system that Stalinist terror had built and the advantages that accrued to the Party from its monopoly of power.
Khrushchev’s strategy, as it emerged in the following years, was fourfold. First, as we have seen, he needed to stabilize relations with the West, following the rearmament of West Germany, its incorporation into NATO and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time Moscow began building bridges to the ‘non- Aligned’ world—starting with Yugoslavia, which Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin visited in May 1955 (just one month after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty) in order to rekindle Soviet-Yugoslav relations after seven years of very cold storage. Thirdly, Moscow started to encourage Party reformers in the satellite states, allowing circumspect criticism of the ‘mistakes’ of the Stalinist old guard and rehabilitation of some of their victims, and bringing to an end the cycle of show trials and mass arrests and Party purges.
It was in this context that Khrushchev gingerly advanced to the fourth (and in his understanding, final) stage of controlled reform: the break with Stalin himself. The setting for this was the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, in February 1956, at which Khrushchev delivered his now-famous ‘secret speech’, denouncing the crimes, errors and ‘cult’ of the General Secretary. In retrospect this speech has taken on a mythical aura, but its epochal significance should not be overstated. Nikita Khrushchev was a Communist, a Leninist and at least as much a true believer as his contemporaries in the Party leadership. He had set himself the tricky objective of acknowledging and detailing Stalin’s deeds, while confining responsibility for them to the man himself. His task, as he saw it, was to confirm the legitimacy of the Communist project by heaping obloquy and responsibility upon the corpse of Uncle Joe.
The speech, delivered on February 25th, was entirely conventional in length and language. It was addressed to the Party elite and confined itself to describing the ‘perversions’ of Communist doctrine of which Stalin was guilty. The dictator was accused of ‘ignoring the norms of Party life and trampling upon the Leninist principles of collective Party leadership’: which is to say that he made his own decisions. His junior colleagues (of whom Khrushchev had been one since the early 1930s) were thus absolved of responsibility both for his criminal excesses and, more importantly, for the failure of his policies. Khrushchev took the calculated risk of detailing the scale of Stalin’s personal failings (and thus shocking and offending the sensibilities of the obedient cadres in his audience), in order to preserve and even enhance the unsullied standing of Lenin, the Leninist system of government and Stalin’s own successors.
The secret speech achieved its purpose, at least within the CPSU. It drew a firm line under the Stalinist era, acknowledging its monstrosities and disasters while preserving the fiction that the present Communist leadership bore no responsibility. Khrushchev was thus secure in power and had won a relatively free hand to reform the Soviet economy and liberalize the apparatus of terror. Old Stalinists were now marginalized—Molotov was removed from the post of foreign minister on the eve of Tito’s return visit to Moscow in June. As for Khrushchev’s contemporaries, and younger apparatchiks like Leonid Brezhnev, these men were just as guilty as Khrushchev of collaborating in Stalin’s crimes and they were thus in no position either to deny his assertions or attack his credibility. Controlled de-Stalinization suited nearly everyone.
But Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin could not be kept a secret, and therein lay the seeds of its failure. The speech would not be officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, but Western intelligence agencies had wind of it within days. So did Western Communist parties, even though they had not been made privy to Khrushchev’s intentions. As a consequence, within a few weeks rumours of Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin were everywhere. The effect was intoxicating. For Communists, the denunciation of Stalin and his works was confusing and troubling; but it was also a relief. Henceforth, as it seemed to many, Communists would no longer have to excuse or deny the more outrageous charges of their critics. Some Western Party members and sympathizers dropped away, but others remained, their faith renewed.
In Eastern Europe, the impact of Khrushchev’s reported abjuration of Stalin was even more dramatic. Read in the context of the Soviet leader’s recent reconciliation with Tito, and his dissolution of the moribund Cominform on April 18th, Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin seemed to suggest that Moscow would now look favorably upon different ‘roads to socialism’, and had rejected terror and repression as a tool of Communist control. Now, or so it was believed, it would be possible to speak openly for the first time. As the Czech author Jaroslav Seifert explained to a Writers’ Congress in Prague in April 1956, ‘Again and again, we hear it said at this Congress that it is necessary for writers to tell the truth. This means that in recent years they did not write the truth… All that is now over. The nightmare has been exorcised.’
In Czechoslovakia—whose Communist leaders maintained a tight-lipped silence about their own Stalinist past—the memory of terror was still too fresh for rumours from Moscow to translate into political action.[113] The impact of the shock wave of de-Stalinization in neighboring Poland was very different. In June the Polish army was called out to put down demonstrations in the western city of Poznan, sparked (like those of East Berlin three years before) by disputes over wages and work-rates. But this only fanned widespread discontent throughout the autumn, in a country where Sovietization had never been carried through as thoroughly as elsewhere and whose Party leaders had survived the post-war purges largely unscathed.
In October 1956, worried at the prospect of losing control over the popular mood, the Polish United Workers Party decided to remove Soviet Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski from his post as Poland’s defense minister and expel him from the Politburo. At the same time the Party elected Wladislaw Gomulka to the position of First Secretary, replacing the Stalinist Boleslaw Bierut. This was a dramatic symbolic move: Gomulka had been in prison just a few years before and narrowly escaped trial. He represented, for the Polish public, the ‘national’ face of Polish Communism and his promotion was widely understood as an act of implicit defiance by a Party forced to choose between its national constituency and the higher authority in Moscow.
That, certainly, is how Soviet leaders saw the matter. Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov and three other senior figures flew to Warsaw on October 19th, intending to block Gomulka’s appointment, forbid the ouster of Rokossowski and restore order in Poland. To ensure that their intentions were clear, Khrushchev simultaneously instructed a brigade of Soviet tanks to move towards Warsaw. But in heated discussions with Gomulka himself, conducted in part on the airport tarmac, Khrushchev concluded that Soviet interests in Poland might be best served by accepting the new situation in the Polish Party, rather than forcing matters to a head and almost certainly provoking violent confrontations. Gomulka, in return, assured the Russians that he could restore control and had no intention of abandoning power, taking Poland out of the Warsaw Pact, or demanding that Soviet troops leave his country.
Considering the disproportion in power between Khrushchev and Gomulka, the new Polish leader’s success in averting a catastrophe for his country was remarkable. But Khrushchev had read his interlocutor well—as he explained to the Soviet Politburo upon his return to Moscow the following day, the Soviet Ambassador in Warsaw, Ponomarenko, had been ‘grossly mistaken in his assessment of Gomulka’. The price of Communist control in Poland might be some personnel changes and liberalization of public life, but Gomulka was a sound Party man and had no intention of abandoning power to the streets or to the Party’s opponents. He was also a realist: if
The ‘Polish October’, then, had a fortuitously benign outcome—few at the time knew just how close Warsaw had come to a second Soviet occupation. In Hungary, however, things were to take a different turn. This was not immediately obvious. As early as July 1953 the Hungarian Stalinist leadership had been replaced (at Moscow’s initiative) with a reform-minded Communist, Imre Nagy. Nagy, like Gomulka, had been purged and imprisoned in earlier days and thus carried little responsibility for the season of terror and misgovernment through which his country had just passed; indeed, his first act as Party leader was to present, with Beria’s backing, a programme of liberalizations. Internment and labor camps were to be closed, peasants were to be permitted to leave kolkhozes if they wished. In general agriculture was to get more encouragement, and unrealistic industrial targets were abandoned: in the characteristically veiled language of a confidential Hungarian Party resolution of June 28th 1953, ‘[t]he false economic policy revealed a certain boastfulness as well as risk-taking, in so far as the forced development of heavy industry presupposed resources and raw materials that were in part just not available.’
Nagy was certainly not a conventional option, from Moscow’s point of view. In September 1949 he had been critical of the ultra-Stalinist line of Matyas Rakosi and was one of only two Hungarian Politburo members who
