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37-536: Stalin Monument may refer to: Stalin Monument (Budapest) Stalin Monument (The Hague) Stalin Monument (Prague) See also [ edit ] List of statues of Stalin Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Stalin Monument . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

74-563: A formal end on 24 February 1956, when word was spread to delegates to return to the Great Hall of the Kremlin for an additional "closed session" to which journalists, guests and delegates from "fraternal parties" from outside the Soviet Union were not invited. Special passes were issued to those eligible to participate, with an additional 100 former party members, who had been recently released from

111-407: A maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the [allegedly] most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma

148-466: A thick steel rope around the neck of the 25-metre tall Stalin's statue while other people, arriving in trucks with oxygen cylinders and metal cutting blowpipes, were setting to work on the statue's bronze shoes. ... An hour later the statue fell down from its pedestal." The site of the former Stalin Monument is now occupied by the Monument of the 1956 Revolution , completed in 2006 for the 50th anniversary of

185-730: The Pospelov Commission , arranged at the session of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee on 31 January 1955. The direct goal of the commission was to investigate the repressions of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934. The 17th Congress was selected for investigations because it was known as "the Congress of Victors" in the country of "victorious socialism" and so

222-486: The Workers' Party of Korea attempted to remove Chairman Kim Il Sung , criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, developing a personality cult, distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's leadership. Former First Secretary of

259-647: The government and the figure of Stalin. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia , Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. In the West, the speech politically devastated organised communists; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication. The speech

296-527: The CIA chief, Allen Dulles , who quickly informed US President Dwight D. Eisenhower . After determining that the speech was authentic, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June. "...the speech, never published in the U.S.S.R., was of great importance for the Free World . Eventually the text was found – but many miles from Moscow, where it had been delivered. ... I have always viewed this as one of

333-551: The CPSU Former Premier of the Soviet Union Domestic policy Khrushchev Thaw Foreign policy Catchphrases and incidents [REDACTED] The issue of mass repressions was known to Soviet leaders well before the speech. The speech itself was prepared based on the results of a special party commission (chairman Pyotr Pospelov , P. T. Komarov, Averky Aristov , and Nikolai Shvernik ), known as

370-565: The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences ( Russian : «О культе личности и его последствиях» , romanized :  “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh” ), popularly known as the Secret Speech ( Russian : секретный доклад Хрущёва , romanized :  sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva ), was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev , First Secretary of the Communist Party of

407-558: The Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences", which served as the party's official and public pronouncement on the Stalin era. Written under the guidance of Mikhail Suslov , it did not mention Khrushchev's specific allegations. "Complaining that Western political circles were exploiting the revelation of Stalin's crimes, the resolution paid tribute to [Stalin's] services" and was relatively guarded in its criticisms of him. Khrushchev's speech

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444-565: The Poles who had just gained political reform during the Polish October . The Hungarians broadcast sixteen demands over the radio, one of them being the dismantling of Stalin's statue. A hundred thousand Hungarian revolutionaries demolished the Stalin statue, leaving only his boots, in which they planted a Hungarian flag. The bronze inscribed name of the Hungarians' leader, teacher and "best friend"

481-455: The Soviet Union , made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Khrushchev's speech was sharply critical of the rule of the deceased General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin , particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for

518-590: The Soviet prison camp network, added to the assembly to add moral effect. Premier Nikolai Bulganin , chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union and then an ally of Khrushchev, called the session to order and immediately yielded the floor to Khrushchev, who began his speech shortly after midnight on 25 February. For the next four hours, Khrushchev delivered "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" before stunned delegates. Several people became ill during

555-690: The Twentieth Congress, arrangements were made to resolve the ills of Stalin's dictatorship. Thus, such criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress was deliberate. Western historians also tended to take a somewhat critical view of the speech. J. Arch Getty commented in 1985 that "Khrushchev's revelations [...] are almost entirely self-serving. It is hard to avoid the impression that the revelations had political purposes in Khrushchev's struggle with Molotov , Malenkov , and Kaganovich ". The historian Geoffrey Roberts said Khrushchev's speech became "one of

592-587: The cult of personality surrounding figures like Vladimir Lenin , Stalin and other Eastern European Communist leaders. Stalin statues sprang up everywhere in Eastern Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were cult objects that demonstrated the almost mystical powers of Stalin. Upon the completion of the Stalin statue, a journalist in Budapest said: Stalin was with us earlier; now he will be with us even more. He will watch over our work, and his smile will show us

629-643: The document and sent them to Israel. By the afternoon of 13 April 1956, the Shin Bet in Israel had received the photographs. Israeli intelligence and United States intelligence had secretly agreed previously to co-operate on security matters. The photographs were delivered to James Jesus Angleton , the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) head of counterintelligence, and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. On 17 April 1956, they reached

666-535: The edge of Városliget , the city park of Budapest . The large monument stood 25 metres tall in total. The bronze statue stood eight metres high on a four-metre high limestone base on top of a tribune eighteen metres wide. Stalin was portrayed as a speaker, standing tall and rigid with his right hand at his chest. The sides of the tribune were decorated with relief sculptures depicting the Hungarian people welcoming their leader. The Hungarian sculptor, Sándor Mikus , created

703-458: The enormous number of "enemies" among the participants demanded explanation. The commission presented evidence that in 1937 and 1938 (the peak of the period known as the Great Purge ), over one-and-a-half million individuals, the majority being long-time CPSU members, were arrested for "anti-Soviet activities", of whom over 680,500 were executed. The public session of the 20th Congress had come to

740-508: The historic event. A life-sized representation of the Stalin Monument was built in Budapest's Statue Park with the broken bronze boots on top of the pedestal in 2006. This is not an accurate copy of the original but only an artistic recreation by sculptor Ákos Eleőd . 47°30′41″N 19°04′53″E  /  47.5114°N 19.0814°E  / 47.5114; 19.0814 On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences On

777-559: The ideals of communism . The speech was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet , which received it from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski. The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock with all of Khrushchev's accusations and defamations against

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814-410: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stalin_Monument&oldid=895723740 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Stalin Monument (Budapest) The monument was erected on

851-707: The major coups of my tour of duty in intelligence." While Khrushchev was not hesitant to point out the flaws in Stalinist practice in regard to the purges of the army and party and the management of the Great Patriotic War , the Soviet Union's involvement in World War II , he was very careful to avoid any criticism of Stalin's industrialization policy or party ideology. Khrushchev was a staunch party man and lauded Leninism and communist ideology in his speech as often as he condemned Stalin's actions. Stalin, Khrushchev argued,

888-521: The prepared text of the Khrushchev speech, which was treated as a top secret state document. On 1 March, the text of the Khrushchev speech was distributed in printed form to senior Central Committee functionaries. That was followed, on 5 March, by a reduction of the document's secrecy classification from "Top Secret" to "Not for Publication". The Party Central Committee ordered that Khrushchev's Report be read at all gatherings of Communist and Komsomol local units, with non-party activists invited to attend

925-437: The proceedings. Therefore, the "Secret Speech" was read publicly at thousands of meetings, making the colloquial name of the document something of a misnomer. The full text was officially published in the Soviet press in 1989. Shortly after the conclusion of the speech, reports of its delivery, and its general content, were conveyed to the West by Reuters journalist John Rettie , after a Soviet acquaintance briefed him about

962-585: The speech a few hours before Rettie left for Stockholm on holiday. It was therefore reported in Western media in early March. Rettie came to believe the information came from Khrushchev himself, via the intermediary. The content of the speech reached the West through a circuitous route. A few copies of the speech were sent by order of the Soviet Politburo to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Shortly after

999-447: The speech and, as a journalist, was interested in reading it. Baranowska allowed him to take the document home to read. As it happened, Grajewski had made a recent trip to Israel to visit his sick father, and resolved to emigrate there. After he read the speech, he decided to take it to the Israeli embassy, and gave it to Yaakov Barmor, who had helped Grajewski undertake his trip. Barmor, a Shin Bet representative, took photographs of

1036-529: The speech had been disseminated, a Polish-Jewish journalist, Wiktor Grajewski, visited his girlfriend, Łucja Baranowska, who worked as a junior secretary in the office of the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party , Edward Ochab . On her desk was a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: "The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev". Grajewski had heard rumours of

1073-440: The speech offered no clue whatever. All that was certain was that the Soviet system and the party itself remained impeccably pure and bore no responsibility for the tyrant's atrocities. Bangladeshi historian A. M. Amzad commented on the speech: It (the speech) was an undesirable, uncalled for and irresponsible act in terms of the ideology of the Soviet Union. It was designed to determine Khrushchev's political fate. Even before

1110-503: The statue and was awarded the Kossuth Prize , the highest distinction that can be attained by a Hungarian artist. The Stalin monument was built during the classical period of socialist realism , the official art of Stalinism, which was a tool to instill the ideology of the Party into the people. This realistic and didactic aesthetic style celebrated the hard working proletariat and especially

1147-451: The tense report and had to be removed from the hall. Khrushchev read from a prepared report, and no stenographic record of the closed session was kept. No questions or debate followed Khrushchev's presentation and delegates left the hall in a state of acute disorientation. The same evening, the delegates of foreign communist parties were called to the Kremlin and given the opportunity to read

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1184-597: The way. I have been told that in Moscow it is customary to pay a visit to Comrade Lenin in Red Square before beginning, or after finishing, an important task, either to report or to ask his advice. Undoubtedly the same will occur here with the statue of Comrade Stalin. The monument not only demonstrated Stalin's power, but the power of the Hungarian Working People's Party as well. Directly across from Stalin's monument

1221-501: Was MÉMOSZ, the house of the builder's union, condemned for its modernist architecture influenced by the West. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Socialist Realism went into decline, in connection with the political changes initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , when he denounced Stalin's cult of personality . On October 23, 1956, around two hundred thousand Hungarians gathered in Budapest to demonstrate in sympathy for

1258-534: Was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong ) and Albania (under First Secretary Enver Hoxha ), who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist . In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin. In North Korea , factions of

1295-579: Was followed by a period of liberalization, known as the Khrushchev Thaw , into the early 1960s. In 1961, the body of Stalin was removed from public view in Lenin's mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis . Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski criticized Khrushchev in 1978 for failing to make any analysis of the system Stalin presided over, stating: Stalin had simply been a criminal and

1332-458: Was ripped off from the pedestal. Before the toppling of the statue, someone had placed a sign over Stalin's mouth that read "RUSSIANS, WHEN YOU RUN AWAY DON'T LEAVE ME BEHIND!" The revolutionaries chanted "Russia go home!" while pulling down the statue. " W.C. " and other insulting remarks were scrawled over the fragmented parts of the statue. The account of the incident by Sándor Kopácsi , head of Budapest's police: "[The demonstrators] placed ...

1369-482: Was the primary victim of the deleterious effect of the cult of personality, which, through his existing flaws, had transformed him from a crucial part of the victories of Lenin into a paranoiac man who was easily influenced by the "rabid enemy of our party", Lavrentiy Beria . The basic structure of the speech was as follows: On 30 June 1956, the Central Committee of the party issued a resolution, "On Overcoming

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