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The Politician. In the two years after his appointment to the party secretaryship, Khrushchev went walking and talking among the Russian people. He bustled into collective farms, backed housing developments, condemned bureaucrats, fathered radical schemes to develop the "virgin lands" of Siberia, proposed growing U.S. corn, raising pigs, promised consumer goods without backing away from the committed heavy-industry program. Behaving like a democratic politician endowed with superabundant energy, tenacity, shrewdness and folksy wisdom, he won friends and began to make the Russians feel that indeed a new age had arrived. The buildup gave him a new standing. But among the people there was still a great suspicion of the old Stalinist gang.
Toward the end of 1955, the party, feeling its new authority and power as a political organization, was in a mood to take an apparently decisive step away from Stalinist autocracy and all it stood for. There were deep rumblings of anti-Stalinism in the newspapers. In February 1956, Khrushchev got up at the end of the 20th Party Congress and made his now famous, secret three-hour speech denouncing Stalin and all his works.
Read in retrospect the speech is a chilling indictment, not only of the dead Stalin as it was then seen, but of his living associates (with the exception of Mikoyan, who is portrayed in a favorable light). Malenkov's maneuverings to obtain permanent succession by liquidation are exposed in a language any party member can understand. It is broadly hinted that it was Malenkov, head of the "special sector," who guided the hand of the Arch-terrorist Yezhov during the 1937-38 purges. Adds Khrushchev: "Mass repressions grew tremendously from the end of 1936 after a telegram from Stalin [ordering that Yezhov get a free hand to step up the liquidations] was sent to Kaganovich and Molotov." The meaning is clear: Kaganovich and Molotov bear a special responsibility for the holocaust of 1936-38.
The Gang-Up. For any Communist leader who heard or read this speech, it was only a matter of time before Malenkov, Kaganovich and Molotov went the way of Beria. It is not surprising that the three men about to be jettisoned, different in all respects, should form some kind of alliance for their own protection. Murmurs of protest were heard from Molotov in Pravda, and Malenkov began maneuvering among his followers in the technocracy. Their big break was the revolt in Poland, followed by the Hungarian Revolution, both of which made Khrushchev look bad.