Re-emergence of public opinion in the Soviet Union: Khrushchev and responses to the secret speech

Abstract

This contribution examines the way that the surprise of Khrushchev's secret speech forced the Soviet party leadership to acknowledge public opinion. Before 1956, the Soviet state paid lip service to the idea of public opinion, but paid no attention to it. The outpouring of emotion and argument after the twentieth party congress made policy makers take notice. In meetings throughout the country, Soviet citizens asked hard questions and raised criticisms of the regime. By the end of 1956 however, the party authorities reasserted themselves and denied the legitimacy of outside input in public debates. Khrushchev and the others realised that the emerging public opinion was incompatible with their belief in the leading role of the Communist party.

Notes

¹Sergei Khrushchev makes this argument in his book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (2000). For a summary of Russian appraisals of Khrushchev, see Nordlander (1993, pp. 248 – 266). For an excellent political biography see Taubman (2003).

²Most of the older work published about this period stresses the protest, but only in terms of published works and their challenge to Socialist Realist conventions; see, for example, Gibian (1960) and McLean and Vickery (1961).

³‘Beseda s predsedatelem amerikanskogo gazetnogo ob'edineniya ‘Skripps—Govard nyuspeipers’ g-nom Roi Govardom’, Pravda, 5 March 1936.

⁴‘Obshchestvennost' zapadnoi Germanii obsuzhdaet poslanie N.A. Bulgachina’, Pravda, 13 February 1957, p. 4.

⁵S. P. Babaevskii was the winner of three Stalin prizes in the late 1940s and 1950s, and later became an incarnation of optimism, of concealment or minimisation of the true problems in agriculture after the war.

⁶Rossiisti Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (RGALI), f. 1702, op. 6, d. 77, p. 52.

⁷RGALI, f. 2464, op. 1, d. 78, p. 42.

⁸One interesting recent dialogue about this rethinking comes from Julianne Furst and Hiroaki Kuromiya. They argue that dissent can only be understood within the discursive foundations of Stalinism (see Furst 2002, pp. 353 – 375; 2003, pp. 789 – 802; Kuromiya 2003, pp. 631 – 638).

⁹It was published in the New York Times in March, apparently passing from a Polish party member, to Mossad then to the CIA. It was also reproduced inside the Soviet Union in limited numbers to be distributed to party members throughout the country.

¹⁰There have been several interesting articles on the way that intellectuals from the Eastern Bloc received the secret speech; see, in particular, Connelly (1997, pp. 329 – 360) and Tighe (1996, pp. 71 – 102).

¹¹ Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishii Istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 16, d. 747, p. 95. The citations in the next two pages are drawn from this document (pp. 95 – 126). This and other documents have been published in the collection Doklad … (2002).

¹³TsGAIPD, f. 2960, op. 6, d. 13, ll. 84 – 85.

¹²Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhi Izucheniia Politicheskikh Dvizhenii (TsGAIPD), f. 2960, op. 6, d. 13, l. 128.

¹⁵ Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'noi i Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f. 556, op. 1, d. 598, p. 181.

¹⁴RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, delo 3, l. 11.

¹⁶RGASPI, f. 556, op. 1, d. 603, p. 131.

¹⁷Originally published in Novyi mir (1956, issues 8 – 10). It was published in book-form in the Soviet Union in 1957 and translated in 1957 by Edith Bone and published by Dutton in the United States.

¹⁸Central Archive of Societal Movements for Moscow (TsAODg.M), f. 8132, op. 1, d. 9, pp. 110 – 175. All of the quotations from this meeting over the next few pages are drawn from this transcript.

¹⁹Lev Slavin (1896 – 1984) was a well respected writer who had, however, been a fellow-traveller in the 1920s and was amongst those who had called for the separation of literature from politics before the imposition of Stalinist cultural orthodoxy in the 1930s. He also supported the dissidents Sinyavsky and Daniel when they were arrested and put on trial in 1965.

²⁰Nikolai Atarov (1907 – 1978) would be removed from the editorship of the journal Moskva in 1957 for deviating too far from the party line.

²²Excerpts of this speech appeared in Samizdat almost immediately afterwards. An abridged version was translated and published in English in McLean and Vickery (1961).

²¹Konstantin Paustovskii (1892 – 1968) started writing in the 1920s, and became an outspoken proponent of sincerity and the independence of writers. In 1957, he was attacked by the party leadership for this speech and for his editing a liberal collection of works entitled Literaturnaya Moskva (Literary Moscow).

²³There is much current work that discusses these events in the lights of the archives; see for example, Kramer (1998, pp. 163 – 214) and Granville (2001, pp. 1051 – 1076).

²⁴See, for example, Literaturnaya gazeta on 22 November and 1 December 1956.

²⁵Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkiv Obshchestvennykh Dvizhenii Gorod. Moskvy (TsGAODg.M), f. 2464, op. 1, d. 325, p. 46.

²⁶RGANI, f. 89, perechen 6, doc. 2, p. 6.

²⁷RGANI, f. 89, perechen 6, doc. 1, p. 10.

²⁸RGANI, f. 89, perechen. 6, doc. 1, p. 7.

²⁹In 1957, 1,964 people were arrested for anti-Soviet activity, almost five times more than in 1956. For example several students at MGU were sentenced to prison for passing out leaflets and trading documents with Polish students (see RGANI, f. 89, perechen 6, doc. 8; also see Kozlov 2002, pp. 75 – 88).

³⁰ Voprosy istorii, 4, 1994, p. 77.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karl E. Loewenstein

The author would like to acknowledge generous financial support from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Faculty Development Program, ACTR/ACCELS, and Duke University that made this research possible.