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When Stalin died in 1953, he was far gone in paranoia, convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors was trying to poison him. Only after shooting Stalin's reptilian police chief, Lavrenty Beria, did the Kremlin survivors, notably the new Communist Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, try to shift to a new policy known as "the thaw." In a four-hour speech before the 20th Party Congress, supposedly secret but widely leaked, Khrushchev described to the faithful for the first time the full range of Stalin's crimes. ("But where were you during all those years?" one listener asked Khrushchev, according to a joke at the , time. "Who said that?" shouted Khrushchev, who had been one of Stalin's commissars in the Ukraine. Silence. "That's where I was," said Khrushchev.)
That same year, 1956, the thaw melted too quickly as far as the Kremlin was concerned. Polish crowds demonstrated to demand a change of leadership. The Hungarians even overthrew their government and enjoyed one heady week of independence. Then Khrushchev sent in Soviet tanks to restore the old order. When he was forced out in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev seemed even more determined to maintain that old order forever, sending more tanks to suppress Czech independence in 1968 and warning that he would do so again whenever necessary. He too proclaimed a new constitution in 1977, declaring more strongly than ever that the Communist Party was "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society."
It sometimes seemed that the tank-backed Communist Party monolith was now immovable, impenetrable, even immortal. But Brezhnev died, and so did his two successors, and the unthinkable idea of Communists actually surrendering power slowly began to become thinkable.
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