In February 1956, the XX Congress of the CPSU was held. This congress can rightfully be called the "congress of traitors." At it, the first secretary Nikita Khrushchev read out his report “On the cult of personality and its consequences”, which laid the foundation for the blackening of I.V. Stalin.
The destructive consequences of Khrushchev’s whistle dance are hard to overestimate. The campaign of discrediting Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, whose name is associated with the construction of socialism, industrialization and collectivization, the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, at the same time meant blackening the entire history of the Soviet Union and socialism in principle.
“Stalin is trampled in order to get close to Lenin. And some are already starting Lenin, ”stated Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the“ Stalinist ”leaders of the Soviet state, on the eve of Perestroika, shortly before his death.
“Not a single enemy brought as much trouble as Khrushchev brought to us with his policy regarding the past of our party and the state, as well as towards Stalin,” admitted former Khrushchev’s comrade-in-arms, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov.
Many contemporaries said that it was from the 20th Congress, from the report “On the Cult of the Personality,” that people began to lose faith in Soviet communist ideals, which were now replaced by confusion in their heads.
What motivated Nikita Khrushchev when he wrote the “report”, what goals did he pursue, dousing the heroic period of building socialism in the USSR? Researchers point out that Khrushchev had “personal accounts” with Stalin: his son Leonid was captured during the war, went over to the Germans, but was then captured by Soviet intelligence and shot. However, Khrushchev found many friends and accomplices, including in the leadership of the CPSU, and this is not only a matter of personal accounts.
V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin warned that the danger to socialism is not only open enemies, but also hidden - for the time being - enemies. Among them are people with the psychology of a petty landlord, a tradesman, a layman who are hostile to the great struggle and the great transformations that socialism brings with it. Among these inhabitants was the peasant son Nikita Khrushchev, who joined the Communists in 1918. These inhabitants, including those who crawled into the Communist Party, did not want reprisals, were afraid of the class struggle, their ideal of “socialism” came down to a “quiet”, “peaceful” course of life. Therefore, during the time of Khrushchev, it was announced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was abandoned and replaced with a “nation-wide state”, and the Leninist-Stalinist position on the continuation and intensification of the class struggle during the construction of socialism was subjected to defamation. Khrushchevtsev was even scared of the Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature, and it was curtailed. They were scared even by the majestic Stalinist architecture, and they adopted the infamous decree "On eliminating excesses in design and construction." Finally, the pygmies, having reached the heights of party power, simply could not help but give a damn about the grave of the giant Stalin.
Khrushchev, relying on his supporters, in 1953 achieved the arrest and murder of Marshal Lavrentiy Beria. But, and becoming the first secretary of the Central Committee, he still did not have all the full power - while George Malenkov remained the chairman of the Council of Ministers. Khrushchev engaged in hardware intrigues, in 1955 Malenkov was accused of economic mistakes and removed from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers. It was then that the supreme power in the country actually passed to Khrushchev, and he began to revise and revise the entire ideology of the USSR.
Often the question arises - why was there not a single person among the delegates of the XX Party Congress who would spit on Khrushchev’s face while reading his report “On the cult of personality”? Indeed, among the party leaders there were also the old Bolsheviks Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who had gone through the school of revolutionary struggle, fought against the tsarism in the barricades. Molotov himself later in his memoirs said that he did not want a split in the party, civil conflict, so he did not appeal to the people, but hoped to remove Khrushchev from power by instrumental methods.
The potential for a popular uprising against the Khrushchevites was present. Khrushchev's gasping of Stalin's name was perceived as an insult in Georgia. Thousands of workers and students of various nationalities took to the streets of Tbilisi in March 1953. Eyewitnesses said that if Stalin's old ally Molotov called on them to speak out against the Khrushchevites, they would follow him. On the night of March 10, a rally of thousands went to the Communications House in Tbilisi to send a telegram to Molotov. The demonstrators were then shot by troops: the exact number of victims of that massacre is unknown - from 15, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to several hundred, according to eyewitnesses.
Events in Tbilisi, in fact, became the first link in a chain of popular unrest and performances that swept the country during the reign of Khrushchev (including the well-known events in Novocherkassk). But in all these unrest, the speakers did not have a clear understanding of what was happening, the Bolshevik leaders, the program and organization.
In 1957, the old Communists Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Voroshilov and “Shepilov who joined them” tried to implement the scenario of Khrushchev’s removal from power at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. But by this time Khrushchev had already placed his people everywhere in the party, enlisted the support of the generals, and his opponents themselves had been declared an “anti-party group” and removed from all posts. Khrushchevism triumphed completely.
The negative consequences of the Khrushchev report "On the cult of personality" were not slow to manifest themselves not only in the USSR, but also in other countries. In the countries of Eastern Europe, local "Khrushchevs" began to break into power - with the support of Moscow. The most bloody events occurred in 1956 in Hungary. There, the revisionists and outright counter-revolutionaries, inspired by the “changes” in the USSR, removed the head of the Hungarian Workers' Party M. Rakosi from the post, and then began terror against the Communists. On October 23, a fascist mob in Budapest broke a monument to Stalin. Events in Hungary already directly led to the fact that a neo-fascist regime could be established there, and the country itself - to move from the category of allies of the USSR to NATO. This forced the Soviet leadership to send troops to Hungary to restore order, after which local "Khrushchevites" were placed in power there.
The discrediting of the name of Stalin, the beginning of the undermining of socialist transformations in the USSR and Eastern Europe led to the outflow of people from communist parties around the world, to the creation of chaos in the minds of people who had previously firmly seen a beacon of progress in Moscow. So, during 1956, up to a third of its members left the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Communist Party of Great Britain after this never became mass.
The firm position of condemning the Khrushchev "coups" was taken by the Albanian Labor Party, headed by Enver Hoxna. The central newspaper of the Chinese Communists, the People’s Daily, in an editorial on the role of the individual in history, in April 1956 actually criticized the Khrushchev report, calling it "intentional falsification."
So Khrushchev's "report" laid the foundation for a split in the international communist movement, undermining its strength and unity.
Thirty years later, when the Gorbachevites launched “perestroika,” it was no coincidence that they began it with a new wave of defamation named after I.V. Stalin. They understood that in order to destroy the USSR they needed to discredit the period of building socialism, to convince the Soviet people that there was nothing bright and heroic there, but only terrible irrational “repressions”. In this they were helped by the ideological “weapon” that Khrushchev gave them.
Dar Vetrov
