The Twentieth Party Congress and History

Abstract

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech at the February 1956 Twentieth Congress of the CPSU sent shock waves through Soviet society and the international communist movement. The dethronement of Stalin could hardly leave Soviet historiography untouched; but even before the main shock there were several tremors among politicians and historians alike. At the congress itself A. I. Mikoyan, while bemoaning the theoretical poverty of Soviet social science as a whole, singled out party and Soviet history as its “most backward” branch.¹ The principal editor of Voprosy istorii, Academician Anna Pankratova, attributed the oversimplification, embellishing and modernization of the past by historians to the ‘cult of the personality’, without mentioning Stalin by name.² This was an understatement. The triumph of Stalinism had been a tragedy for history — the “most political of all the sciences” as M. N. Pokrovsky, the leading Marxist historian in the 1920s, had rightly deemed it. The General Secretary’s menacing admonition to the editorial board of Proletarskaya revolyntsiya back in 1931 that scholarship, history especially, should be nothing less than “party scholarship” had taken a terrible toll.³

The Twentieth Congress was a dizzying gasp of freedom. Initially, strictly speaking, it was a settling of accounts with Stalin by the method of Stalinist historiography itself.

M. Ya. Gefter, Moscow, March 1992