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Home from his foreign exploits, Khrushchev began preparing for his major triumph as First Secretary: dominating his first party congress. His 47,000-word speech was loaded with tables of production, learned quotes from Lenin, and exhortations to efficiency and greater production. It sounded like (and might easily have been) a rehash of one of Stalin's old speeches. In Stalin's mighty fashion, Khrushchev took lofty cracks at top party comrades, referred to Malenkov as an "incorrigible braggart," and told how it had been "necessary to correct" Molotov on an important ideological point.
It was the attitude of a man who undoubtedly considered himself Stalin's legitimate heir. But crafty little Anastas Mikoyan, the Armenian trader, had been chosen to deliver a speech (obviously approved by others in the leadership) which snatched the rug out from under Nikita's big feet. Mikoyan attacked Stalin's Short Course of the History of the Party, for years the ideological basis of all such Communists as Khrushchev. He dismissed Stalin's phony account of the civil war and talked of "party leaders of that time who were wrongly declared to have been enemies of the people." Adding insult to injury, Mikoyan named Khrushchev's liquidated predecessor Kossior as one such and asserted, to the sound of laughter, that "Ukrainian historians will be found who will write a history of the emergence and development of the Ukrainian socialist state better than some Moscow historians." The speech, opening up the whole case against Stalin, and by indirection the complicity of his associates, was a sensation.
For two days it was withheld from print. Then, as the 20th congress ended, Khrushchev called his famous secret meeting in which he tearfully blabbed the whole story of Stalin's mass murders, torturings and evil motives. Nikita's reasons could be deduced: if the party was going to open that one up, he was going to be chief opener. If they intended to pin a guilt label to him, he would show that they were all equally guilty. By twice indicating in his speech that Georgy Malenkov was Stalin's most trusted collaborator, he wanted to make certain that Malenkov (whom Muscovites now somewhat affectionately call Georgy Neudachnik—Georgy the Unsuccessful) came in for his share of guilt.
Leaked to the world press and foreign diplomats at a French embassy party (attended by Mikoyan), the story exploded on the foreign Communist Parties and rebounded in the Soviet Union with atomic force. In Soviet newspapers it was the signal for an intense campaign against "the cult of personality." Ostensibly the campaign was directed against the dead Stalin, and busts of the dictator began falling all over the land. But it was also a warning to Khrushchev. The subsequent acknowledgment of Stalin's anti-Semitism was also a reminder of Khrushchev's work in the Ukraine. As the Central Committee began rehabilitating liquidated Red army officers, Nikita's chosen partner Bulganin suffered a severe loss of prestige. Marshal Zhukov, who had been downgraded (and all but liquidated) by top military commissar Bulganin at the high point of his great wartime victories, had an old score to settle.