Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [303]
Releases began, although for the next year and a half, they would proceed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Those who had completed two-thirds of their sentences were sometimes let go, without explanation or rehabilitation. Others were kept inside the camps, for no reason at all. Despite everything they knew about the camps’ unprofitability, Gulag officials were unwilling to close them. They needed, it seemed, an extra jolt from above.
Then, in February 1956, the jolt arrived, when Khrushchev gave what came to be known as his “secret speech,” delivering it to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party. For the first time, Khrushchev openly attacked Stalin and the “cult of personality” that had surrounded him:
It is impermissible, and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years.8
Much of the rest of the speech was tendentious. Listing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev focused almost exclusively on the victims of 1937 and 1938, singling out the ninety-eight Central Committee members who were shot, as well as a handful of Old Bolsheviks. “The wave of mass arrests began to recede in 1939,” he declared—which was a patent falsehood, as in fact the numbers of prisoners increased in the 1940s. He did mention the Chechen and the Balkan deportations, perhaps because he had no hand in them. He did not mention collectivization, or the Ukrainian famine, or the mass repressions in western Ukraine and the Baltic States, perhaps because he had himself been involved in these operations. He spoke of 7,679 rehabilitations, and although those in the hall applauded him, this was in fact quite a small percentage of the millions whom Khrushchev knew had been falsely arrested. 9
Flawed though it might have been, the speech—soon transmitted, also in secrecy, to Party cells all over the country—shook the Soviet Union to its core. Never before had the Soviet leadership confessed to any crimes, let alone such a broad range of them. Even Khrushchev was uncertain what the reaction would be. “We were just coming out of a state of shock,” he wrote later. “People were still in prisons and in the camps, and we didn’t know how to explain what had happened to them or what to do with them once they were free.”10
The speech galvanized the MVD, the KGB, and the administrators of the camps. Within weeks, the atmosphere in the camps lightened further, and the process of release and rehabilitation finally began to speed up. If 7,000-odd people had been rehabilitated in the three years preceding the secret speech, 617,000 were rehabilitated in the ten months that followed it. New mechanisms were created to speed the process further. Ironically, many of the prisoners who had been sentenced by troikas were now released by troikas as well. Commissions composed of three people—a prosecutor, a Central Committee member, and a rehabilitated Party member, often an ex-prisoner—traveled to camps and places of exile all over the country. They were empowered to conduct fast investigations into individual cases, to conduct interviews with prisoners, and to release them on the spot.11
In the months that followed the secret speech, the MVD also prepared to make much deeper changes to the structure of the camps themselves. In April, the new Interior Minister, N. P. Dudorov, sent a proposal for the reorganization of the camps to the Central Committee. The situation in the camps and colonies, he wrote, “has been abysmal for many years now.” They should be closed,