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5 Probs. Communism 1 (1956)
Anatomy of Tyranny: Mr. Khrushchev's Attack on Stalin

handle is hein.journals/probscmu5 and id is 169 raw text is: CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS The Twentieth Congress and After Editors' Note: The three articles below continue Problems of Com- munism's series of commentaries on developments in the USSR and on the international scene since the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, held in Moscow last February. Eclipsing all other repercussions of the Congress was the publication in June of leaked portions of Khrushchev's secret speech of February 25th-a scathing defamation of Stalin which laid the sins of a quarter-century of misrule and repression at the late dictator's door. The first article below analyzes the various implications of Khrushchev s charges and at- tempts to assess the party leadership's motives in airing these revela- tions of Stalinist terrorism before the party assemblage. A second article by the British political analyst Richard Lowen- thal examines the no less significant-if less sensational-Congress pronouncements sanctioning the pursuit of socialism by other paths than the Leninist pattern of revolutionary overthrow. The author sees Moscow's talk of a peaceful or parliamentary road to socialism not merely as a move to promote a new phase of Popular Front tactics, but as part of a revival of Kremlin interest in world revolution-by any means which might lead to the establishment of Communist power in new areas. In the third article, British M. P. Denis Healey discusses the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to Great Britain in April, showing the patent failure, in this instance, of Soviet efforts to curry popular favor for the broad front tactic. Anatomy of Tyranny: Mr. Khrushchev's Attack on Stalin* I ARELY has a document aroused more interest and .lspeculation than the paper issued by the US State Department, purporting to be the text of the speech delivered on February 25, 1956 by Mr. Khrush- chev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to the Twentieth Congress. The United States Government does not vouch for its authenticity; nevertheless it has been received every- where as plausible; it is in keeping with the tenor of statements made by responsible officials of non-Soviet Communist parties, and Communist newspapers in *Printed simultaneously in Problems of Communism and The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs, London), July 1956, with the permission of the latter publication. the West have made no attempt to denounce it as a forgery. On the contrary, they have treated it as genuine. To read this paper is to recall a dozen highlights of Soviet history between the assassination of Kirov in 1934 and Stalin's death in 1953. Of these two events, the first is presented in a highly equivocal light, suggesting a plot by the secret police in collusion with Stallin, the second as a release from unparallelled tyranny. Overshadowing all the rest is the somber horror of the great purge of the later 1930's. The ostensible purpose of the speech was to destroy Stalin's reputation, or, in its own terms, to destroy the cult of the individual. Mr. Khrushchev's

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