Gulag

By this time, the upper echelons of the Soviet elite had also begun to conduct a wider debate about Stalinist justice. In early 1954, Khrushchev had ordered, and received, a report detailing how many prisoners had been accused of counter-revolutionary crimes since 1921, as well as an account of how many were still imprisoned. The numbers were by definition incomplete, since they did not include the millions sent into exile, those unjustly accused of technically nonpolitical crimes, those tried in ordinary courts, and those never tried at all. Still, given that these figures represent numbers of people who had been killed or sent to prison for no reason at all, they are shockingly high. By the MVD’s own count, 3,777,380 people had been found “guilty” of fomenting counter-revolution by the OGPU collegiums, the NKVD troikas, the Special Commissions, and all of the military collegiums and tribunals that had mass-produced sentences throughout the previous three decades. Of these, 2,369,220 had been sent to camps, 765,180 had been sent into exile, and 642,980 had been executed.⁶

A few days later, the Central Committee undertook to re-examine all of these cases—as well as the cases of the “repeaters,” those prisoners who had been sentenced to a second term of exile in 1948. Khrushchev set up a national committee, led by the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, to oversee the task. He also set up local committees in every republic and region of the country to review prisoners’ sentences. Some politicals were released at this time, although their original sentences were not yet annulled: real rehabilitation—the state’s admission that a mistake had been made—would come later.⁷

Releases began, although for the next year and a half, they would proceed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Those who had completed two-thirds of their sentences were sometimes let go, without explanation or rehabilitation. Others were kept inside the camps, for no reason at all. Despite everything they knew about the camps’ unprofitability, Gulag officials were unwilling to close them. They needed, it seemed, an extra jolt from above.

Then, in February 1956, the jolt arrived, when Khrushchev gave what came to be known as his “secret speech,” delivering it to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party. For the first time, Khrushchev openly attacked Stalin and the “cult of personality” that had surrounded him:

It is impermissible, and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years.⁸

Much of the rest of the speech was tendentious. Listing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev focused almost exclusively on the victims of 1937 and 1938, singling out the ninety-eight Central Committee members who were shot, as well as a handful of Old Bolsheviks. “The wave of mass arrests began to recede in 1939,” he declared—which was a patent falsehood, as in fact the numbers of prisoners increased in the 1940s. He did mention the Chechen and the Balkan deportations, perhaps because he had no hand in them. He did not mention collectivization, or the Ukrainian famine, or the mass repressions in western Ukraine and the Baltic States, perhaps because he had himself been involved in these operations. He spoke of 7,679 rehabilitations, and although those in the hall applauded him, this was in fact quite a small percentage of the millions whom Khrushchev knew had been falsely arrested. ⁹

Flawed though it might have been, the speech—soon transmitted, also in secrecy, to Party cells all over the country—shook the Soviet Union to its core. Never before had the Soviet leadership confessed to any crimes, let alone such a broad range of them. Even Khrushchev was uncertain what the reaction would be. “We were just coming out of a state of shock,” he wrote later. “People were still in prisons and in the camps, and we didn’t know how to explain what had happened to them or what to do with them once they were free.”¹⁰