The revelations may even have contributed to the Polish uprising in June and the Hungarian revolution of October Rumors of the speech first reached Ambassador Bohlen on March 10, at a reception at the French embassy. Key portions of the guidance include: [6]. Still without a copy of the speech, in early April, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made the following pointed statement. In mid-April, still without any definitive detailed information about the speech, the Department of State and USIA sent out another guide for use in dealing with the anti-Stalin movement.
It should serve as the basic guideline for all official [propaganda] output. Posts were informed that Guidance on the Far East was forthcoming. In those days everything had to be set in hot metal to be made up into pages.
By that Thursday, according to Obank, 'half the paper had been set, corrected and was being made up. Worse, we found that we would have to hold out almost all the regular features - book reviews, arts, fashion, bridge, chess, leader-page articles, the lot. The Khrushchev copy, page by page, began flowing. As we began making up pages, it became clear that still more space would be needed, so we gulped and turned to the sacred cows - the advertisements. An endless number of headlines, sub-headings, cross-heads and captions had to be written as the copy wound its way through the paper.
But the gamble paid off. Reader response was enthusiastic. One said: 'Sir, I am just a chargehand in a factory, hardly a place where you might expect The Observer to have a large circulation. But my copy of the Khrushchev edition has been going from hand to hand and from shop to shop in the administration offices, transport etc.
I was quite amazed at the serious interest shown as a result of the very minute examination of the speech. The paper sold out and had to be reprinted. That, surely, was justification for the extraordinary decision to print the full text at three days' notice.
Khrushchev was clearly shaken by developments. His opponents gained strength, and in May came within an ace of ousting him. When a majority in the Presidium of the Central Committee the Politburo voted to depose him, only his swift action to convene a full Central Committee meeting gave him a majority. It was his opponents, notably the veteran Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who were deposed. But seven years later the conservatives did succeed in ousting him. Twenty years of Leonid Brezhnev followed, during which the clock was turned back, if not to full-scale Stalinism, at least part of the way.
But there were Communists who never forgot Khrushchev, and in particular his 'secret speech'. One was Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been a student at Moscow University in When he came to power in he was determined to carry on Khrushchev's work in reforming the Soviet Union and opening it to the rest of the world. More than once he publicly praised his predecessor for his courage in making the speech and pursuing the process of de-Stalinisation. Some may doubt that Stalin's Soviet Union could ever have been reformed, but Khrushchev was not among them - and neither, indeed, was Gorbachev.
But after two decades of decay under Brezhnev, even he could not hold the country together. It can well be argued that the 'secret speech' was the century's most momentous, planting the seed that eventually caused the demise of the USSR. Marina Okrugina, 95, former Gulag prisoner 'I was born in Siberia in My father had been exiled there in Tsarist times after killing a Cossack who attacked a workers' demonstration that he was taking part in.
In I was working in Mongolia as a typist for a group of Soviet journalists. They were producing a newspaper to be distributed in Manchuria with the hope of making the Chinese sympathetic to us. But the censor decided it was a "provocation". We were all arrested and sent to the Gulag. When the war started the men were sent to the front and I was left behind. I spent eight years in the camps. In I got word that my two sons had died in the Leningrad blockade and my husband had perished fighting in Smolensk.
I was released in , but not allowed to live in the 39 biggest cities in the Soviet Union. I stayed in the Far East and had to report to the police every week. Less than three years after his death, new Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Twentieth Communist Party Congress with a long, angry speech that denounced Stalin.
Furthermore, he said, more than half of the Seventeenth Party Congress was arrested on trumped-up charges of counterrevolutionary actions. Khrushchev warned the delegates that they needed to tightly control these revelations. The delegates did not dare even to look at each other as the party secretary piled one horrifying accusation on another for four solid hours.
At the end there was no applause and the audience left in a state of shock. One of those who heard the speech was the young Alexander Yakovlev, later a leading architect of perestroika, who recalled that it shook him to his roots. He sensed Khrushchev was telling the truth, but it was a truth that frightened him. Generations in the Soviet Union had revered Stalin and linked their lives and hopes with him.
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