feb 25, 1956 - Khrushchev makes his "on the cult of personality and its consequences" speech to the congress of the communist party

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"Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party by candidly cataloguing, and then denouncing Stalin’s crimes….he did so with a view preserving communism: reform could only take place by acknowledging error. “I was obliged to tell the truth about the past” he later recalled, “whatever the risks to me”…But the system he was trying to preserve had itself been based, since the time of Marx and Engles, on the claim to be error-free. That was what it meant to have discovered the engine that drove history forward. A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption. The problems Khrushchev created for himself and for the international communist movement therefore began almost from the moment he finished speaking. One was simple shock…The Polish party leader, Boleslaw Beirut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died." (Gaddis 2006, p. 107-108)

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