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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]
First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev criticized Stalin's dictatorial rule at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, but Khrushchev's own increasingly erratic decisions lead to his ouster in 1964. The Party replaced Khrushchev in his posts with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and with Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Though Brezhnev gained more and more ...
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 ...
On 25 February 1956, de-Stalinization became official when he spoke to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, delivering an address laying out some of Stalin's crimes and the "conditions of insecurity, fear, and even desperation" created by Stalin. [1] Khrushchev shocked his listeners by ...
Khrushchev went on to say that such a mistake had been made about Stalin. He himself had been guilty of what was, in essence, a distortion of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism . The attention of the audience was then drawn to Lenin's Testament , copies of which had been distributed, criticising Stalin's "rudeness".
As a Marxist–Leninist, Mao was much angered that Khrushchev did not go to war with the US over their failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and the United States embargo against Cuba of continual economic and agricultural sabotage. For the Eastern Bloc, Mao addressed those Sino-Soviet matters in "Nine Letters" critical of Khrushchev and his leadership ...
[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.
The uprisings in Poland and Hungary during 1956, which coincided with a softening of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin course (he told guests in a reception at the Chinese embassy in Moscow that "Stalinism is inseparable from Marxism") brought about renewed protests from various elements of Soviet society.