Alexander Friedman is a historian, teaching modern history and the history of Eastern Europe at the "Heinrich Heine" University in Düsseldorf and at the University of Saarland.
Recently, the name of Nikita Khrushchev has rarely been mentioned in the Russian media - although February 25 marked the 70th anniversary of his landmark address to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, which became a landmark event among Western experts on the USSR. At the time, Khrushchev's speech gave serious cause for reflection on the trajectory of development of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries. But today in Russia they prefer not to talk about it.
Such an attitude towards one of the key events in post-war Soviet history is connected both with the negative assessment of Khrushchev's policy and personality in the Kremlin, and with the very content of the speech, which contradicts the views, including on history, of the current Russian leadership. Four years ago, it started the war against Ukraine and took a course towards the glorification of the Soviet past - in particular, towards the justification and glorification of Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev's predecessor.
Khrushchev and the Kremlin's anti-Ukrainian campaign
The large-scale campaign to rethink Stalin's role in Soviet history, as well as the trend to rehabilitate the "leader" as an "effective manager", has borne fruit in Russia. The number of Russians sympathetic to Stalin is constantly growing. In a survey conducted by the Institute for Socio-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in October 2025 (under the title "Political figures who have brought the greatest benefit to Russia"), Stalin took "an honorable" second place with 45%, second only to Vladimir Putin (65%). Nikita Khrushchev's "rating" is 6% - half the approval rating he had in 1995. However, this is not the lowest result: in a 2016 survey, the first such survey after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine, only 4% of respondents supported him.
The decline in Khrushchev's already low "rating" is most likely the result of the anti-Ukrainian campaign in the Russian media, which emphasized his ties with Ukraine and his role in the "illegal" transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). But the critical (albeit often restrained) assessment of Putin, who in recent years has often risen to the rank of a kind of "corypheus of historical thought" in Russia, also has an influence. The Russian president categorically does not approve of the way in which Khrushchev rethinks Stalin's legacy, nor of the decline in the role and prestige of the state security organs during his rule. At the same time, Putin uses Khrushchev, as well as his successor Leonid Brezhnev, as examples of Soviet leaders whose biographies are closely connected with Ukraine, which, according to his logic, should confirm the thesis of the "historical unity" of Russia and Ukraine.
Unlike Lenin or Stalin, the figure of Khrushchev generally does not cause sharp public discussions in Russia. A significant part of Russians treat him rather with indifference. If in the West, Khrushchev's controversial era is primarily associated with the Caribbean crisis of 1962, the "melting of the ice" and the cessation of mass repressions, then in Russia the focus of attention is on the topic of space - the launch of the world's first artificial satellite of the Earth in 1957 and the flight of Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, as shown by the studies of the "Levada" Center. Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes remains on the periphery of public interest.
Khrushchev's Secret Speech
Khrushchev's report of February 25, 1956 was the culmination of the 20th Congress of the CPSU. The session was closed, and no discussion of the speech was planned. The party leader's statement surprised the delegates, even shocked them, as is clear from eyewitness accounts.
First of all, Khrushchev aimed not so much to give impetus to a process of consistent de-Stalinization as to strengthen his own positions in the party, and thereby gain additional support in his battle with Stalin's former associates, which erupted after the death of the "leader". That is why he focused on the cult of personality and Stalin's crimes, paying special attention to the repressions against party cadres in the 1930s - the years of the "purges" in the Secular Union.
Khrushchev also touches on the deportations of peoples accused of Nazi sympathies or collaboration with them - Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and others. He also does not ignore the political campaign of late Stalinism, which became known as the "Doctors' Conspiracy" of 1952. This part of the report is deliberately selective: in order to respond to the political expediency of the time, Khrushchev, while listing the deported peoples, omits the Russian Germans and the Crimean Tatars, and also keeps silent about the anti-Semitic nature of the "Doctors' Conspiracy".
A similar trend can be observed with regard to the crimes in which Khrushchev himself was involved during the years in which he led the party organizations in Moscow and Ukraine: they were either omitted, or his role in them was downplayed. The tragedy of the Holodomor in Ukraine in the early 1930s was deliberately omitted so as not to cast a shadow on the collectivization of agriculture and complicate Ukraine's relations with Moscow. However, Khrushchev did not manage to completely avoid the Ukrainian question: he accused Stalin of preparing the deportation of Ukrainians, who were supposed to follow the fate of other deported peoples. However, as the First Secretary noted, this never happened, because "there are too many of them and there is nowhere to send them".
Stalin's anti-Ukrainian sentiments are well known, but the thesis of his plans to deport Ukrainians remains controversial and is not supported by reliable sources. The Holodomor and Khrushchev's statements were subsequently used to fuel accusations of discrimination against Ukrainians in the USSR, which the Ukrainian diaspora in the West regularly leveled against the Kremlin. The current war, in which Moscow seeks to establish (or rather, restore) control over Ukraine, is often seen as a continuation of this policy. This is an additional, and perhaps the main, reason why the wide discussion of Khrushchev's secret report is not beneficial to the Kremlin.
Reactions to Nikita Khrushchev's report
Nikita Khrushchev's report, however, did not remain a secret for long. In the USSR, the text was not published until 1989, but as early as the spring of 1956 it was read at party meetings in factories, plants, and educational institutions. According to eyewitness accounts, the reactions were contradictory - from hope and relief to anger and denial. Khrushchev's speech marked the beginning of the "melting of the ice" and contributed to the final dismantling of the Stalinist Gulag system.
As early as 1956, the contents of the report became known in the West. An important role was played then by the Polish journalist Viktor Graevsky, who handed over the text he had to Israeli diplomats in Warsaw. One of the first Western leaders to become acquainted with the speech was then the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, to whom the sentence is attributed: "If this is not a forgery and not specially planted disinformation, believe me, in twenty years the Soviet Union will not exist".
His prediction did not come true, but from the point of view of subsequent events it becomes clear that Khrushchev's statement and the "melting of the ice" from the second half of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the ideological foundations of the Soviet system built by Stalin were significantly weakened.
For it to function successfully, it was necessary to "stagnation, everything brought to an extreme". This is how the writer Fedor Abramov, head of the Department of Soviet Literature at Leningrad State University, describes in his diary the reaction of those present to Khrushchev's report, which he delivered on March 7, 1956 in the university's assembly hall. They sat "like dead", there were neither shouts nor indignation. The report was accepted for information.
It was precisely this "stagnation" that Stalin relied on. The current Russian authorities, who prefer to remain silent about Khrushchev's speech, 70 years after it, seem to be counting on the same thing.