Khrushchev's Vilification Of Stalin

Khrushchev’s vilification of Stalin in his address to the Twentieth Party Congress was meticulous in detailing precise failures of his predecessor’s rule. Above all, Khrushchev strongly elaborated on Stalin’s extremities, especially the cult of personality that he had built up over the years. The speech also in turn attacked ‘Stalinist repressions, arrests, terror and murders…[and] for bungling foreign affairs and mishandling the war’. Despite this, Khrushchev was cautious in limiting his other criticisms of Stalin, and it was this focus on him as an individual rather than of the overall Soviet system that defined the boundaries of acceptable criticism. As such, the speech sought to condemn Stalin without endangering the party’s validity or the system that had indeed allowed Khrushchev to rise to power.
Khrushchev’s speech portrays Stalin as ‘a very distrustful man; sickly
suspicious,’ and attributes his wrongdoings as the result of the flaws in his character, in addition to the fault of other distinctive wrongdoers such as Beria. It must be said that while Khrushchev was careful to deflect attempts to trace the origins of Stalinism to issues within the Party; despite dealing with the crimes after 1934, his speech was still not entirely honest – only crimes from top ranking officials were dealt with, not the repression and terror of ordinary citizens. ‘De-Stalinisation’ …during the Khrushchev era did signify the direct criticisms of Stalin made during the series of revelations instigated by the Secret speech’. De-Stalinisation, amongst the criticisms he made of Stalin, had always been for Khrushchev a method for eliminating possible political contenders whom he would subsequently attack as defenders of the old guard: ‘Khrushchev became the author of de-Stalinisation… partially because he had a clearer and bolder vision of the need for reforms than did his rivals’. In contrast to the conservatism of the successive Brezhnev years, if Khrushchev had made one great contribution to Soviet life, it was the fact that despite the flaws in his leadership, he had led the beginnings of an attack on Stalin and Stalinism as a whole: therefore he had brought a definitive end to the terror. By delivering his Secret Speech, he had at least laid the foundations for the Soviet system to break away from the repression that was Stalinism, as well as allowing for an ongoing process of a more thorough de-Stalinisation at some point in the distant future – though this would have to wait until Gorbachev came to power.
However, the speech dwindles somewhat in its’ evaluation of Stalinism: Khrushchev only truly begins to refer to the horrific nature of events following on from the Kirov murder of 1934 and even then, he restricted his critiques. As the Medvedev brothers point out, Stalin’s reign of terror had been well established before this occasion, yet Khrushchev had still said absolutely nothing on this. This is thus a vital indication that Khrushchev implicitly accepted the repression of various opposition movements against Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s such as the joint opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev one side, followed by the right opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Additionally, Khrushchev leaves a lot to be desired as he does not question the brutal reality of forcible collectivisation. Likewise, there was no mention of the hardships caused by industrialisation and the great famine of 1932-33, or even any reference to the first show trials. As the successor to the political and economic system that Stalin had come to shape, as well as playing a role in these programs, Khrushchev had no real motivations for raising real concerns about the Party structure and methods of rule that occurred.
Isaac Deutscher criticises Khrushchev for only revealing the purges of Stalin’s inner circle of lesser important figures that had come to power simply because other rank-and-file party members had been eliminated: ‘He reveals nothing of the inner story of the purges of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin… Eikhe, Postyshev, and Chubar were by comparison insignificant figures: their names meant little or nothing not only to the outside world, but even to the young Soviet generation’.
Miriam Dobson argues that Khrushchev’s speech was necessary for voicing the ordeals of ordinary people who suffered under Stalinism who would otherwise be unheard: ‘…only the Secret speech allowed their stories to be told’. Stalinism, according to Khrushchev, was associated with ‘an army of willing perpetrators of terror, but also a mentality of fear, subservience, deceit and stifled initiative’. As such, it is also important to recognise that the critique of Stalin had only taken place once Stalin and his system had firmly established control – it was the ruler that had to be condemned, rather than the line of
succession.
‘The Secret speech was not intended to be ‘secret’ – it was on Party orders to be read out in workplace meetings and consequently published all over the world’. The initial reaction that followed its deliverance was so substantial that it forced Khrushchev to decrease the pace of de-Stalinisation. As a matter of fact, he began a retreat that reduced the scale of Stalin’s alleged abuses of power by acknowledging Stalin’s services to the Party and the revolutionary movement – consequently, this lead to a halt on any further investigations into the past. According to the Medvedev brothers: ‘Khrushchev and his colleagues were reluctant to undermine the foundations of their own power, power which had been gained under the old system’. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death was a cultural thaw, as was delivered in Khrushchev’s speech, although this was to end just as quickly as it had begun.
The speech attempts to offer an analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, though this is far from complete. However, it does to a certain degree come to terms with the past that would continue to have dysfunctional effects on the present. Moreover, it strove to expose the cult of personality, but more importantly, change how Stalin and his legacy would be remembered, which in turn would allow deeper reforms to be made. Before this was obtainable, a new memory of Stalin and Stalinism needed to be imposed, and Khrushchev endeavoured to do this by subjecting Stalinism to historical analysis. However, the Secret Speech was a critique of Stalin himself and not of Stalinism and ultimately, most it consisted of attacks on Stalin himself, making the speech less objective in its analysis of Stalinism than an assault of character.