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Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953, having ruled the Soviet Union for approximately a quarter of a century. Within three years his successor had publicly denounced him for "grave perversions of party principles", for the "cult of the individual", and for a terror that had killed thousands of loyal communists. Within eight years his body had been removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and his name erased from Stalingrad. The de-Stalinisation conducted under Nikita Khrushchev between 1953 and 1964 was a partial and contradictory process: it dismantled the most extreme features of Stalinism (mass terror, the Gulag as a central institution, the cult) while retaining the single-party dictatorship, the planned economy and the external empire on which the system rested. This lesson examines the succession crisis of 1953, the Secret Speech of 1956, the limits of the "thaw", Khrushchev's domestic and foreign initiatives, and the reasons for his removal in October 1964.
Stalin's final illness and death generated no prepared succession. On the night of 28 February – 1 March 1953 Stalin suffered a stroke at his Kuntsevo dacha; his guards, fearful of entering without summons, left him undiscovered for many hours. He died on 5 March 1953 without recovering consciousness. Within hours the surviving Politburo agreed a collective leadership to contain the rivalries that any single successor would have generated.
| Figure | 1953 position | Political base |
|---|---|---|
| Georgy Malenkov | Chairman of the Council of Ministers (formal head of state) | State apparatus; consumer goods emphasis |
| Lavrentiy Beria | First Deputy Chairman; Minister of Internal Affairs (MVD/NKVD) | Security services; advocate of some reforms |
| Vyacheslav Molotov | First Deputy Chairman; Minister of Foreign Affairs | Old Bolshevik orthodoxy |
| Nikita Khrushchev | Secretariat (formal First Secretary from September 1953) | Party apparatus |
| Nikolai Bulganin | Minister of Defence | Army links |
The most immediate danger, in the estimation of the others, was Lavrentiy Beria. Beria controlled the combined security ministries and had moved rapidly after 5 March: he released from the Gulag approximately 1.2 million prisoners under an amnesty decree of 27 March 1953 (mostly non-political criminals serving short sentences), halted the fabricated Doctors' Plot (January 1953 — the antisemitic conspiracy trial prepared against mostly Jewish Kremlin physicians) and rehabilitated its accused, and proposed the reunification of Germany on neutral terms. His reforms were ambitious enough to alarm his colleagues; his control of the security services made him uniquely dangerous.
On 26 June 1953 Beria was arrested at a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin had agreed the plan in advance; Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a detachment of army officers made the physical arrest. Beria was tried in secret on charges of espionage and terrorism; he was shot on 23 December 1953. His trial was the last application of the show-trial technique against a senior Soviet leader, but — unlike the Moscow Trials of the 1930s — Beria's associates in the security apparatus were removed, not replaced in the next generation by equally empowered successors. The MVD and the KGB (established in 1954 as a committee rather than a full ministry) were subordinated to party oversight in a way they had not been under Stalin.
Between late 1953 and early 1955 Khrushchev used his control of the party Secretariat to assemble a majority within the Presidium. Malenkov was forced out of the premiership in February 1955 and replaced by Bulganin. By 1955–56 Khrushchev, as First Secretary of the Central Committee, held the dominant political position.
On the final night of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU (14–25 February 1956), after the public sessions had concluded, delegates were reconvened for a closed session to hear a four-hour speech by Khrushchev titled "On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences". Foreign communist parties and the press were excluded. Delegates were instructed not to take notes. The speech was never officially published in the Soviet Union in Khrushchev's lifetime; it became known internationally when a text reached Western intelligence services (probably through Polish communist channels) and was published by The New York Times in June 1956.
The Secret Speech denounced Stalin's "grave perversions of party principles" and his "cult of the individual". Its specific accusations were striking:
Khrushchev's analysis was limited in an important respect. He denounced Stalin's crimes as the product of Stalin's personal defects — "a man with sickly suspicion" — rather than as the product of the party structure or of the Soviet system. Collectivisation, the first Five-Year Plan, the 1932–33 famine, and the fate of those outside the party hierarchy received little or no attention. The speech was addressed to the party about the party, and its moral frame was the suffering of loyal communists.
flowchart TD
A[Stalin dies<br/>5 March 1953] --> B[Collective leadership<br/>Malenkov Beria Molotov Khrushchev]
B --> C[Beria arrested 26 June 1953<br/>shot Dec 1953]
C --> D[Khrushchev First Secretary<br/>Sep 1953]
D --> E[Malenkov removed Feb 1955]
E --> F[Secret Speech<br/>24-25 Feb 1956]
F --> G[Rehabilitations<br/>Thaw in culture]
F --> H[Hungarian Uprising<br/>Oct-Nov 1956]
F --> I[Sino-Soviet Split from 1960]
G --> J[Stalin body removed<br/>Oct 1961]
J --> K[Khrushchev deposed<br/>14 Oct 1964]
The international effects of the Secret Speech were immediate and in some respects catastrophic. Within weeks, text of the speech circulated in Polish and then international communist parties. The moral authority of the Soviet Union as the centre of world communism was permanently damaged.
Within the Soviet Union de-Stalinisation took several concrete forms.
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