On The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences - Reports of The Speech

Reports of The Speech

The public session of the 20th Congress had come to a formal end on 24 February 1956 when word was spread to delegates to return to the Great Hall of the Kremlin for an additional "closed session," to which journalists, guests, and delegates from "fraternal parties" from outside the USSR were not invited. Special passes were issued to those eligible to participate, with an additional 100 former Party members, recently released from the Soviet prison camp network, added to the assembly to add moral effect.

Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and Khrushchev political ally Nikolai Bulganin called the session into order and immediately yielded the floor to Khrushchev, who began his speech shortly after midnight in the early morning of 25 February. For the next four hours Khrushchev delivered the "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" speech before stunned delegates. Several people became ill during the tense report and had to be removed from the hall.

Khrushchev read from a prepared report and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept. No questions or debate followed Khrushchev's presentation and delegates left the hall in state of acute disorientation. That same evening the delegates of foreign Communist parties were called to the Kremlin and given the opportunity to read the prepared text of the Khrushchev speech, which was treated as a top secret state document.

Shortly after conclusion of the speech, reports of it having taken place and its general content was conveyed to the West by Reuters journalist John Rettie, who had been informed of the event a few hours before Rettie was due to leave for Stockholm; it was therefore reported in the Western media in early March. Rettie believes the information came from Khrushchev himself via an intermediary.

On 1 March the text of the Khrushchev speech was distributed in printed form to senior Central Committee functionaries. This was followed on 5 March by a reduction of the document's secrecy classification from "Top Secret" to "Not For Publication." The Party Central Committee ordered the reading of Khrushchev's Report at all gatherings of Communist and Komsomol local units, with non-Party activists invited to attend the proceedings. The so-called "Secret Speech" was therefore publicly read at literally thousands of meetings, making the colloquial name of the report something of a misnomer. Nevertheless, the full text was not officially published in the Soviet press until 1989.

However, the text of the speech was only slowly disclosed in the Eastern European countries. It was never disclosed to Western communist party members by their leaders, and most Western communists only became aware of the details of the text after the New York Times (5 June 1956) and The Observer (10 June 1956) published versions of the full text.

The content of the speech reached the west through a circuitous route. A few copies of the speech were sent by order of the Soviet Politburo to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Shortly after the speech had been disseminated, a Polish journalist, Viktor Grayevsky, visited his girlfriend, Lucia Baranowski, who worked as a junior secretary in the office of the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Edward Ochab. On her desk was a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: "The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev." Grayevsky had heard rumors of the speech and, as a journalist, was interested in reading it. Baranowski allowed him to take the document home to read.

As it happened, Grayevsky, who was Jewish, and had made a recent trip to Israel to visit his sick father, decided to emigrate there. After he read the speech, he decided to take it to the Israeli Embassy and gave it to Yaakov Barmor who had helped Grayevsky make his trip to visit Grayevsky's sick father. Barmor was a Shin Bet representative; he photographed the document and sent the photographs to Israel.

By the afternoon of April 13, 1956, the Shin Bet in Israel received the photographs. Israeli intelligence and United States intelligence had previously secretly agreed to cooperate on security matters. James Jesus Angleton was the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) head of counterintelligence and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. The photographs were delivered to him. On April 17, 1956, the photographs reached the CIA chief Allen Dulles, who quickly informed U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June.