1 The Crimes of the Stalin Era; Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Nikita S. Khrushchev, with notes by Boris I. Nicolaevsky; supplement (Section Two) to The New Leader (New York, July 16, 1956), pp. S17 and S48. No Soviet publication of Khrushchev's “secret” speech has appeared at this writing, and I am using the text as made available by the U. S. Department of State. The present edition, by The New Leader, is particularly recommended because of Nicolaevsky's extremely valuable annotation. It is henceforth, in this article, cited as Special Report.

2 Ibid., p. S59.

3 Isaac Deutscher, “The Stalinists’ Case Against Stalin,” The Reporter (New York, July 12, 1956), p. 22. Cf. the text of Khrushchev's report of the Central Committee of the CPSU on February 14 in Pravda for February 15, 1956.

4 S. Schwarz, “Dvadtsatyj S'ezd KPSS,” Novy Zhurnal (New York, Book 44, March 1956), pp. 230-31; Nicolaevsky, B., “Bor'ba za vlast’ v KPSS (k itogam 20-go s'ezda),” Socialisticheskij vestnik (New York-Paris, April, 1956), pp. 56–57 Google Scholar, and the same material by Nicolaevsky in English in “Is Bulganin Finished?”, The New Leader (April 23, 1956),'. pp. 16-17. t

5 See Mikoyan's speech in Pravda for February 18, 1956.

6 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 22.

7 Ibid., pp. 22-23.

8 Guesses as to such non-participators have included at various times Mikoyan, Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhukov, and others.

9 Special Report, p. S34.

10 Ibid.

11 For a graphic description of the tense expectancy in Moscow of such a purge see Salisbury, Harrison E., American in Russia (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, Chapter IX, “The Doctors’ Plot,” pp. 140-57.

12 Cf. Mark Vishniak, “Was Stalin Murdered? Are Collective Leaders Bound by Collective Guilt?”, The New Leader, (April 16, 1956), pp. 7-9. Less provable, at this time at least, is the theory that the de-Stalinization at the Twentieth Congress was caused by the discovery that for years before the revolution of 1917 Stalin had been an informer in the pay of the tsar's secret police. Alexander Orlov, one of the originators of this theory, in his article “The Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin” in Life (New York, April 23, 1956), wrote: “It is not unlikely that the Kremlin itself will one day disclose Stalin's guiltiest secret… . Meanwhile, with the destalinization campaign, the current men of the Kremlin are conditioning their Russian subjects for the shock to come” (p. 44). Orlov, a former member of the Soviet secret police who defected in 1938, based his theory mostly on hearsay. The editors of Life presented it along with a companion article on the same subject by Isaac Don Levine (pp. 47-51, later developed into a book on Stalin as a secret agent of Okhrana) with the comment that the theory is offered “as a cogent reason for the sensational turnabout of Russia's bosses in denouncing and downgrading Stalin” (p. 34).

13 Kuskova, Yek., “Termidor,—a chto dal'she?”, Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New York, July 8, 1956), p. 2.Google Scholar

14 A. Avtorkhanov, “Politicheskije itogi XX s'ezda KPSS i perspektivy kollektivnogo rukovodstva,” Vestnik po izucheniju SSSR (Munich, April-June 1956), pp. 6-10. Practically the same material is in English in Uralov, Alexander, “The Social Composition of the Twentieth Party Congress,” Bulletin, Institute for the Study of the USSR (Munich, 1956), III, 30-33.Google Scholar

15 G. Aronson, “Nashi termidoriancy,” Socialisticheskij vestnik (May, 1956), p. 86, quoting a letter from a friend in Paris who has visited Moscow since the war.

16 Nicolaevsky, op. cit., Socialisticheskij vestnik (April, 1956), pp. 58-59, and The New Leader (April 23, 1956), pp. 17-19.

17 Nicolaevsky, op. cit., Socialisticheskij vestnik (April, 1956), p. 59.

18 Schwarz, op. cit., pp. 236-37.

19 Certain experts, however, do find Khrushchev's “secret” speech a treasure-trove of new details, not heretofore known abroad even to the best foreign researchers on Soviet purges; details on who in the Kremlin knifed whom and under what circumstances. Nicolaevsky in particular proves this point again and again in his fascinating annotation to Special Report.

20 Special Report, p. S64.

21 “Postanovlenije Central'nogo Komiteta KPSS o preodolenii kul'ta lichnosti i jego posledstvij,” Pravda, July 2, 1956; all the other Soviet periodicals the same or next day or soon after.

22 Special Report, pp. S24-25. See particularly, on p. S25, Nicolaevsky's note to the effect that “Khruschchev's account of the Bolsheviks’ abolition of the death penalty in January 1920 is altogether incorrect.” Nicolaevsky proves that “in reality, the death penalty was not abolished at all” even when Lenin said it was.

23 Ibid., pp. S20-21.

24 Ibid., pp. S44-45. At that Khrushchev uttered not a word in condemnation of the Stalinist deportations of Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, or of Sta lin's anti-Semitism.

25 Ibid., p. S60. Certain parts of Khrushchev's speech at the final session of the Congress, not yet available in the West, may have dealt with Stalin's foreign policy at greater length than this.

26 bid.

27 “Postanovlenije,” Pravda, July 2, 1956.

28 Ibid.; also “Dokument bol'shogo istoricheskogo znachenija,” editorial in Pravda, July 3, 1956, p. 1.

29 A. B., “Moskva vesnoi 1956 goda (Iz pis'ma iz Evropy),” Socialisticheskij vestnik (June 1956), p. 103.