Why Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalin for his ‘grave abuses of power’

WHEN Nikita Khrushchev gave a special speech at a closed session of the Congress of Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, he dropped a bombshell about his predecessor Joseph Stalin.

Soviet (USSR) leader Nikita Khrushchev waves from the balcony of his New York hotel during his first visit to USA in 1959.

DELEGATES at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could hardly believe their ears when secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin on the final day of the congress in 1956. It was the first gathering of the party since Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 and, instead of a tribute to the feared Soviet leader, Khrushchev quoted Lenin who said that Stalin was “excessively rude, lacked tolerance, kindness and considerateness toward his comrades”.

Khrushchev also boldly accused Stalin of having perpetrated “a grave abuse of power ... which has caused untold harm to our party”. He denounced Stalin’s elevation of himself to the status of a god and vowed to abolish the “cult of the individual” that had been such a feature of Stalin’s rule.

That speech, given 60 years ago today, caused some initial indignation, but by the end delegates gave Khrushchev a standing ovation, not out of fear for a new leader but joy that Stalin’s reign of terror was finally being put to rest.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev waves from the balcony of his New York hotel during his first visit to US in 1959.

News soon spread around the world about Krushchev’s speech, people seeing the new Soviet leader as a great hope for easing Cold War tensions. While some of his speech had been disingenuous, considering he had once been one of Stalin’s stalwart supporters, his loss of faith in Stalinism, reflective of a growing dissatisfaction within the USSR, would change the course of European history.

Stalin was born Josip Dzhugashvili in Georgia in 1879, but changed to Stalin after joining the revolutionary movement in 1900. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution he worked his way up to party secretary in 1922. Wielding excessive power over members, Soviet leader Lenin later warned Stalin could not be trusted to use this power wisely.

Vladimr Lenin and his wife Nadya (Nadezhda) Krupskaya during the Russian Civil War in 1919.

Stalin kept files on members, using the information to eliminate enemies and promote supporters, earning him the derisory nickname “comrade card index”. Following Lenin’s death in 1924 Stalin consolidated his power, stacking the higher echelons of the party with friends and allies, thereby dominating the congresses and the Politburo, the executive of the government.

In the ’30s Stalin orchestrated purges of the party, resulting in hundreds of executions, as a way of sowing fear over those who would dare challenge his authority. One of those who assisted was Khrushchev.

A young Nikita Khrushchev, left, with Josef Stalin at the Kremlin in 1936.

Born in 1894, the son of a coal miner, Khrushchev served in the Red Army in 1919 and became one of Stalin’s staunchest supporters in the Communist Party. He came to national prominence in 1935 by supervising the completion of the Moscow underground railway and became a full member of the Politburo in 1939. But over the course of World War II and its aftermath, Khrushchev became disenchanted with Stalin’s mismanagement, particularly of the war and agriculture, and his poor treatment of loyal party members.

Khrushchev planned for the inevitable power struggle that would happen after Stalin’s death so when it finally happened in March 1953 he was in a prime position. He arrested and executed Stalin’s henchman, security chief Lavrenty Beria, rallied his own supporters and began to take control of the party. After a brief power struggle with Georgy Malenkov, Khrushchev supplanted him as party secretary and appointed his own man, Nikolai Bulganin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1955.

On February 25, 1956, he denounced Stalin’s leadership. Although his speech was not officially published in the Soviet Union, word soon spread, sparking widespread disillusionment.

A Russian policeman on patrol in front of Lenin's tomb in Red Square, Moscow.

The revelations damaged the Soviet Union’s reputation abroad and contributed to uprisings in Hungary and Poland, where people found Khrushchev was capable of brutal repression. But it marked a more liberal era and the start of a policy of “De-Stalinization”, removing Stalin from the pantheon of revolutionary heroes and revealing some of the truth about his reign. In 1961 his corpse was taken from Lenin’s tomb in Red Square and buried.

Khrushchev tried to walk a path between greater freedoms for his people and maintaining control over the Soviet Union and its satellites. He was ousted from power in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev and died in 1971. The social and political changes he had set in motion with his 1956 speech would lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism in that country.

Originally published as Why Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalin for his ‘grave abuses of power’