First signs of thaw

The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 passed off entirely without incident. Speeches on the next five-year plan were applauded and Stalin’s pet agronomist Lysenko made his customary appearance to denounce bourgeois genetics. A visiting communist from Trieste, Vittorio Vidali, noted his envy of two Uzbek party members who sat reading short stories throughout the proceedings. By late on Friday, the Congress was over, except for the announcement of one additional closed session the following morning.

How many delegates skipped this dreary-sounding extra session? Any that did missed the single pivotal moment in the history of the Soviet Union. Without preamble, Nikita Khrushchev stood up and delivered a report ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’. For over four hours he spoke to the hushed hall of the ‘exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of party democracy and revolutionary legality’ that had occurred during the latter part of Stalin’s reign. He was speaking out, but secretly — a confusing message that aimed to launch a programme of strictly controlled reform to invigorate the Party and, most importantly, to absolve the Party leadership of complicity in Stalin’s and Beria’s crimes.

Yet, as Kathleen E. Smith points out, 1956 could be used as a case study for ‘how dictatorships stumble into reform and cope with ambiguity of their own making … and the obstacles to controlled liberalisation’. Once delivered, Khrushchev’s revelations took on their own momentum. They set in motion a pendulum of reform and reaction that swung back and forth through the Brezhnev years and beyond. Intermittently hesitant and high-handed, the Party’s approach had the effect of emboldening both sides of the debate, which would culminate in Yeltsin’s appearance on a tank outside the Duma in 1991 and the collapse of the entire Soviet system.