Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism. The speech was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which received it from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski. The speech was shocking in its day. [2]
Khrushchev used these ideas so that he could win enough support to remove his opponents from power, most notably Premier Malenkov, who resigned in February 1955. [2] During the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Khrushchev criticised Stalin's rule and his "cult of personality".
On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev gave a clandestine speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was entitled, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin and his protégés. Khrushchev charged Stalin with fostering a personality cult, despite maintaining support for the ...
Nikita Khrushchev in his "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, claimed that Stalin had personally added by hand to the manuscript of the hagiographical Short Biography of Stalin, published in 1948, passages such as: "Although he performed his task as the leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed ...
De-Stalinization (Russian: десталинизация, romanized: destalinizatsiya) comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power, [1] and his 1956 secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its ...
On Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union launched a counter-attack on Nazi Germany, which finally succeeded in 1945. [18] Stalin died in March 1953 [19] and his death triggered a power struggle in which Nikita Khrushchev after several years emerged victorious against Georgy Malenkov. [20]
After Stalin's death, Khrushchev claimed that Stalin encouraged him to incite anti-Semitism in Ukraine, allegedly telling him that "the good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews." [11] In 1946, Stalin allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy". [12]
[27] Stalin dismissed this as excessive and contributing to a cult of personality he thought might later be used against him by the same people who praised him excessively, one of those being Khrushchev—a prominent user of the term during Stalin's life who was later responsible for de-Stalinization and the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw era.