Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 9,001
The billing!
The 20th party congress of the CPSU begins on February 14, 1956. It is the first party congress after Stalin's death.
When the new General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev...
...on February 25, 1956, when he invited selected delegates to a closed special session at the end of the party congress, the dictator had been dead for three years. But his spirit still lingered vigorously among the living.
Stalin's mortal remains lie next to Lenin's corpse, preserved in what is now the "Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum"...:
...and frozen into a monument you meet him in innumerable places; Streets and cities bear his name.
When Khrushchev begins his speech, the nerves of those present are on edge. What is this special session that no one knows about that seems to be on short notice? Journalists have no access, any recordings are prohibited, tape recordings are not permitted.
Personal and written out of a spontaneous impulse, Khrushchev's speech, which now begins, has no effect, as he later emphatically claimed in his memoirs. The first secretary reads the more than 20,000-word speech from the paper instead of speaking it freely...:
In general, Khrushchev seems very tense, the words seem carefully chosen, the speech remarkably carefully edited - everything seems to have been prepared a long time ago.
It is "impermissible and contrary to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism (...) to single out a person and make him into a superman who possesses godlike, supernatural qualities, a man who supposedly knows everything, sees everything, for everyone thinks everything can and is infallible in all his conduct."
Such a belief in a man, namely in Stalin, according to Khrushchev, "has been cultivated for many years".
The delegates are thunderstruck. They seem petrified, hardly daring to breathe, the hall is dead quiet.
Khrushchev insists: "Stalin did not dwell on persuading, enlightening and patiently cooperating with the people, but he imposed his views on others and demanded absolute submission to his opinions. Anyone who opposed his conception or defended his own point of view, who tried to prove the correctness of their own position was inevitably expelled from the leadership collective and subsequently destroyed both morally and physically..."
But Khrushchev only comes out with part of the truth:
Only Stalin's crimes against the party, but not those against the Soviet people, are discussed. Stalin has almost 100 million Soviet citizens on his conscience!
And Khrushchev does not completely break with Stalin's fame either, he emphasizes: "On the other hand, Stalin undoubtedly did great service to the party, the working class and the international workers' movement in the past."
In the end, Khrushchev even declared himself the despot's victim: "Anyone who tried to defend themselves against baseless suspicions and accusations fell victim to the reprisals."
What Khrushchev is concealing: he was also a creature of Stalin's!
As Moscow and Ukrainian party leader, he himself took part in the purges and ordered numerous shootings - and shared responsibility for the millionfold mass murder of the Ukrainian population in the 1930s through a deliberately triggered famine, the notorious "Holodomor"!
**continued next post**
The 20th party congress of the CPSU begins on February 14, 1956. It is the first party congress after Stalin's death.
When the new General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev...
...on February 25, 1956, when he invited selected delegates to a closed special session at the end of the party congress, the dictator had been dead for three years. But his spirit still lingered vigorously among the living.
Stalin's mortal remains lie next to Lenin's corpse, preserved in what is now the "Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum"...:
...and frozen into a monument you meet him in innumerable places; Streets and cities bear his name.
When Khrushchev begins his speech, the nerves of those present are on edge. What is this special session that no one knows about that seems to be on short notice? Journalists have no access, any recordings are prohibited, tape recordings are not permitted.
Personal and written out of a spontaneous impulse, Khrushchev's speech, which now begins, has no effect, as he later emphatically claimed in his memoirs. The first secretary reads the more than 20,000-word speech from the paper instead of speaking it freely...:
In general, Khrushchev seems very tense, the words seem carefully chosen, the speech remarkably carefully edited - everything seems to have been prepared a long time ago.
It is "impermissible and contrary to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism (...) to single out a person and make him into a superman who possesses godlike, supernatural qualities, a man who supposedly knows everything, sees everything, for everyone thinks everything can and is infallible in all his conduct."
Such a belief in a man, namely in Stalin, according to Khrushchev, "has been cultivated for many years".
The delegates are thunderstruck. They seem petrified, hardly daring to breathe, the hall is dead quiet.
Khrushchev insists: "Stalin did not dwell on persuading, enlightening and patiently cooperating with the people, but he imposed his views on others and demanded absolute submission to his opinions. Anyone who opposed his conception or defended his own point of view, who tried to prove the correctness of their own position was inevitably expelled from the leadership collective and subsequently destroyed both morally and physically..."
But Khrushchev only comes out with part of the truth:
Only Stalin's crimes against the party, but not those against the Soviet people, are discussed. Stalin has almost 100 million Soviet citizens on his conscience!
And Khrushchev does not completely break with Stalin's fame either, he emphasizes: "On the other hand, Stalin undoubtedly did great service to the party, the working class and the international workers' movement in the past."
In the end, Khrushchev even declared himself the despot's victim: "Anyone who tried to defend themselves against baseless suspicions and accusations fell victim to the reprisals."
What Khrushchev is concealing: he was also a creature of Stalin's!
As Moscow and Ukrainian party leader, he himself took part in the purges and ordered numerous shootings - and shared responsibility for the millionfold mass murder of the Ukrainian population in the 1930s through a deliberately triggered famine, the notorious "Holodomor"!
**continued next post**
