On the Personality Cult and its Consequences: Encyclopedia II - On the Personality Cult and its Consequences - Summary

On the Personality Cult and its Consequences - Summary

The basic structure of the speech was as follows:

• Repudiation of Stalin's personality cult
  • Quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, which denounced the "cult of an individual" (i.e. the cult of personality, see above)
  • Lenin's Testament and remarks by Nadezhda Krupskaya about Stalin's character
  • Before Stalin, the fight with the Trotskyists was purely ideological; Stalin introduced the notion of the "enemy of the people" to be used as "heavy artillery"
  • Stalin violated Party norms of collective leadership
    • Repression of the majority of Old Bolsheviks and delegates of the XVII Party Congress, most of which were workers and had joined the Communist Party before 1920. Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were declared "counter-revolutionaries", 848 were executed, and 98 of 139 members and candidates to the Central Committee were declared "enemies of the people".
    • After this repression, Stalin ceased to even consider the opinion of the collective.
  • Examples of repressions of some notable Bolsheviks are presented in detail
  • Stalin ordered that the persecution be enhanced: "NKVD is four years behind the schedule"
    • Practice of falsifications followed, to cope with "plans" for numbers of enemies to be uncovered.
  • Exaggerations of the role of Stalin in the Great Patriotic War (World War II)
  • Deportations of whole nationalities
  • Doctors' plot
  • Manifestations of personality cult: songs, city names, etc.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Summary", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki