Zealous de-Stalinizers, moreover, had personally experienced Stalin’s fearsome tyranny. Close family members of Stalin’s top associates were counted among his victims—kinsmen, even immediate family members, of members in the Politburo. Postwar campaigns like the ‘Leningrad affair’ swept away top figures in the party, leaving many others feeling profoundly vulnerable. The philosopher Aleksandrov himself had been a victim of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign: after A. A. Zhdanov denounced his history of Western philosophy (for exaggerating West European influence on Marxism) in June 1947, Aleksandrov was replaced as ideological watchdog by M. A. Suslov. In Stalin’s final years top aides grew fearful that the dictator had new designs on them; according to Khrushchev, only the dictator’s death prevented him from carrying out plans to arrest Molotov and Mikoyan.
Khrushchev himself had reason to fear the ageing tyrant. The most dramatic incident involved Khrushchev’s proposal to increase agricultural output by merging kolkhozy into larger ‘agrocities’. He advertised this idea in a Pravda article on 4 March 1951, but without first obtaining Stalin’s endorsement—probably because Stalin no longer read many documents. After Stalin subjected the article to devastating criticism, a terror-stricken Khrushchev hastily sent Stalin a letter of abject self-abasement and pleaded for the opportunity to denounce himself: ‘Profoundly distraught by the mistake I committed, I have been thinking how this could best be corrected. I decided to ask you to let me correct this mistake myself. I am prepared to publish in the press and to criticize my own article, published on 4 March, examining its false theses in detail’.
Khrushchev and his supporters also addressed the question of the cult’s victims and initiated a cautious rehabilitation, beginning first with élite figures. A typical early case involved I. M. Gronskii, a former editor of Izvestiia; sentenced to fifteen years in prison for ‘wrecking’, in June 1953 he petitioned the Central Committee to review his case. An investigation confirmed that his ‘confession’ was obtained through coercion and that he was innocent. In May 1954 the party established special commissions to review the cases; during the first year, these cautious commissions rehabilitated 4,620 individuals, leaving the mass of politicals—and ordinary criminals—in the maws of GULAG.
Apart from appeals for rehabilitation, the regime had other reasons for concern about GULAG. Above all, this prison empire became increasingly volatile, with frequent and violent disorders. The most famous, at ‘Gorlag’ (Norilsk) in 1953, required a military assault that left more than a thousand prisoners dead. Insurrections also exploded at Steplag (1954), Kolyma (1955), and Ozerlag (1956). More important, the ‘corrective labour’ system was anything but corrective: rates of recidivism were shockingly high. According to one study (April 1956), 25 per cent of current prisoners were former inmates. But such results were inevitable for a system manned by people with abysmally low professional standards: three-quarters of the camp administrators did not even have a secondary education. The size and complexity of GULAG also militated against better results. The population of camps and prisons (2,472,247 on 1 January 1953) declined after the Beria amnesty, but then increased sharply. On 1 January 1956 the prisons held 1.6 million inmates (with another 150,000 in transit or under investigation); GULAG’s 46 corrective labour camps and 524 labour colonies held another 940,880 people (including 113,739 guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’). In short, initial measures had barely altered the Stalinist prison-camp system; it was the Twentieth Party Congress that would open the floodgates for rehabilitation and reform.
Twentieth Party Congress (1956)
The first such assembly since Stalin’s death, the Twentieth Party Congress was a watershed in the political history of modern Russia. It sought to revitalize the party by including many new faces, not only among the 1,349 voting delegates, but also in the leadership: roughly half of the oblast and regional secretaries, even the Central Committee, were new. That turnover reflected Khrushchev’s campaign to consolidate power: one-third of the members of the Central Committee came from Khrushchev’s Moscow and Ukrainian ‘tail’ or entourage. The congress began in humdrum fashion, with little hint of the coming fireworks; Khrushchev’s report as First Secretary made only passing reference to Stalin. Critical tones, however, reverberated in the speeches of M. Suslov (about the ‘cult of the individual’) and Anastas Mikoyan (who attacked the cult and Stalin’s last opus, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR).
But the bombshell exploded unexpectedly on 24 February when delegates were summoned to an unscheduled, late-night speech by Khrushchev behind closed doors. His speech on ‘the cult of the personality and its consequences’, a text of 26,000 words requiring four hours for delivery, offered a devastating account of Stalin’s crimes after Kirov’s murder in December 1934. It presented shocking statistics on the number of party members, congress delegates, and military leaders who perished in the 1930s amid ‘mass violations of socialist legality’. The report also blamed Stalin for catastrophic mistakes in the Second World War, for the mass deportation of entire peoples, and for other crimes after the war. By suggesting that the cult appeared after collectivization and industrialization (which were thus not called into question), Khrushchev sought to distinguish between Stalin’s crimes and Soviet achievements and to uphold the principle that ‘the true creators of the new life are the popular masses led by the Communist Party’. The main thrust of the speech was incorporated in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’.
By then the rehabilitation process was already in high gear. The regime advised investigatory commissions that many convictions were based on un-proven accusations or ‘confessions obtained through the use of illegal methods of investigation’. Nevertheless, it exempted whole categories from rehabilitation: ‘nationalists’ in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war as well as those ‘who were really exposed as traitors, terrorists, saboteurs, spies and wreckers’. To accelerate the process, a party commission was sent to interview political prisoners and judge whether they should be released. The undertaking was enormous, involving more than one hundred thousand ‘counterrevolutionaries’. According to a report from 15 June 1956, authorities had already released 51,439 prisoners (including 26,155 politicals) and reduced the sentences for another 19,093. Although restricted to cases initiated after 1935 (on the specious grounds that ‘mass violation of individual rights’ commenced only then), by 1961 rehabilitation gradually enveloped a large number of Stalin’s victims, including half of the politicals who had been executed.
De-Stalinization was also fraught with foreign repercussions. Khrushchev’s secret speech, leaked by a Polish communist, quickly found its way into print (with the assistance of the American CIA). It had an extraordinary impact on foreign communists—many of whose comrades-in-arms had perished in the Stalinist repressions. In April 1956 the Pravda correspondent in Bonn reported that West German communists reacted favourably to the speech, yet wanted to know why the CPSU had failed to stop Stalin and, more important, ‘where is the guarantee that the Soviet comrades will not again make mistakes and bring harm to the fraternal parties through their new mistakes?’ Khrushchev personally had to fend off similar questioning from Italian communists. The attack on Stalin also contributed to the rebellious mood in Poland, where demonstrations in Poznan ended in bloodshed and brought a change in party leadership.