ABSTRACT

In October 1955, nearly three years after Stalin’s death, the Central Committee received a letter from a retired lawyer in Moscow, bearing the title, ‘The Revision of the Stalinist Era of the Party’s History’. 1 Theauthor, a certain Aladzhalov, urged the leadership to proclaim a clean break with Stalinism at the 20th Party Congress, the first such gathering in the post-Stalinist era, due to be held in February 1956. Like many domestic and foreign observers, he had understood the reforms that had taken place in the months and years after Stalin’s death in March 1953 as an attempt to renounce certain parts of the late leader’s legacy, especially in the criminal justice system and the Soviet economy. Whilst this impression was strengthened by the disappearance from much public discourse of the epithets and canonical narratives of the Stalin cult, and indeed of Stalin’s name itself, the author, as one of this discourse’s intended recipients, argued that its messages remained unclear. It left even sophisticated ‘readers’ disorientated and it exposed an apparent lack of commitment within the Soviet leadership to ‘re-write’ the history of the Stalin era in any substantive sense. In short, it exposed a disjuncture between post-Stalinism, understood strictly chronologically (Soviet society after the death of Stalin), and post-Stalinism in a broader sense (the completion of the transition from the system charismatically embodied by Stalin).