Khrushchev Revelations

KHRUSHCHEV REVELATIONS. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s American radicalism was dominated, in declining measure, by the Communist Party. At top strength, before the Nazi-Soviet Pact in mid-1939, the Party and its youth division numbered nearly 100,000. It had, as well, several hundred thousand sympathizers, and millions belonged to organizations with Communists among the leaders. All other radical groups combined then numbered a few thousand.

When the Cold War and the accompanying anticommunist hysteria hit high gear in 1948, Communist membership was still sixty-thousand. But by early 1956, when Khrushchev delivered his secret report on Stalin’s crimes to the Soviet’s Twentieth Communist Party Congress, membership had fallen to twenty-thousand, a two-thirds drop. This, however, was still several times greater than that of any other socialist group. Khrushchev’s revelations had their principal impact on this residual Party membership. It was a devastating one.

Two fundamental developments caused the decline in membership and influence: the anticommunist hysteria accompanying the Cold War, and the sectarian policies following replacement of Earl Browder with William Z. Foster as Party leader in 1945. The Party’s postwar policies reinforced the isolation imposed upon it by the witch-hunts.

Persecution of Communists expanded rapidly with the arrest of Party leaders under the Smith Act in 1948, and membership began to drop steadily. Around 1953 Party activists began to reexamine the assumptions and policies that had mired it in isolation. The return, early in 1956, to active political life of the leaders jailed under the Smith Act in 1951 gave impetus to this reexamination process. And in April 1956 the first national committee meeting in five years discussed major new directions.

Khrushchev’s secret report, delivered in February, was yet unknown to the Americans in April. A summary received from abroad was read to the national committee and the result was shock. These devoted Communists who had dedicated their lives for decades in pursuit of a better society, and had rejected as impossible the widespread reports of Stalin’s dreadful brutalities, were now confronted with the truth from a source they could not question. At issue was not only Stalin’s paranoia, but the nature of the system that had permitted it.

The immediate consequence was to intensify the internal struggle concerning the extent and direction of Party change. The revelations, by shifting the emphasis of debate to Stalin and the Soviet Union, tended to undercut the independent overall self-examination that, it was hoped, would help to restore the Party’s viability. While most leaders remained in the effort to seek change, a membership exodus did set in and those who left were among the supporters of change. Thus, while the Party convention in February 1957 approved sweeping changes, their advocates proved too powerless to make them stick, as members continued to depart in the face of the revelations and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. By 1958, the Party was back in the grip of the sectarians. All others had left; the changes were reversed.

The New Left of the 1960s rose largely out of the void created by the essential disintegration of the Party. Many thousands of ex-Communists continued to function actively, however, in the peace, civil rights, labor, political, and other popular movements. Some joined democratic socialist organizations built in the 1970s, following the disintegration of the New Left.

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Richmond, Al. A Long View from the Left. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Starobin, Joseph. American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

“Khrushchev's Secret Speech, 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,' Delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” February 25, 1956, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, From the Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 84th Congress, 2nd Session (May 22, 1956-June 11, 1956), C11, Part 7 (June 4, 1956), pp. 9389-9403. Wilson Center, Digital Archive.
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