The Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party convened on 14 February 1956in the Great Kremlin Palace. On 25 February, the day the congress was slated toend, Soviet delegates attended an unscheduled secret session at which theirleader, Nikita Khrushchev, talked for nearly four hours with one intermission. Hisspeech was a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin. Stalin was guilty of ‘agrave abuse of power’. During his reign ‘mass arrests anddeportation of thousands and thousands of people, and execution without trial ornormal investigation, created insecurity, fear, and even desperation’.Stalinist charges of counter-revolutionary crimes had been ‘absurd, wildand contrary to common sense’. Innocent people had confessed to such crimes‘because of physical methods of pressure, torture, reducing them tounconsciousness, depriving them of judgement, taking away their humandignity’. Stalin himself had been personally responsible for all this: he‘personally called in the interrogator, gave him instructions, and told himwhich methods to use, methods that were simple – to beat, beat and onceagain, beat’. ‘Honest and innocent Communists’ had beentortured and killed. Khrushchev assailed Stalin for incompetent wartimeleadership, for ‘monstrous’ deportations of whole Caucasian peoples,for a ‘mania of greatness’, and ‘nauseatingly false’adulation and self-adulation.

Khrushchev’s indictment was neither complete nor unalloyed. The Stalin heportrayed had been a paragon until the mid- 1930s. Although oppositionists had notdeserved ‘physical annihilation’, they had been ‘ideologicaland political enemies’. Khrushchev not only spared Lenin and the Sovietregime itself, he glorified them, but his speech stunned his audience.