ABSTRACT
Soon after Beria’s execution Khrushchev and the Party Politburo assigned a secretary of the Central Committee, P.N.Pospelov, to write a report on Beria’s crimes.1 An accidental discovery changed Khrushchev’s mind. Construction workers converting Stalin’s Kremlin apartment into a museum found a secret safe inserted in a wall. The safe was brought to Khrushchev. Years later, he mentioned only one of the documents he found in it: the letter in which Lenin had threatened to break off all relations with Stalin. ‘I was astonished that this note had been preserved. Stalin had probably forgotten all about it’, Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs.2 Khrushchev did not reveal the nature of any of the other documents he had discovered in Stalin’s safe. His colleagues in the Politburo strongly objected to revelations of any embarrassing information about Stalin’s past.3 The other documents in the safe were too scandalous for Khrushchev even to mention them. But slowly these documents continued to erode Khrushchev’s veneration of Stalin and he decided to attack his ‘personality cult’. Despite the objections of Politburo members, Khrushchev delivered a secret report on 24 February 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress, condemning Stalin’s ‘personality cult’. His report became known as ‘Khrushchev’s secret speech’. Its transcript was secretly read to party members at various places of work all over the Soviet Union.4 Leaders of Communist Parties in eastern Europe also received the text of Khrushchev’s secret speech, which was leaked to the West and published there.5
