The Cult of Personality During the Khrushchev Thaw

2011/12/01 by Aleksandr V. Pyzhikov · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Eastern European Communism and Reforms

paper · doi:10.2753/rsh1061-1983500301

openalex publication_date 2011/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Nikita Khrushchev's famous denunciation of Stalin during his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 may have been motivated more by internal power plays against his political rivals than by a desire to expose Stalin's "cult of personality." The denunciation surprised foreign visitors and resident party officials alike. Their scramble to attack Stalin's henchmen (Lavrentii Beria and Georgii Malenkov in particular), while shielding Stalin himself, explains the contradictory, halting aspects of the ensuing de-Stalinization campaign.

Cited by

• Bibliography of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union [wikipedia]

Related

• Stalin the Charismatic Leader?: Explaining the ‘Cult of Personality’ as a Legitimation Technique
• “Your Hands, Malenkov, Are Covered in Blood…”: Nikita Khrushchev and the Instrumentalization of the 1949–1952 Leningrad Affair
• ‘Kings among their subjects’? Ernst Thälmann, Harry Pollitt and the Leadership Cult as Stalinization
• The Decembrists and Dissidence: Myth and Anti-Myth from the 1960s–1980s
• Excoriating Stalin, Criticizing Mao