ABSTRACT
The event which shook the world Communist movement most profoundly was the posthumous dethronement of Joseph Stalin which took place at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. Through his glorification by the Communist world press, Stalin had become a legendary figure for innumerable Communists during his lifetime: a symbol of the myth of the Soviet Union and of its ideals for which they were prepared to sacrifice themselves. Barely short of three years later, on 25 February 1956, was his immense stature shattered by the speech Khrushchev made to the Twentieth Congress. The Communists were faced with the painful question of how it could come about that one single person could so monopolize power in party, state and society, and how Lenin's creation, the Soviet Union, could degenerate under the leadership of his successor into a barbaric caricature of Socialism.
