Secret Speech
"The great change, surely one of the pivotal events of Soviet history occurred in February 1956 at the twentieth party congress. Khrushchev, after being elected first secretary by the congress, gave a four-hour-long, so-called secret speech. Although this speech was not published in the Soviet Union until 1989, it was not really secret. It was given in front 1,500 delegates, among them some prominent foreign communists, and was almost immediately published abroad. In the following months party cells discussed it, and soon every political conscious Soviet citizen knew more or less what Khrushchev had said at the party congress. (K, 191)"
"In his speech Khrushchev denounced Stalin's autocratic rule, his terror, his falsification of history, and blamed him for the reverses the country had suffered at the outset of World War II. Of course, Khrushchev did not five a fair and reliable evaluation of Soviet history. In his description Stalin had departed from the correct path only in 1934, that is, at the time of the Kirov murder and the beginning of the mass terror. Khrushchev accused Stalin of Kirov's murder, but did not hold him responsible for the terror connected with collectivization. He emphasized Stalin's communist victims but the murder of ordinary citizens who were caught in the machinery of terror. Although by implication he exculpated the chief victims of the purge trials, he did not explicitly rehabilitate them, and their names continued to be present in discussion of the Soviet past. In "scholarly" articles, for example, describing the first steps of Soviet diplomacy, the name of the first commisar for foreign affairs, Trotsky, still could not be mentioned (K,192)."
193: prisoners released
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