This is just my input into the danger of hero worship that we see all over the middle east, from Bin Laden, to Sadr, to Sistani....
(Closed session, February 24-25, 1956)
By Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Western intelligence agencies had no difficulties obtaining the "Secret Speech" shortly after it was delivered. Translated into English, possibly by Russian speakers working in West Germany for the CIA, it was disseminated widely outside the Soviet bloc. The text below has been adapted from the most commonly available variant. I have corrected the worst of the translation's infelicities and have made small grammatical changes to improve its readability.
Khrushchev's speech is full of references to people and events that should/would have been fully understandable to his intended audience. For the benefit of student readers who don't share that background knowledge, I have supplied paragraph-end footnotes where I thought them appropriate. I also have footnoted a number of instances where Khrushchev's remarks demand amplification or correction according to what we now know about the Stalin period. This commentary is based in part on cold-war-vintage annotations by Boris Nikolaevsky. However it has been revised and expanded.drastically to reflect new, archivally-based understanding as well as present-day concerns.
If you are reading this on a web browser, click on highlighted paragraph-end notes in the text to go to the appropriate commentary. Use your browser's back button to return to the spot where you had interrupted your reading.
Jon Bone
Comrades! In the Party Central Committee's report at the 20th Congress and in a number of speeches by delegates to the Congress, as also formerly during Plenary CC/CPSU [Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] sessions, quite a lot has been said about the cult of the individual and about its harmful consequences.
After Stalin's death, the Central Committee began to implement a policy of explaining concisely and consistently that it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.
Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years. The objective of the present report is not a thorough evaluation of Stalin's life and activity. Concerning Stalin's merits, an entirely sufficient number of books, pamphlets and studies had already been written in his lifetime. Stalin's role of Stalin in the preparation and execution of the Socialist Revolution, in the Civil War, and in the fight for the construction of socialism in our country, is universally known. Everyone knows it well.
At present, we are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the Party now and for the future -- with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality.
Because not all as yet realize fully the practical consequences resulting from the cult of the individual, [or] the great harm caused by violation of the principle of collective Party direction and by the accumulation of immense and limitless power in the hands of one person, the Central Committee considers it absolutely necessary to make material pertaining to this matter available to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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