ABSTRACT
Towards six in the evening on February 25, 1956, as the delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party were leaving the hall, they were suddenly called back to hear an important speech from the First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. It consisted of a long denunciation, lasting some six hours, of the former First Secretary, Joseph Stalin. Among other offences, Khrushchev accused him of crimes against Soviet legality, failure to prepare for the German attack of June 22, 1941, and also what Khrushchev called ‘the cult of the personality’. Officially, the Congress was in secret session, but the Reuter journalist Sidney Weiland heard what was happening, flew to Stockholm, and filed his report on March 16. Although the speech then became widely known in the West, it was not until early June that a full version became available within the USSR, Soviet censorship was still functioning with only slightly less rigour than in the days of Stalin.
