The secret speech that changed world history

Fifty years ago Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union by denouncing Stalin in a special address to Communist party comrades. The text, detailing the dictator's crimes, was smuggled out of Moscow and later published in full in The Observer. John Rettie recalls his part in the mission and reflects on a pivotal episode of the 20th century..It was an evening half a century ago, a week or so after Khrushchev had denounced the horrors of Stalin's rule to a secret session of the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress.


That was only three years after the death of Stalin, mourned by the great majority of Soviet citizens, who saw him as a divine father. So soon afterwards, here was their new leader telling them they had made a cataclysmic error: far from divine, Stalin was satanic. The leaders who inherited the party from the old dictator agreed that Khrushchev should make the speech only after months of furious argument - and subject to the compromise that it should never be published.

Its consequences, by no means fully foreseen by Khrushchev, shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its communist allies, notably in central Europe. Forces were unleashed that eventually changed the course of history. But at the time, the impact on the delegates was more immediate. Soviet sources now say some were so convulsed as they listened that they suffered heart attacks; others committed suicide afterwards...

In the next few days diplomats of central European communist states began to whisper that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin at a secret session. No details were forthcoming. I was working as the second Reuters correspondent in Moscow to Sidney Weiland, who - more for form's sake than anything - tried to cable a brief report of this bald fact to London. As expected, the censors suppressed it.

Then, the evening before I was due to go on holiday to Stockholm, Orlov telephoned to say: 'I've got to see you before you go.' Hearing the urgency in his voice, I told him to come round at once. As soon as he said why he had come, I deemed it wise to confuse the microphones we all thought we had in our walls by putting on the loudest record I had. So, through soaring trombones, Orlov gave me a detailed account of Khrushchev's indictment: that Stalin was a tyrant, a murderer and torturer of party members.

Orlov had no notes, far less a text of the speech. He told me that the party throughout the Soviet Union heard of it at special meetings of members in factories, farms, offices and universities, when it was read to them once, but only once. At such meetings in Georgia, where Stalin was born, members were outraged at the denigration by a Russian of their own national hero. Some people were killed in the ensuing riots and, according to Orlov, trains arrived in Moscow from Tbilisi with their windows smashed.

But could I believe him? 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/26/russia.theobserver?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Personality_Cult_and_its_Consequences
Khrushchev began the speech shortly after midnight; it took some four hours to deliver. Shortly thereafter, reports of it were conveyed to the West by Reuters journalist John Rettie, who had been told about the speech by Kostya Orlov a few hours before Rettie was due to leave forStockholm; it was therefore reported in the Western media in early March. Rettie believes the information came from Khrushchev himself via an intermediary.