Seventy years ago, in late February 1956, the first secretary of the Communist Pary of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a “secret speech” at a closed session of the 20th Soviet Party Congress. In remarks lasting several hours before a hushed audience, Khrushchev condemned many of the abuses perpetrated by his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, especially against other Communists. This forceful denunciation of Stalinist repressions, selective though it was, could not help but indict some of Khrushchev’s erstwhile colleagues and subordinates as well as all the East European leaders who had been appointed under Stalin’s auspices and had faithfully adhered to Stalinist principles in their own countries. Chief among these was the head of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), Bolesław Bierut, who had led the Polish delegation to Moscow for the congress and was given the full text of Khrushchev’s secret speech right after the session. Bierut’s colleagues later recalled that he was “stunned” and “utterly devastated” by the speech. Its repercussions among Polish Communist leaders facilitated the worldwide distribution of a text that was supposed to have remained secret.
On Feb. 28, 1956, a few days after the Soviet Party Congress ended, four high-ranking Polish officials who had accompanied Bierut to Moscow — Jerzy Morawski, Jakub Berman, Józef Cyrankiewicz, and Aleksander Zawadzki — presented to the PZPR Politburo a detailed account of Khrushchev’s secret speech. After receiving this information and discussing its implications, the Politburo decided to convene a meeting of central party activists in Warsaw on March 3-4 to tell them about the speech, gauge their reactions, and address any questions they might raise. When the gathering of activists opened, Morawski spoke at length about Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin, trying to play down the implications for the PZPR. But as soon as he finished, he and his Politburo colleagues were forced to reply to heated questions from the floor and to defend the Polish regime’s own policies as best they could against a torrent of criticism and complaints.
This initial meeting was followed three days later by a larger gathering in Warsaw of PZPR activists, who voiced harsh comments about Bierut's reign and the continued presence of Stalinists in the PZPR Politburo and Secretariat. The full text of Khrushchev's secret speech had not yet been formally circulated within the PZPR (distribution of it was not authorized until two weeks later), but so much of it had been disclosed by this point that the mere mention of it sparked a barrage of anti-Bierut comments. Bierut himself had fallen gravely ill during the Soviet Party Congress and had stayed in Moscow afterward to try to recover. He kept in close touch by phone with officials in Warsaw and thus knew that his authority in Poland was rapidly ebbing, but he was incapable of responding from afar. On March 12 he suddenly died, apparently of heart failure and pneumonia, which may have been worsened by the acute emotional stress he was under. His unexpected death, after nearly eight years of iron-fisted rule, gave a powerful fillip to the process of de-Stalinization in Poland and greatly eroded the positions of those who had supported his rigid dictatorship.
Until Bierut’s death was officially announced on March 13, the large majority of Poles had been unaware that he was ill or even that he was still in Moscow. The abrupt announcement that he had died in the Soviet capital therefore caused a huge stir and an air of excitement in Polish society. Within a day or two, the internal security forces in almost every region of Poland reported finding large quantities of “anti-Communist and anti-Soviet leaflets” that castigated Bierut (often in extremely insulting and obscene terms), expressed delight that he was dead, and disparaged the Polish Communist regime as a “Russian-dominated government.” Graffiti of a similar nature appeared on subway cars and the outer walls of buildings in Warsaw, particularly at Warsaw University, and also on the walls of public buildings and buses in many other large Polish cities.
Rumors quickly spread in Poland that Bierut had been “fatally poisoned by Soviet secret police agents at the behest of the CPSU leadership.” Many of the rumors were promulgated (or at least fueled) by local PZPR officials, who openly declared that “comrade Bierut was murdered on orders from the CPSU after the 20th Congress when it became inconvenient to have him around any longer.” There was no concrete evidence to support any of these claims, but the fact that many Poles were willing, on the one hand, to condemn Bierut and, on the other, to accept the allegations that he was murdered by the USSR is indicative of how rapidly Poland’s political climate was changing in the immediate aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech and Bierut’s death.
Bierut’s successor as head of the PZPR, Edward Ochab, sought to disseminate Khrushchev’s secret speech much more widely in Poland than was done in other Communist countries. He approved the suggestion by Stefan Staszewski, the reform-minded first secretary of the PZPR’s Warsaw committee, that party leaders should permit and indeed encourage rank-and-file members to study the secret speech and think about its implications for Poland. On March 21, 1956, the day after Ochab formally took office, the PZPR Secretariat (which he chaired) endorsed his proposal to distribute both the Russian text of the secret speech and a full Polish translation. Initially, the leaders of the PZPR gave out only a small number of copies of the two documents to the heads of regional and local party organizations around the country, who were instructed to read the translated text aloud at select gatherings of party members and to keep track of the questions and comments from the audience. The lively discussions that ensued in Poland over the next several days generated such widespread interest and curiosity that Ochab and his colleagues sensed the need to expand the dissemination of the speech in order to prevent “unfounded and malicious rumors” about its contents from arising. On March 27, at Ochab’s behest, the PZPR Secretariat authorized much wider distribution of the secret speech, ordering regional and local party organizations throughout Poland to “conduct public meetings in both urban and rural areas” and to “ensure that the participants are fully apprised of [Khrushchev’s] report on ‘the cult of personality and its consequences.’”
The decision to make such a large increase in the dissemination of Khrushchev’s speech was driven in part by circumstances beyond the PZPR’s control. Starting in mid-March 1956, right after the first revelations about the speech appeared in the Western press (via short summaries provided to Western diplomats and journalists by a participant in one of the CPSU’s initial briefings), Poles were able to listen to increasingly detailed summaries of the speech on the Polish service of Voice of America (VOA), on Radio Free Europe (RFE), and on other Western short-wave radio stations.
These “forbidden” broadcasts proved exceedingly popular. By mid- to late March, local and regional party officials in Poland were expressing “grave concern” about the “vast number of workers [who] are tuning in to bourgeois radio stations in order to hear the repeated broadcasts of N. S. Khrushchev’s [secret speech], as well as the malevolent commentaries about it.” The first secretary of the PZPR committee in Szczecin, Józef Kisielewski, reported in late March that “workers in Szczecin on many occasions over the past three to four weeks have been gathering en masse to listen to [coverage of Khrushchev’s speech] on bourgeois radio stations, and afterward they have continued talking about the speech in an unsavory and blatantly hostile manner, with distinctly anti-Soviet overtones.” The head of the PZPR department that oversaw the mass media, Tadeusz Goliński, acknowledged that “people everywhere in Poland are listening to Voice of America. Jamming it is pointless because Poles always find some way to tune in.”
Goliński, Kisielewski, and other senior Polish officials argued that the only way to offset the VOA and RFE broadcasts was by expanding, rather than curbing, the PZPR’s own dissemination of the speech: “If we do not convey this information to the people ourselves, the enemy will gladly do it for us… People throughout the country, even those who are not enemies [of the PZPR], will end up listening to Voice of America if we fail to tell them the truth or if we delay in telling it.” Citing the experience in Szczecin, Kisielewski emphasized that “unless we increase the distribution of N. S. Khrushchev’s report, we will never be able to dissuade workers from listening to it on bourgeois radio stations.” He warned that a failure to act on this matter “as soon as possible” would exacerbate the “virulently anti-Soviet” and “anti-socialist” sentiments that had been proliferating “at an alarming rate” in Szczecin and other cities over the previous few months.
The pleas from Kisielewski, Goliński, and other high-ranking party officials spurred the PZPR Secretariat to adopt its resolution on March 27 increasing the distribution of Khrushchev’s speech — a step that Polish leaders hoped would undercut (or at least mitigate) the influence and popularity of the VOA and RFE broadcasts. Some 3,000 additional copies of the secret speech were officially printed in Warsaw, and another 15,000 to 20,000 “unofficial” copies were produced at Staszewski’s initiative. Many of the unofficial copies (and even some of the official ones) were distributed outside the PZPR as well as to party members, resulting in a vast increase in the circulation of the speech throughout Polish society. By early April, copies of the speech were even reportedly on sale at Warsaw’s Różycki market, where they were quickly bought up.
As the number of PZPR members and ordinary Poles who learned about the speech grew exponentially in late March and early April, political ferment in Poland steadily increased, causing some Polish officials to worry that the situation might soon spin out of control. Although the PZPR Secretariat took steps in mid-April to curtail official dissemination of the speech, these efforts were much too limited and belated to stem the surge of political unrest. Even in the unlikely event that distribution of the speech through official channels could have been halted immediately (which it was not), such a step would have been purely cosmetic unless the Polish authorities could also have tracked down and confiscated the many thousands of illicit copies and blocked all the VOA and RFE broadcasts — a task that proved impossible. The secret speech from then on was secret only in name. Khrushchev’s remarks were not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1989, but events in Poland in 1956 had ensured that the text had become known around the world 33 years earlier.
Director, Cold War Studies Project, Davis Center
