Khrushchev's Vilification Of Stalin

Khrushchev’s vilification of Stalin in his address to the Twentieth Party Congress was meticulous in detailing precise failures of his predecessor’s rule. Above all, Khrushchev strongly elaborated on Stalin’s extremities, especially the cult of personality that he had built up over the years. The speech also in turn attacked ‘Stalinist repressions, arrests, terror and murders…[and] for bungling foreign affairs and mishandling the war’. Despite this, Khrushchev was cautious in limiting his other criticisms of Stalin, and it was this focus on him as an individual rather than of the overall Soviet system that defined the boundaries of acceptable criticism. As such, the speech sought to condemn Stalin without endangering the party’s validity or the system that had indeed allowed Khrushchev to rise to power.
Khrushchev’s speech portrays Stalin as ‘a very distrustful man; sickly
Miriam Dobson argues that Khrushchev’s speech was necessary for voicing the ordeals of ordinary people who suffered under Stalinism who would otherwise be unheard: ‘…only the Secret speech allowed their stories to be told’. Stalinism, according to Khrushchev, was associated with ‘an army of willing perpetrators of terror, but also a mentality of fear, subservience, deceit and stifled initiative’. As such, it is also important to recognise that the critique of Stalin had only taken place once Stalin and his system had firmly established control – it was the ruler that had to be condemned, rather than the line of