IRL 14, March 1, 2010

URL; http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/25/newsid_2703000/2703581.stm

This is an article from the BBC telling about the day in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev made a speech telling the people of the Soviet Union what an atrocious leader Joseph Stalin was, and condemning some of his ways. This was the start of what was thought of as "de-stalinization" where Stalin's methods and ways of doing things were beginning to fade, and the Soviet Union was going to have a new start. The importance of this to what we are learning in class is that this speech by Khrushchev lead up to a few events that resulted in other Soviet-controlled countries such as Hungary and Poland, where the people saw Khrushchev as less controlling than Stalin, seizing an opportunity to start to do communism their own way in their respective countries. It states in the article that Khrushchev exposed Stalin for being a brutal leader, suggesting his involvement in Kirov's murder, condemning him for his behavior during the Purges, and accusing him of anti-Semitism among other things. This is all important because it represents a period of marked change in the Soviet Union and surrounding areas, where the people were being let go from Stalin's oppressive ways and other countries felt less threatened if they decided to break away from the Soviet model of communism. The main limitation of this source is that Khrushchev was not at any point directly quoted, so his exact words are not known, and the fact that his speech was given in Russian means that unless I find a translation, I will not know what he said from this article alone. However, the information here is both consistent with what we have studied in class and also useful, since it represents two things; a period of marked change, and the start of what would be an intensified Cold War in years to come.