*https://portside.org/2026-06-01/week-peoples-history-jun-3-9-2026 <https://portside.org/2026-06-01/week-peoples-history-jun-3-9-2026>*
JUNE 4 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication by the U.S. State Department of an English translation of “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” a speech that had been delivered by Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The June publication of the speech was big news because when Khrushchev had first delivered it 14 weeks previously, he had done so during a closed, secret, session of Party’s annual conference in Moscow; in the days following Khrushchev’s presentation, the speech was read to hundreds of meetings of Soviet Communist Party members, but its text was not released, so the exact details of its contents hard to pin down. Within three weeks of Khrushchev making the speech, the fact that he had done so and a general description of what he had said were available to anyone who sought the information, but the text released by the State Department was the first authoritative version that could be read by anyone who was interested. The speech contained an enormous amount of information, which would take pages to summarize fairly. Its overarching point was that under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Communist Party had violated the norms of collective leadership and had come to depend on repression, persecution and falsification instead of principled discussion and democratic decision making. Eventually, Stalin immeasurably overestimated himself and came to believe he was infallible, which became the justification for major violations of socialist law and grave acts of repression. The speech was a repudiation of the basis for a great deal that the Communist Party had done over the course of decades, but it was, at the same time, a defense of many other things it had done, and a defense of the party’s leadership that was in place in 1956, three years after Stalin died. As such, it was an ideological earthquake, which reverberated for years throughout every institution that had any connection to the international communist movement. For a detailed collection of reactions to “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” published in 1956 by communist parties in the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy click - *https://archive.org/details/the-anti-stalin-campaign-and-international-communism/page/n7/mode/2up* <https://archive.org/details/the-anti-stalin-campaign-and-international-communism/page/n7/mode/2up> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41917): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41917 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119611956/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
