February 25, 1956

On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

Khrushchev delivers his closed-session denunciation of Stalin

The congress had formally finished. Soviet delegates were called back without their foreign comrades and told that 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to Stalin's 1934 congress had been arrested.

The session foreigners were not allowed to hear

At the final, closed session of the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress in the Great Kremlin Palace on 25 February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a long report to Soviet party delegates. Foreign Communist delegations and journalists were excluded.

He condemned Stalin's personality cult, the destruction of collective leadership, fabricated accusations, torture, mass repression and violations of what he called socialist legality.

For evidence he turned to the fate of the 17th Party Congress, telling the hall that 1,108 of its 1,966 delegates had been arrested on counterrevolutionary charges.

What the report left standing

The account was selective. It concentrated especially on Communist officials victimized after 1934, and defended Lenin and the Soviet system rather than offering a comprehensive reckoning with Stalinist violence.

The Pospelov Commission, whose archival investigation supplied important evidence for the report, had reported 1,548,366 arrests and 681,692 executions for 1937-1938.

Secret, then not

No stenographic record of the live session was kept, and the text that circulated afterward was edited following delivery, so it cannot be assumed to reproduce every spoken word.

Polish party leader Bolesław Bierut received the full text immediately after the session. In Poland roughly 3,000 further copies were printed officially in late March, and some 15,000 to 20,000 unofficially.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Sources variously describe the delivery as lasting roughly four or five hours and date its beginning either shortly after midnight on February 25 or to the night of February 24–25.
No stenographic record of the live session was kept. The circulated text was edited after delivery, so it cannot be assumed to reproduce every spoken word or audience reaction exactly.
Claims that Khrushchev deliberately engineered the Western leak remain an interpretation based partly on the suspected role of intermediaries; the surviving evidence does not make every step certain.