Khrushchev & De-Stalinisation (Edexcel A Level History): Revision Note

Summary

• This note will examine how Khrushchev came to power and how successful the policy of de-Stalinisation was

• Stalin left behind a legacy of terror, repression, and a rigid centralised state

• At the 20th Party Congress (1956), Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and abuses of power in his “Secret Speech”

• The Crisis of 1957 showed Khrushchev’s vulnerability but also his ability to outmanoeuvre rivals

• De-Stalinisation involved dismantling aspects of Stalin’s rule, releasing prisoners, and relaxing censorship

  • However, it was inconsistent and limited

• Historians debate whether de-Stalinisation was a genuine break from Stalinism or a tactical adjustment to preserve Communist Party power

Stalin's legacy

• Stalin left behind a Soviet Union transformed into a superpower

  • The Second World War brought the USSR military prestige

• However, his rule had also created:

  • Widespread fear

  • Repression

  • Inefficiency in government and the economy

• The cult of personality around Stalin meant the Party had to find a way to distance itself from him without undermining its own legitimacy

• His death in 1953 created an opportunity for reform

  • However, it also caused uncertainty over the USSR’s future direction

Leadership struggle

After Stalin’s death, three main figures emerged as contenders for leadership

Lavrentiy Beria

• Head of the secret police

  • He had the support and loyalty of the MVD

• Beria was Stalin's Deputy Premier in his final years

• He was feared for his ruthless reputation

• He advocated liberalising policies, such as prisoner releases

  • This weakened the MVD

  • The Party did not trust him

    • Khrushchev and Malenkov accused Beria of working with the British government

    • Beria was arrested and executed in June 1953

Georgy Malenkov

• Malenkov was Stalin’s designated successor as Premier

• He initially seemed the most likely leader as he had support from the Soviet state

  • He worked together with Khrushchev initially

• However, he lacked strong Party support

  • Khrushchev's popularity meant that Malenkov lost the role of Premier in February 1955

Nikita Khrushchev

• Secretary of the Central Committee after Stalin's death

  • He used this role to bring his supporters into senior roles in the Party

• Popular with the Communist Party

  • He was known for his loyalty to the Party

• However, he had no role in the state

  • His early reforms aimed to weaken the state by cutting the number of central Soviet roles and relying on republic governments

The 20th Party Congress & the 'Secret Speech', 1956

• On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress

• The speech lasted nearly four hours

  • It shocked delegates by directly criticising Stalin

Main criticisms of Stalin

Cult of Personality

• Khrushchev denounced the excessive glorification of Stalin

• He argued that it went against Lenin’s principle of collective leadership

• Khrushchev also quoted the section about Stalin in Lenin's Testament

Use of terror

• He condemned the purges of loyal Communists, including the execution of Old Bolsheviks

  • He believed that it was wrong that suspects were not given a fair trial

  • He stated that Stalin's actions went against Lenin's legacy

• Khrushchev revealed the scale of the terror to the Party

  • This extent of the political violence had been kept hidden from the wider Party

Military failures

• Stalin was blamed for disastrous mistakes during the early stages of the Second World War, including:

  • Purging the army before the war

  • Ignoring intelligence about Hitler’s invasion in 1941

What did Khrushchev not criticise?

• To keep the legitimacy of the Party intact, Khrushchev did not criticise

  • Stalin's economic and agricultural policies

  • Stalin's communist ideology

Was the speech truly 'secret'?

• The speech was delivered in a closed session

  • It was not officially published in the USSR until 1989

• However, copies quickly circulated among Party members

  • These were leaked to the West via the Polish Communist Party

  • It was printed in the New York Times

• The secrecy reflected the difficulty of balancing criticism of Stalin with maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party

Reactions to the speech

• Delegates were stunned

  • Some reportedly fainted or had heart attacks in shock

• The speech had a huge psychological impact

  • It shattered the myth of Stalin

  • Some members reportedly took their own lives after hearing about Stalin's crimes

• Abroad, it undermined communist movements

The crisis of 1957

• In 1957, a group of senior leaders, known as the 'Anti-Party Group' attempted to remove Khrushchev from power

  • This group included Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich

  • They accused him of undermining Party unity with his reforms and reckless criticism of Stalin

• Khrushchev survived by appealing to the Central Committee

  • He argued that only the Central Committee could decide to replace him

  • Khrushchev held the majority of support in the Central Committee

• The failure of the coup attempt strengthened Khrushchev’s authority

  • He consolidated his power in March 1958

• However, it showed reform because:

  • Khrushchev fired, rather than killed, his political opponents

  • Khrushchev relied on the support of the Central Committee to rule, rather than on fear

The process of de-Stalinisation

• Khrushchev introduced a series of reforms designed to dismantle the worst excesses of Stalin’s rule

Release of political prisoners

• In June 1956, 51,439 prisoners were released from the GULAG system

• By 1961, half of all prisoners executed under Stalin had been pardoned by the state

Reform of the secret police

• The MVD was reorganised into the KGB, with a narrower focus and fewer powers

Relaxation of censorship

• Writers, artists, and intellectuals were allowed more freedom

• An example is the publication of critical works like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Democratisation of the government

• He expanded Party membership to include more peasants and workers

• He introduced fixed term positions for key positions in the Communist Party

  • This meant that officials were chosen more regularly and could not exploit their power

Impacts of de-Stalinisation

Positive impacts

• Soviet society was no longer dominated by mass terror

  • Political enemies were sacked, rather than tortured and killed

• Thousands of political prisoners were released and rehabilitated

• The USSR was not ruled under a personal dictatorship

  • Khrushchev's position relied upon the support of the Central Committee

Negative impacts

• Repression did not end

  • Dissent was still punished

  • Uprisings in the republics, such as Hungary in 1956, were brutally crushed

• Khrushchev did not permanently remove Stalinism

  • Khrushchev never publicly denounced Stalin

  • Khrushchev created his own cult of personality

  • Brezhnev revived the cult of Stalin

How successful was de-Stalinisation?

Historians disagree over whether de-Stalinisation was a real break with the past or simply a tactical reform

Successful reform

• Some historians argue de-Stalinisation reduced fear and made Soviet life less repressive

Key historians

"Inside Russia, then, de-Stalinization has in mind mainly the unraveling of the second phase of Stalinization. But even this limited process has many complexities when it passes beyond the enunciation of the negative principle of "No new Stalin." To rehabilitate the memory of a murdered majority of a party's leadership is not to resurrect them... So revival of party rule is thus far not, in practice, a very impressive phenomenon. The Presidium, reduced to its pre-1952 small size immediately upon Stalin's death, became a "collective"-that is, a talking, debating, voting, fighting, and feuding-organ of government, with some apparent effort to introduce political order into its workings... The Central Committee was brought back from post-1947 oblivion to become, at least in theory, the supreme arbiter of the Presidium's squabbles. Khrushchev, as First Secretary, has tried very hard to pack the Central Committee with his supporters. It meets in plenary session at intervals of roughly six months, as the 1952 statutes demand. A party congress was held on schedule last year for the first time in many years." - Robert C. Tucker, The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization (1957)

"[Khrushchev] wanted to break the mould of Soviet politics and to narrow the gap between the leadership and the masses... It served several purposes. It permitted him to vilify his political opponents and Stalinists and replace them with his own cadres; it allowed him to advocate radically different policies; it ushered in new initiatives in foreign policy but entailed much risk-taking; it emptied the labour camps and gave a new meaning to socialist legality and it introduced some fresh air into the world of Soviet culture... One of his achievements was to bring the Soviet Union onto the world stage to reduce some of the fear it engendered and to increase respect for it." - Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (1987)

Reforms were limited and inconsistent

Others stress that repression continued and the one-party state remained intact

Key historians

"In the West, his policies were dubbed de-Stalinization. This was understandable, since Khrushchev had devoted an entire report to denouncing Stalin. But Khrushchev himself talked instead of a campaign to eliminate 'the cult of the individual'. This was not an inappropriate term even though it was so euphemistic. For Khrushchev kept Stalin's kolkhozes in agriculture and his capital goods priorities in industry; he also refrained from rehabilitating Trotski, Bukharin, and the various other communists alleged to have been foreign spies. Much remained in place that would have been congenial to Stalin." - Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (2005)

"Khrushchev’s criticism of the errors of the past also spilled out into the present: many ordinary Communists began to attack the corruption of local elites and to question the behavior of party leaders in Moscow. Faced with a barrage of conflicting responses in 1956, the party leadership seemed to retreat from “radicalism” and, even as it made what seemed like a more public and complete attempt at de-Stalinization at the 22nd Party Congress, imposed firmer restrictions on public discussion... Condemning Stalin and the purges he had overseen was, perhaps inevitably, problematic: first, because repudiating terror raised the practical question of how to treat those who had been its victims; second, because condemning Stalin and the terror compelled society to rethink the way it understood its own recent, and very bloody, past—and by extension how people were now to relate to their own life stories." - Miriam Dobson, The Post-Stalin Era: de-Stalinization, daily life, and dissent (2011)

Reforms had unintended consequences

• Some argue de-Stalinisation destabilised the USSR by raising expectations it could not meet

Key historians

"Khrushchev gave them the belief that they could reconnect with the revolutionary ideals of their parents' generation and carry on the work that they had left undone. But as well as giving many people hope his speech gave rise to widespread scepticism and disbelief. His revelations invited questions not just about Stalin but about the system as a whole; and once they started questioning the system, they thought about alternatives to it." - Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 (2014)

"A passionate public discussion followed, with many different viewpoints expressed. Veterans were upset at the criticism of Stalin’s wartime leadership. Students and intellectuals were excited at the implied prospect of cultural liberalisation. In some Russian provincial towns, it stimulated attacks on corruption in local party leaderships; in Central Asia, the issue was Russian ‘colonial’ attitudes in the republics’ administration. The only actual civil unrest within the Soviet occurred in Tbilisi, Georgia, where after days of largely peaceful demonstrations marking the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, a military unit opened fire, killing twenty-one people. It was another story in Eastern Europe, where the Secret Speech sparked a crisis in Poland and Hungary." - Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (2021)