seriously affected the morale of the military just prior to the outbreak of World War II.”
“He is accused of ignoring intelligence reports from Germany and warnings from Churchill that Hitler was going to attack Russia in 1941.”
“He is accused of having concocted the ‘doctors’ plot’ as a perverted excuse for initiating a new bloodbath of the Communist Party leadership.”
Then, in summation, I used the phrase “it is believed,” suggesting I had gotten the information on “deep background” from a senior diplomatic source, more than likely Ambassador Bohlen, who by this time had learned definitively, from Israelis based in Warsaw, that Khrushchev had indeed delivered the rumored secret speech. “Deep background” meant I could use the information without attribution to any named source. I adhered rather rigidly to the rules of deep background while I worked as a translator at the JPRS and later, for many years, as a journalist. But now, more than sixty years later, I’m breaking the rules and taking the liberty of citing Bohlen. “It is believed that at some time during the 20th Party Congress,” I wrote, citing no source, “Khrushchev launched a vicious attack against Stalin as a man. He is believed to have called Stalin a madman, driven by a persecution mania. Further reports indicate that throughout the Soviet Union, these charges are now being discussed.”
Nine days later, on March 28, using a kind of coded language, Pravda went public with Khrushchev’s dethroning of Stalin. Deep background was no longer needed to protect a source. In a long article, spread across the bottom halves of the second and third pages of the four-page newspaper, Khrushchev buried the Stalin era, even though photos, paintings, and busts of the disgraced Soviet leader were still in evidence throughout the city. Not enough time had passed to remove them. Pravda drew an interesting distinction between Stalin in his early years of power and in his later years. In his early years Stalin actually made “creative” contributions to Marxism-Leninism, the newspaper noted, but “with the passage of time, this personality cult assumed more and more ugly forms and seriously damaged the cause.” My impression was that now that Pravda had spoken, Stalin’s image would soon follow Stalin’s crimes into the dustbin of Soviet history.