XX. Party congress of the CPSU
The XX. CPSU party congress (20th party congress of the CPSU) from February 14 to 25, 1956 in Moscow was a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union . It was the first national CPSU party congress after the death of the dictator Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953. His successor Nikita Khrushchev made some of Stalin's crimes, above all the " purges " of Communist party members, known in a five-hour secret speech and condemned them. In this way he wanted to prepare the CPSU for de-Stalinization and gain room for maneuver for a cautious reform policy.
prehistory
The people of the Soviet Union had greatly revered "Father Stalin" as the victor in the " Great Patriotic War " against National Socialist Germany . At the same time, since Stalin's death there had been unrest in the parties allied with the CPSU throughout the Eastern Bloc . They now hoped for more independence and autonomy. Above all, the uprising of June 17, 1953, which was violently suppressed , had made it clear to the Politburo that reforms were necessary in order to counter the danger of a revolutionary disengagement movement in the satellite states of the Soviet Union.
With his speech, Khrushchev had two main goals: domestically, he wanted to confront the CPSU with Stalin's crimes in order to be able to initiate a reform policy, and in terms of foreign policy he wanted to appear as a conqueror of Stalinism in order to bind the Eastern bloc states even more closely to Moscow and to gain acceptance of their party leaderships and populations to win for it. In doing so, in accordance with the structural codification of democratic centralism introduced since Lenin's ban on parliamentary groups, he relied on party reform through a party discussion controlled by the Politburo without real freedom of expression .
In months of top-secret preparations, Khrushchev had instructed the KGB to collect documents about Stalin's crimes and to make reports about them. In doing so, he carefully ensured that his own involvement in Stalinism was covered up, for he had been his loyal follower until Stalin's death and this attitude owed his rise in the CPSU. He himself denounced party comrades and thus handed them over to the Gulag .
Khrushchev had only let his closest confidante know about his plan and consciously relied on shock therapy for the delegates. Only after lengthy discussions was he able to get the Politburo through that the results of an investigation into Stalin's crimes, which had been available for some time, could be presented to the delegates. In his opinion, political and social further development of the country was only possible by turning away from the personality cult around Stalin.
Course of the party congress
In accordance with his plan, Khrushchev opened the party congress with a speech that highlighted Stalin's services to the Soviet Union and emphasized the continuity of the current policy with his goals. On February 18, he had his agriculture minister test the mood of the delegates in a critical speech about Stalin's personality cult. As expected, they reacted negatively to the moderate and formal criticism, but now suspected that a change of course in the Politburo had to be planned.
On February 25, the day before the end of the party congress, from 10:00 a.m., Khrushchev then held his long-prepared secret speech on the personality cult and its consequences behind closed doors. All journalists and guests who did not belong to the party were excluded and all recordings - including the usual tape recordings - were strictly prohibited. He informed the party members that Stalin had made serious "errors" with his ideological course. He told them about the mass murders of the first generation communists who had supported the October Revolution in the 1930s . He announced that he would publish a list of Stalinist crimes that the Soviet Union had previously denied. However, he was silent about the labor camps and the much larger mass murders of Russian peasants and Orthodox priests during the course of the forced collectivization , as well as about the crimes of the Red Army during World War II and afterwards. It was particularly important to him that the criticism should be based solely on Stalin and not on the Soviet system. Despite the preparatory archival studies of the KGB , which he was familiar with, his speech suggested that the main thrust of Stalinist crimes was directed against the elites in the party, business and army . In relation to the number of victims, however, the so-called “mass operations” were several times more important. They were directed against members of social groups who were considered risk factors and foreign enemies of the people . Hundreds of thousands of these people were either shot dead, killed in custody or sent to the Gulag camps.
After 1989, listeners reported that the audience had taken the speech in complete silence and with paralyzing horror. Nobody dared to look at his neighbor. There was no debate. The delegates were forbidden to pass on what they had heard orally or in writing.
publication
On March 5, as the speech was beginning to leak out, Khrushchev decided to make its essential content available in writing to all Soviet party members. 18 million Soviet citizens learned for the first time that their idol had been a mass murderer. This triggered a deep shock and distrust of Khrushchev in many. He had even expected a coup for his removal.
Western governments had heard only vague rumors about the secret speech and were working hard through their secret services to get the full text. In addition, rumors were spread of a $ 1 million reward. The Polish journalist Wiktor Grajewski, who was friends with one of the secretaries of Edward Ochab , the new head of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), received the original manuscript from her for a few hours and forwarded an incomplete copy to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw . The Mossad passed the information on to the CIA . After she had checked the text of the speech and recognized it as authentic, she passed the receipt as her own success and did not pay out any reward. Only the Mossad thanked Grajewski 30 years later with a certificate.
At that stage of the Cold War , the US government tried to take advantage of its knowledge as much as possible. It was discussed whether one should publish the received text in whole or only partially with deliberately manipulative excerpts in order to unsettle the Eastern European communists and to destabilize the Soviet leadership. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower opted for a full announcement. This took place first in the New York Times , then from Western stations also to the Eastern Bloc, including the station Freie Berlin , on June 21, 1956. Although the complete text was only published in 1989, the announcement in 1956 had serious consequences, especially for Poland and Hungary .
Effects
The content of the speech, published by Khrushchev himself, initially initiated a partial amnesty in the Soviet Union for former CPSU members who were imprisoned as forced laborers under Stalin . They were released under the strict condition of the KGB not to report anything about their experiences. Many of the traumatized prisoners of the Gulags, who had hoped in vain for new affection and openness, received no state support and did not find their way back into social life. Many party communists, on the other hand, saw the 20th party congress as the beginning of revisionism , i.e. a departure from the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and thus the beginning of the gradual disintegration of real socialism .
After the announcement of the speech by western radio stations, the so-called thaw period initially occurred in the Eastern Bloc countries . The reform wings of the Communist Eastern Bloc parties felt encouraged to represent their ideas more openly.
In the GDR , Walter Ulbricht also distanced himself from Stalin after his return from Moscow in March 1956. In New Germany he declared on March 4th: “Stalin cannot be counted among the classics of Marxism.” He now emphasized that the SED did not need de-Stalinization, since its members were not Stalinists anyway. Although Ulbricht was unpopular in the GDR and in Moscow, Khrushchev continued to support him, as he feared another popular uprising like the one of June 17, 1953, if the party leadership were to be destabilized . Nevertheless, internal discussions in the SED about the importance of the speech for their course. For younger party members like Gustav Just , who had become communists after 1945 through the Stalinist form of denazification , this meant a renewed identity crisis: after Hitler, another “false idol” had been dethroned. Further reform movements, such as that of the Harich group , were crushed, and those involved were sentenced to long prison terms.
The Polish party leader Bolesław Bierut suffered a heart attack after Khrushchev's speech at the party. He died on March 12, 1956 in a Moscow sanatorium. The new party leadership in Warsaw under Edward Ochab ordered price increases and wage cuts. After strikes and workers' meetings, the Poznan Uprising broke out in June . Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in the center, chanting “Down with the Russians! Freedom and bread! ”And then marched to the building of the UB secret police . There, some Molotov cocktails were thrown at the building and tried to set it on fire. The Warsaw government then had tanks deployed and the revolt put down: around 90 people were killed and 900 injured. Those involved who were seen as ringleaders were then convicted in show trials. As a result, the anti-Soviet mood in the population grew enormously.
On October 21, Władysław Gomułka, the former party leader, who had been imprisoned for four years as an opponent within the party, was re-elected party leader. Three days later, Gomułka gave a speech in front of several hundred thousand people in central Warsaw , in which he promised reforms and a “Polish road to socialism”. Gomułka went to Moscow from November 16 to 18 and managed to have tens of thousands of Poles return from their exile in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossowski , who was Poland's Defense Minister, and numerous Soviet staff officers who held key positions in the Polish armed forces, were ordered back to Moscow. The industrial town of Stalinogród got its old name Katowice again . The farmers no longer had to join the collective cooperatives, existing cooperatives were often dissolved. Thousands of political prisoners were legally rehabilitated.
On October 23, tens of thousands of students in Budapest who had heard of the Polish triumph gathered at the Stalin monument, overturned it and smashed it. Unlike in Poland, this created hatred of its own communist government. Hungary had long suffered under a Stalinist regime. This now requested Soviet help. On October 24th, the Russian tanks reached Budapest, but could not calm the situation. The reform communist Imre Nagy , who enjoyed the sympathy of the population, managed to withdraw the tanks on October 30th. During the victory celebrations, there were riots against the Hungarian Stasi members, manhunts and lynching . After Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev let the Red Army invade again on November 4 to prevent the Eastern bloc from breaking up. The fighting lasted until November 15, in which 5,000 people lost their lives (see Hungarian popular uprising ).
With the arrest of 60,000 Hungarians, the deportation of the entire Hungarian government, secret show trials and death sentences against Nagy and others. a. Khrushchev returned to the Stalinist methods of rule. This practically ended his attempt at de-Stalinization.
See also
literature
- Bund-Verlag (ed.): Khrushchev accounts for Stalin: wording of the speech by Khrushchev at the secret meeting of the XX. Moscow Party Congress on February 25, 1956 . Bund-Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. o. J. (1956)
- Jan Foitzik: The internal treatment of Khrushchev's secret speech on the XX. Party congress of the CPSU by the SED, the PVAP and the CPC . In: Inge Kircheisen (ed.), Thaw without spring. The year 1956 as reflected in changes within the bloc and international crises , Berlin 1995, pp. 60–83.
- Wladislaw Hedeler : Nikita Chruščev's lecture “On the personality cult and its consequences” at the 20th party congress of the CPSU in 1956 and its history. Considerations in the light of new sources , in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume I / 2006.
- Siegfried Prokop: Between thaw, spring and frost - the GDR in the months after the XX. Party conference of the CPSU , in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue II / 2006.
Web links
Single receipts
- ↑ Schroeder, Klaus: The SED State - History and Structures of the GDR , Munich 1998, p. 133
- ↑ On the effects of the party congress on the GDR, cf. Siegfried Prokop: Between thaw, spring and frost - the GDR in the months after the XX. Party conference of the CPSU , in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue II / 2006.