Fifty years on, exhibit looks at Khrushchev's 'thaw'

On February 25, 1956, when delegates to the Soviet Communist Party's 20th congress came to hear Nikita Khrushchev's "secret report" on Stalinism, they noted there were no stenographers in the room. No one was allowed to take notes.

Fifty years on, an exhibit on the political "thaw" launched in the Soviet Union by this momentous report opened Friday, even though the complete text of the document itself has still not been published and recordings of Khrushchev's reading of it cannot be found.

Other artefacts of the time, ranging from documents relating to the rehabilitation of political figures branded "enemies of the people" by Stalin to a cap that once belonged to the Georgian bard Bulat Okudzhava -- a cultural figure emblematic of the epoch for many Russians, are on display.

The exhibit is being held at Moscow's Historical Museum, just off Red Square.

The shock triggered by the 1956 report, which Khrushchev read out loud for two hours as delegates sat in stunned silence, was paralyzing, Alexander Yakovlev, a delegate to the historic congress and later the ideological architect of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, recalled before his death last year.

Party elites learned that day that two million of their compatriots were jailed in Gulag camps between 1935 and 1940, that 700,000 of those were shot as "enemies of the people," and that the People's Father, as Stalin was once affectionately called, personally ordered torture.

Neither applause nor debate followed Khrushchev's enunciation of the report.

No version of the report was even officially published until March 1989, when the Soviet Politburo released it seeking to avert "uncontrollable de-Stalinisation," but an unofficial written version off the document was passed from hand to hand in party cells a week after the congress.

"My father secretly worked on this report and I myself learned of its existence from my Komsomol chief," recalled Rada Khrushchev, the late Soviet leader's daughter.

Some party faithful recall being stunned at the revelations contained in the report but records show others were instantly angered and ready to press demands for more of the truth about their leadership to be made public.

"Why is there no public debate?," was among the questions asked by party members mentioned by name in a secret report sent to the party's governing Central Committee after the report was made.

"A slavish spirit reigns in our party," they said.

Many who voiced such views, even after Khrushchev's report began to liberalize political discourse in the Soviet Union, nonetheless found themselves expelled from the party or jailed.

For Marc Goldman, a political expert who visited a preview of the exhibit, all the talk of liberalization started by Khrushchev is bunk.

"There was no thaw," he said. "After the 20th congress, Khrushchev threw 50,000 political prisoners into camps," said the 74-year-old who himself spent six years in a Mordovian Gulag on the Volga river after having called for "true de-Stalinisation."

Khrushchev took a step back four months after his historic report to send a secret letter to party members, presenting Stalin as an "eminent man" who had "abused power."

But it was too late -- the intellectual opposition, including future dissidents, had already been born, and other countries equally "contaminated" -- with protest breaking out in Poland starting in June 1956 and reaching Hungary in October.

And though this revolt was suppressed in a month by the Red Army, it provoked in turn Soviet student rallies that started in October 1956.

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AFP 111341 GMT 02 06

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