Khrushchev denounces Stalin in the 'Secret Speech'

On February 25, 1956, on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev rose at a closed session and spent roughly four hours dismantling the legacy of Joseph Stalin, dead just three years. The speech, formally titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” accused Stalin of orchestrating the terror of the 1930s, of cowardice during the Nazi invasion, of blundering military strategy, and of monstrous self-glorification.

It was meant to be secret. Yet copies were soon read aloud at thousands of local Party and Komsomol meetings, and the contents leaked westward within weeks.

The shock rippled across the Soviet bloc, helping spark unrest in Poland and Hungary that year. At home it opened the “Khrushchev thaw,” a cautious loosening of censorship and a partial reckoning with millions of victims the state had pretended did not exist.