ABSTRACT
Following Nikita Khrushchev's ouster from power in the USSR in 1964, the new Brezhnev leadership put an end to his policy of “de-Stalinization,” started in 1956 with the “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress. This chapter analyses the struggle of influence between various political forces over the “Stalin Question” in the years 1965 and 1966, as a new course was being defined. In the weeks leading up to the 23rd Party Congress, the neo-Stalinist lobby was particularly influential and seemed on the verge of obtaining a rehabilitation of Stalin. However, anti-Stalinist moods ran high in the Soviet intelligentsia, expressed in numerous letters of protest to the Brezhnev leadership. The compromise ultimately reached was a middle course, which consisted of tacitly ending de-Stalinization, without rehabilitating Stalin: the accomplishments of the Stalin era would be celebrated, but attributed to the Party, and criticism of Stalin's crimes would be silenced. However, as the chapter shows, this compromise was never unanimously accepted, and both neo-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists continued to push for more radical narratives, either in censored or underground publications.
