Khrushchev and De-Stalinisation: Reform and the Secret Speech (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• After Stalin died in March 1953, power passed to a collective leadership before Khrushchev outmanoeuvred his rivals

• At the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev delivered the ‘Secret Speech’

  • He denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and the purges

• The Anti-Party Group tried to remove Khrushchev in 1957

  • However, he survived by appealing to the Central Committee

• De-Stalinisation released and rehabilitated prisoners, cut back the secret police and restored the Party’s authority

• The reforms were real but limited

  • Repression continued, Hungary was crushed in 1956, and the one-party state stayed intact

• Historians debate how far de-Stalinisation broke with the Stalinist past

  • McCauley sees a genuine reform that ended mass terror and relaxed Soviet life

  • Brown argues it left the one-party dictatorship fundamentally intact

Stalin’s legacy: what did Khrushchev inherit?

Illustration: Concept map of 20th Party Congress (new)

A superpower built on terror

• Stalin’s death in March 1953 left the USSR transformed into a military superpower after victory in 1945

• His rule had also entrenched fear, repression and a vast forced-labour system

  • The Gulag held millions of political prisoners by the early 1950s

  • High Stalinism had revived terror through:

    • The Leningrad Case (1949)

    • The Doctors’ Plot (1952–1953)

A Party reduced to a rubber stamp

• Under Stalin, Party and state bodies had become "rubber-stamping organisations"

  • This meant they depended on one man

• The cult of personality had made Stalin's authority almost sacred

  • This created a problem for Stalin's heirs

    • The Party had to distance itself from Stalin

    • However, it could not destroy its own legitimacy

An unresolved succession

• Stalin named no successor

  • This left a power vacuum at the very top

Khrushchev’s rise to power after Stalin’s death

Collective leadership, 1953

Illustration: Troika

• Stalin's death produced a collective leadership, rather than a single successor

• Power initially sat with a troika of Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov

  • These were the three most senior figures at the moment of Stalin's death

• Real power, though, ran through four men, each with a different base

  • Georgy Malenkov led the government as Chairman of the Council Ministers

  • Lavrentiy Beria controlled the Secret Police (the MVD)

  • Vyacheslav Molotov, the veteran Foreign Minister, was a senior Stalinist hardliner

  • Nikita Khrushchev held the Party Secretaryship, using it to appoint his own supporters

• The contest for supreme power narrowed to Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev

  • Each controlled a major power base: government, security and the Party

    • Molotov had no such base; he was a rival on policy, not a contender to lead permanently

    • Khrushchev would deal with him when the Anti-Party Group struck in 1957

The fall of Beria

• Beria moved fastest to reform, releasing prisoners and easing repression

  • His control of the police and the power of his office alarmed the others

• Khrushchev, Malenkov and the military conspired against him

  • Beria was arrested in June 1953 and executed on the 23rd December 1953

  • He was accused of "criminal anti-Party and anti-State activities" and of working for British intelligence

Outmanoeuvring Malenkov

• Malenkov pushed a "new course"

  • This favoured consumer goods

  • Khrushchev backed heavy and light industry together

• Khrushchev sold himself as an agricultural expert

  • He launched the Virgin Lands Scheme in 1954

    • Its early success helped rally the Party behind him

• Malenkov was forced to resign as head of government in February 1955

  • He was replaced by Nikolai Bulganin

The 20th Party Congress & the ‘Secret Speech’, 1956

A speech in closed session

• On the 25th February 1956, Khrushchev addressed a closed session of the 20th Party Congress

• The speech was titled "On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences"

  • None of the 1,400 delegates were allowed to ask questions

  • Khrushchev drew on a Central Committee commission into Stalin's abuses

The charges against Stalin

• Khrushchev accused Stalin of causing "tremendous harm to the cause of socialist progress"

• His main charges were:

  • the cult of personality

  • Stalin's breach of Lenin's principle of collective leadership

  • the purges and execution of loyal Communists, including Old Bolsheviks

  • the murder of Kirov

  • military failure during Operation Barbarossa in 1941

  • ignoring warnings of the German invasion

What Khrushchev did not attack

• The speech was carefully limited

  • It protected both the Party and Khrushchev himself

• Khrushchev did not criticise:

  • the one-party state

  • the command economy

  • communist ideology

• He condemned the purging of loyal Communists

  • However, he did not condemn the terror against ordinary citizens

  • This protected men like Khrushchev who had themselves benefitted from the Stalinist system

How secret was it?

• The speech was never officially published in the USSR

  • However, it quickly leaked

  • Copies filtered down through the Party, even reaching the West

  • A young delegate Mikhail Gorbachev, was deeply affected by it

• The speech inspired unrest in:

  • Tbilisi (Georgia)

  • Poland

  • Hungary

• Khrushchev used force to crush these risings

  • This illustrated the limits of his reformism

The Crisis of 1957: The Anti-Party Group

The challenge to Khrushchev

• In 1957, senior figures tried to remove Khrushchev from his position of power whilst he was abroad

• The "Anti-Party Group" included:

  • Vyacheslav Molotov

  • Georgy Malenkov

  • Lazar Kaganovich

• They accused Khrushchev of:

  • damaging Party unity

  • reckless criticism of Stalin

• A majority of the Presidium voted for his dismissal

How did Khrushchev survive?

• Khrushchev insisted the decision belonged to the Central Committee

  • He argued that it did not belong to the Presidium

  • This returned to the Leninist principle that smaller bodies of power answered to their parent body

• Khrushchev made sure loyal members were flown to Moscow to outvote his rivals

• Marshal Zhukov gave decisive military backing

  • The Central Committee overturned the Presidium

• The plotters were expelled

  • They were sent to minor posts far from Moscow

    • They were not executed

Consolidating power

• The crisis left Khrushchev stronger

  • It revealed a less violent style of politics

• Khrushchev remained wary of rival power bases

  • He dismissed Zhukov in October 1957

  • He removed Bulganin in 1958

  • He then combined the Party and government leadership

• Opposition later regrouped and brought him down in 1964

The process of de-Stalinisation: how far did Khrushchev go?

Releasing and rehabilitating prisoners

• Khrushchev dismantled the worst of the terror state

  • 51,439 prisoners were released from the Gulag in June 1956

  • Many victims of the purges were formally rehabilitated

    • Some after their deaths

Reforming the secret police

• The coercive machinery of the Stalin era was cut back

  • The secret police was reduced and reorganised into the KGB

    • It had narrower powers than before

  • A partial revival of independent courts moved law away from police control

Restoring the Party

• Khrushchev rebuilt the Party as the centre of power, as it had been in the 1920s

• Collective leadership replaced one-man rule through the Presidium

• Party membership grew from 7 million in 1956 to 11 million by 1964

  • This rose from 3.6% to 4.8% of the population

    • This broadened the Party's base

    • It reduced the weight of senior bureaucrats

Democratisation and decentralisation

• From 1957, Khrushchev tried to open up and decentralise the system

  • In 1962, the Party was split into urban and rural sections

  • Fixed terms limited how long officials could serve

  • Local soviets and comrade courts took on more minor matters

The limits of reform

• De-Stalinisation was inconsistent and never threatened the system itself

  • Repression continued and dissent was still punished

  • Unrest in Hungary was crushed by force in 1956

  • Khrushchev developed his own, milder cult of personality

How successful was de-Stalinisation?

• Historians disagree over whether de-Stalinisation was a genuine break with Stalinism or whether it was a limited adjustment that preserved dictatorship

De-Stalinisation was a genuine break

• Mass terror ended, and the labour camps were emptied of political prisoners

• Politics became far less lethal

  • Opponents were demoted, not executed

• The Party regained real authority and the law gained some independence

• Everyday Soviet life became freer and less fearful than under Stalin

Key historian

• McCauley stresses the scale of genuine change

  • De-Stalinisation reduced fear and gave Soviet citizens a real, if limited, relaxation

De-Stalinisation left the dictatorship intact

• The one-party state, the command economy and censorship all survived

• Repression continued

  • Hungary was crushed by force in 1956

• Khrushchev never questioned the system that had enabled Stalin

• He built his own personality cult, showing the old habits continued

Key historian

• Brown highlights the limits

  • The attack fell on Stalin personally, while the structures of the one-party dictatorship were left untouched