ABSTRACT
Stalin’s death in March 1953 was an important event for Eastern Europe. De-Stalinisation, the change of leadership in Moscow and in most Eastern European countries, had important repercussions for the social, economic and political order in all of the East European countries. The impact of Stalin’s death and the ensuing relaxation of the more arbitrary forms of repression was felt everywhere in the bloc but nowhere more dramatically than in Hungary. As in Hungary in 1956, the Czechoslovak reform movement began within the ruling party. The crisis arose out of a combination of several factors, the most important of which related to the economic problems the country faced. While in every other country of Eastern Europe the rulers resisted the moves towards liberalisation introduced after Stalin’s death by Georgi Malenkov under the slogan of the ‘New Course’, the Polish party leaders introduced the New Course in Poland themselves.
