From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 2/24/2006 3:04 AM

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

A Speech to Stun Even a Daughter
By Anatoly Medetsky
Staff Writer
    

Igor Tabakov / MT

Rada Adzhubei, now 76, was a university student when Khrushchev made the secret speech on Feb. 25, 1956.

When a Party official read Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to her university class two weeks later, Rada Adzhubei, like millions of Soviet citizens, was stunned by the denunciation of Josef Stalin.

But she was not surprised that the speech had been kept secret, even from her, Khrushchev's daughter.

"He was a statesman who went through Stalin's school," Adzhubei, now 76, said of her father. "Khrushchev never discussed secret affairs with the family, and the speech was a secret."

Khrushchev's speech, denouncing the Stalin personality cult and his mass purges, came as a bombshell to the 1,500 delegates who attended the last day of the 20th Communist Party Congress. The date was Feb. 25, 1956 -- 50 years ago Saturday.

The speech wasn't a secret for long, as the party had it printed in booklet form and read out to millions of people at workplaces and colleges across the country.

The outside world learned of the speech via a Reuters correspondent in Moscow, who ran the first story from Stockholm after an acquaintance -- possibly a KGB agent -- recited it for him.

The CIA obtained a copy later.

The speech was not printed in the Soviet media, however, until 1989, well into the era of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika.

Adzhubei and her fellow students in Moscow State University's biology department had the speech read to them, she said, speaking Monday in her apartment near City Hall on Tverskaya Ulitsa, which she shares with her son and his family. It took between 1 1/2 and two hours to read, she recalled.

Like the delegates at the Party Congress, the students were given no opportunity to ask questions afterward.

"The person from the Party's neighborhood committee took the booklet away, and we were left with our thoughts and opinions," said Adzhubei, who is reserved when talking about the now distant past.

"Stalin was our God, tsar, hero and everything else. It wasn't easy to debunk him."

Adzhubei came to see her father's revelations as "an act of justice," she said as she sat in a large armchair under a portrait of Khrushchev hanging on the wall. In the photograph, three red-star Hero of the Soviet Union awards, the highest in the country, are pinned to his chest.

On another wall in the handsomely furnished living room, a second, smiling Khrushchev looks out from a poster hanging next to a large 19th-century chest of drawers, with a collection of Indonesian wooden figures perched on top. A set of ivory carvings is displayed in the hallway.

Levada Remembers


Vasily Yegorov / Tass Archive

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev speaking at the opening session of the 20th Communist Party Congress in Moscow on Feb. 14, 1956, 11 days before his secret speech on the congress' final day.
    
Yury Levada, director of the independent Levada Center polling agency and former head of the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, or VTsIOM, before it came under state control, was an editor at the scientific journal Nauka i Zhizn when Khrushchev delivered his famous speech.

The journal's office, like the entire country, was abuzz with rumors that Khrushchev had attacked Stalin. In early March, the staff realized the rumors were true when they were shown the booklet of 20-odd pages, Levada said in an interview last week.

Levada was picked by his colleagues to read out the speech, and after he had finished, it was given back to Party officials, as happened everywhere else across the Soviet Union, he said. The booklet had a warning stamped on its cover, "Not for publication," Levada said.

"I thought I'd never see an official copy being handed out. It was a surprise," he said.

Khrushchev did not explain what caused Stalinism, or invite any discussion of the subject, Levada said. "Khrushchev made a strong effort to make sure that people didn't ask too many questions and that faith in the Party wasn't undermined," he said.

Although rumors had prepared the journal's staff for what was in the speech, they felt "a certain shock," Levada said. Afterward, they wondered in private conversations why the Party had allowed Stalin to do what he did, he said.

The 20th Congress, and the secret speech in particular, was the start of the Khrushchev thaw, which saw a certain easing of the stranglehold over society. The speech was a chink in the communist system that helped people to think independently and lessened their fear of the authorities, Levada said.

Adzhubei, meanwhile, recalled that "some radical groups" at the time sought to overthrow communism but Khrushchev reacted angrily to any talk of discarding the Soviet system at home and in Eastern Europe.

Later that year, the Soviet Union sent in troops to brutally suppress the workers' uprising in Hungary.

In many people, the speech sparked a desire to review the country's history, and they rifled through pre-Stalin Communist Party records and searched for ways to be "the real Reds, the true revolutionaries," Adzhubei said.

Khrushchev's thaw lasted only eight years, and under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet media were banned from mentioning Khrushchev and his criticism of Stalin for 18 years.

According to Levada, the Khrushchev thaw -- and later, Gorbachev's perestroika -- was too brief to allow Russia to recover from Stalinism.

"Russia has never decisively rejected Stalin," he said. "That is one of the reasons why we are stuck, now even turning back. There's an effort to repeat or at least imitate the Stalin regime."

Asked what he meant specifically, he said, "It's being spoken about very much."

Liberal politicians and the West have criticized President Vladimir Putin over what they have called his rollback of democracy.

Gorbachev, who has said the 20th Congress paved the way for perestroika, last week likened today's Russia to the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. Without purges but with absolute control over everything, those times were neo-Stalinist, he said at a discussion dedicated to the 1956 congress.

"There are those who want a return to the old times," Gorbachev said. "Russia is at a crossroads because we never made a final choice."

But Gorbachev said he supported Putin.

Vladimir Petukhov, research director at Levada's old research center, VTsIOM, which is now under state control, cited three of his agency's polls from last year as evidence that Russians were ambivalent about Stalin's legacy.

In one poll, 50 percent of respondents approved of Stalin because he created a strong state that defeated the Nazis, while in a second, 48 percent said Stalin's purges were wrong, Petukhov said.

In a third poll, 52 percent said they did not want someone like Stalin as president, but 42 percent longed for a "second Stalin," he said.

The agency's polls consistently gave Gorbachev and former President Boris Yeltsin worse ratings than Stalin, Petukhov said.

"There's no romanticism about his kind of rule. People realize that Stalin committed crimes but they don't want the history of the state to be destroyed together with Stalin," he said.

Victory in World War II "was the greatest achievement in Russian history, and he was around then," Petukhov said. "If you cancel out the war, it would ruin Russia's sense of identity."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/02/22/001.html