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Ask Mr. Dulles. After three years, Khrushchev had not yet gained complete supremacy over Malenkov. In a bold gamble, he delivered a sensational 20,000-word speech before the Party Congress denouncing Stalin and his methods in mordant detail. Other members of the Presidium were opposed to Khrushchev's move. Fearfully they asked him, "What will we be able to say about our own roles under Stalin?" Khrushchev went ahead anyway. When he rose to speak, he recalls, "it was so quiet in the huge hall you could hear a fly buzzing. You must try to imagine how shocked people were by the revelations of the atrocities to which party members had been subjected." In preparing for the speech, says Khrushchev, he asked the state prosecutor to investigate whether the purge trials of the 1930s were founded on actual crimes. The reply he received: "From the standpoint of judicial norms, there was no evidence for condemning or even trying these men."
The speech was never publicly confirmed, but it was later circulated to party committees throughout the Soviet Union and deliberately leaked to the Western press. Says Khrushchev, wryly referring to the man who directed the CIA at the time: "I remember when journalists would ask me, 'What can you tell us about this speech?' I used to say they'd have to direct their questions to Mr. [Allen] Dulles."