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This chapter describes the immediate de-Stalinization that occurred upon Stalin’s death. It then devotes separate sections to each of the primary elements of the new discourse of difference, and how they were articulated in different domains of Soviet society at the time.

This chapter argues that during the 1950s, Stalin's image continued to be manipulated, and even after the 22nd Congress, both in order to regulate de-Stalinization's unintended consequences and in order to instrumentalize the Stalin question to pursue domestic and foreign policy objectives, the latter dominated in the early 1960s by the worsening Sino-Soviet split and the abrupt rises and falls in Cold War tensions. The chapter explores the effects on commemoration of Stalin of the shift from anti-revisionism to ideological relaunch during the end of the Khrushchev era.

The Conclusion looks at the legacy of Stalin as it stands now. That post-Soviet leaders and citizens, as in other countries tackling traumatic pasts, continue to grapple with the same questions as previous leaders and citizens suggests that it was not only the Soviet limits on discussion that left de-Stalinization unresolved in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the decade and a half after Stalin's death witnessed a huge variety of approaches to remembering Stalinism. These lent the period its unique blend of hope and disillusionment about the post-Stalinist relaunch of the Soviet project itself.

This chapter addresses the role of cultural heritage in the drive to strengthen social solidarity and national unity in the ideologically unstable era of de-Stalinization. During the second, reconstitutive phase of de-Stalinization after 1961, the heritage of the Northwest played a strategic role in “imagining” the post-Stalin Soviet nation, a community founded on the political principles of socialist democracy, collectivism, and internationalism. The chapter shows how the creation of a touristic infrastructure in the region served as a means of exhibiting the heritage of the Northwest to the Soviet people. A key component in this enterprise is the body of touristic and kraevedenie materials focusing on the region's historic architecture. These texts reinforced a politically correct understanding of heritage as an integral part of Soviet modernity.

This chapter explores the evolution of the health resort vacation from medical treatment to an object of consumer desire. In the decades that bridged de-Stalinization and late socialism, vacationers increasingly valued holidays as commodities to be consumed for pleasure, satisfaction, and self-identification rather than for physical and mental recuperation. The state responded slowly to popular demand, however, most notably in its failure to provide adequate vacation opportunities for married couples and their children. This shortcoming revealed the contradictions between the traditional purpose of the Soviet vacation to provide medical recuperation for working adults and the growing demand by sophisticated Soviet consumers for family vacations as an entitlement of the Soviet good life.

Until the 1980s, postrevolutionary despotism ruled political life in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, contrary elements of the Russian tradition received a major impetus from the Russian intelligentsia. In both prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Russia, the intelligentsia played a critical role in reform. It was the principal constituency for reform under Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. In particular, the creative intelligentsia always enjoyed special influence in Russia, and their power was clearly recognized by the Communist authorities. A natural adversary of the critical intelligentsia was the bureaucracy of the Communist Party and state nomenklatura. Joseph Stalin's death resulted in “a great burst of renewal” in intellectual life. Khrushchev outmaneuvered Georgi Malenkov to succeed Stalin and proceeded with the groundwork for the Twentieth Congress in February 1956. The intelligentsia was not a prominent issue at the Twentieth Congress, but the de-Stalinization campaign had a stirring impact on intellectual life. Relatively speaking, the years 1959 to 1962 were a golden age for Soviet intellectuals.

This chapter examines the changes in Soviet-Polish cultural contacts during the immediate post-Stalin years of 1953–57. Stalin's death, “collective leadership,” and Khrushchev's ascendance to power offered new possibilities for reciprocal cultural relations and a more flexible Soviet approach in Poland. But the cautious de-Stalinization in the USSR together with the rapid Polish Thaw complicated the work of Soviet international outreach institutions. The new Soviet “hands-off” approach to East European affairs also meant that a number of institutions that hitherto had intervened in the cultural affairs of the Soviet Union's East European satellites were suddenly deprived of Moscow's support. Though many Soviet cultural outreach officials toyed with ingenious ideas about how to run these operations more effectively, the state of limbo negated their best efforts—and they were forced to leave.

This chapter views socialism as a mental world, following Albanian youths sent to the Soviet Union in the 1950s for training in literature, engineering, and architecture. These youths came to see themselves and others in similar socialist terms. The encounter with Moscow was awe-inspiring, but exposure to the socialist world could also be alienating. Such contradictory reactions find expression in the lives of two individuals: an aspiring architect shipped to Moscow to learn how to plan the socialist cities of the future, and a young writer sent on a scholarship to absorb the techniques of socialist realism. The chapter also shows how party-enforced “friendship propaganda” for the Soviet Union was meant to insert Albania into a genealogy of international socialism. This campaign came with rewritten history textbooks, mandatory Russian language courses, and a system of sanctions and rewards.

This chapter examines the wave of antireligious and atheist campaigns launched during the Khrushchev era, beginning with the Hundred Days campaign of 1954 and again in 1958 until Nikita Khrushchev's forced retirement in 1964. It explains why the Soviet state disrupted the postwar stability of church–state relations and again viewed religion as a problem, and why Khrushchev brought atheism back after it was cast aside by Joseph Stalin. The chapter discusses the Hundred Days campaign and its impact on Soviet religious life, Khrushchev's antireligious propaganda of 1958–1964, and the factors that led to the Soviet Communist Party's renewed offensive against religion, including anxiety about religious revival. It shows that Khrushchev's antireligious campaigns are part of his efforts to redefine the course of Soviet Communism after Stalin's death. For Khrushchev, political de-Stalinization, economic modernization, and ideological mobilization were all necessary to infuse revolutionary vitality back to the ideology of Marxism–Leninism.

This chapter assesses Khrushchev's reforms in the penal sphere. The reforms of the Khrushchev period had an important lasting effect on the Soviet penal system. This certainly holds true in terms of the Gulag's permanent reduction in size, but it also applies to the reorientation of Gulag aims and the resultant improved conditions experienced by its inmates. Although certain inmate privileges were reduced or eliminated in the early 1960s at the culmination of the “camp is not a resort” campaign, many of the most important prisoner-friendly reforms of the 1950s, such as parole and the eight-hour workday, remained. Despite certain continuities, therefore, the Gulag did not return to a state of unchecked (and even abetted) violence, grueling labor, and oppressive living conditions—the defining features of the Stalinist penal system. De-Stalinization in the penal sphere was a real and enduring legacy of the Khrushchev era.

This chapter looks at the succession struggle in Moscow and its effects on the environment in which substate leaders operated. It discusses the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 that unleashed a succession struggle and caused sweeping effects on the dynamics of regional rule. It also mentions the appearance of a new model of governance associated with Lavrentii Beria and adoption of reformist policies at the center. The chapter explains Nikita Khrushchev's assumption of power that inaugurated a decade long triumph of Soviet reformism along a number of policy dimensions. It also investigates reformist policies that had earlier been blocked by Stalin and grouped under the umbrella term “de-Stalinization.”

This chapter examines the changes that were made in Russia after Joseph Stalin's death. Within weeks of Stalin's death, the charges against the “murderer doctors” had been dropped, the use of torture had been outlawed, and the punitive authority of the security apparatus had been limited. Furthermore, the last remaining victims of the “Mingrelian Affair” were released from prison, and Solomon Mikhoels, the assassinated chairman of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, was rehabilitated posthumously. Despotism, the hallmark of Stalinism, would disappear from daily life, and fear and dread would no longer be the ruling standard. Nikita Khrushchev became the new party leader, Georgi Malenkov was made prime minister, Vyacheslav Molotov was allowed to return to his former post as foreign minister, and Stalin's executioner Lavrenty Beria assumed control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the state security apparatus. Throughout the years of de-Stalinization, it remained the great exception for any of the crimes against defenseless individuals to be prosecuted.

This chapter shows how minority activists took advantage of political de-Stalinization and the Thaw to advance national claims and interests. It recounts the 1950s, in which new grassroots movements emerged and challenged nationalizing policies and practices in the republics. It also illustrates the evolving political atmosphere in the USSR after Joseph Stalin's death and mentions minority activists that engaged in rights negotiations with the state and regained access to national rights lost in the 1930s. The chapter reviews the successes and failures of minority activists that expose the possibilities of the ongoing debates about the meaning and limits of Soviet constitutional guarantees of national equality and Leninist nationality politics. It discusses petitioning that is commonplace in Russian administrative and legal cultures before the Soviet period has long been a feature of historical analysis.

Following Stalin’s death, differences developed between Moscow and Beijing over the appropriate level of de-Stalinization. Mao welcomed a period of peace to concentrate on socialist industrialization, offering China the chance to expand ties with the newly independent countries and thereby countering US efforts to contain the PRC. At the Bandung conference of developing countries, Zhou Enlai demonstrated considerable diplomatic skill in reaching out to various countries—India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Cambodia—expanding PRC foreign ties beyond the socialist camp for the first time. A dialogue with the United States was launched to pry the United States away from Taiwan, but without success. A dialogue mechanism between Beijing and Washington was, however, established that served as the primary channel for communications until 1971.

Soviet-Chinese debates over de-Stalinization were linked to prescribed levels of investment in heavy industry versus consumer goods. Mao favored the former, Khrushchev the latter. Uprisings in Poland and Hungary in 1956 focused these differences: should popular discontent be addressed by improved living standards or by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Differences intensified in 1957 when Mao laid out his vision of global revolutionary offensive. Soviet leaders thought this risked nuclear war—fears Mao disparaged. Mao responded to Khrushchev’s boast of rapid economic advance by pledging an equally rapid Chinese economic advance, and the next year made good on that pledge by launching the Great Leap Forward. A race to communism had begun. Confrontation with the United States in the Taiwan Strait created the political atmosphere for full collectivization of agriculture that gave Beijing control over the harvest to fuel the hyperindustrialization campaign.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the ambivalence with which Lenin viewed the Jacobins is once again the reigning orthodoxy. As a result, the debate among Soviet historians over the relationship between the Jacobin dictatorship and the Thermidorian reaction to it, which began in the 1920s but was interrupted during the Stalin era, resumed. Most considered the downfall of the Jacobins the catalyst for economic changes that essentially reversed the Jacobins’ policies; several others, however, saw a ‘growing over’ in terms of policy from the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution to the Thermidorian one. But the debate did not shake the consensus that the revolution ended with the demise of the Jacobins in 1794, rather than with Napoleon’s coup five years later.