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The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956.[1] Popularly known as the Secret Speech (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), this is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organisations across the country.[2] Khrushchev's speech was sharply critical of the rule of the deceased General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism.

[11] Special passes were issued to those eligible to participate, with an additional 100 former party members, who had been recently released from the Soviet prison camp network, added to the assembly to add moral effect. Stalin, Khrushchev argued, was the primary victim of the deleterious effect of the cult of personality,[20] which, through his existing flaws, had transformed him from a crucial part of the victories of Lenin into a paranoiac man who was easily influenced by the "rabid enemy of our party", Lavrentiy Beria. As to how, and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the [allegedly] most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatever.

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