Was Stalinism made by one man or by the Soviet system?

The short answer

• The system depended on one man. Stalin had concentrated power so completely that his death removed the force holding the system’s extremes in place. His colleagues had approved and carried out his policies, but they had also feared him and privately doubted many of them. Once he was gone, no one had the authority or the wish to continue mass terror, and a collective leadership replaced personal rule within days, because none of his heirs could claim his authority.
• The Gulag had become too large and too costly. The camp system had grown so large that it cost more than it produced: by 1953 the camps held about 2.5 million prisoners and the special settlements about 2.7 million more. Gulag officials and economic ministers knew that forced labour was unproductive and expensive to guard, and Beria himself proposed cutting it. Releasing prisoners and ending giant projects such as the Arctic railway from Salekhard to Igarka saved money as well as easing fear.
• Prisoners and borderlands had stopped being afraid. Many of the political prisoners of the 1950s were former soldiers and partisans who had fought and were used to organising. Concentrated in special camps, they formed networks across national lines and refused to work when the amnesty passed them by. Their strikes forced the authorities to choose between massacres and reforms; Kengir was crushed by tanks in June 1954, but elsewhere the leadership mostly chose reforms, which showed that the camps could no longer be run by fear alone.
• Stalin’s heirs needed a new legitimacy. Khrushchev and his colleagues had to explain why the system they ran had killed so many loyal communists. Blaming Stalin personally, and dating the crimes from 1934, allowed them to condemn the Terror while keeping the party, collectivisation and the planned economy. The Secret Speech also helped Khrushchev against rivals such as Molotov and Malenkov, who were more closely tied to the worst years, so condemning Stalin served Khrushchev’s own climb as well as the party’s need for a new start.

What it changed

The return of the prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were released between 1954 and 1960, and many were formally rehabilitated, often after death. Their return, which the historian Stephen F. Cohen called “the victims return”, brought survivors face to face with the colleagues and neighbours who had denounced them. Literature such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) briefly allowed the camps to be described in print.

Restored homelands, for some. The homelands were restored only in part. In 1957 the Chechen-Ingush, Kalmyk, Karachay and Balkar autonomies were restored and their peoples allowed to return. The Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic, and the Crimean Tatars, whose homeland the 1956 map still hatches, could return only in 1989, which shows how long the state took to admit it had wronged whole nations.

Revolt and repression in the bloc. The speech encouraged reformers in Eastern Europe. In Poland, protests in June 1956 led to the return of Władysław Gomułka without Soviet invasion, but in Hungary a revolution in October was crushed by Soviet forces on 4 November, with about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers killed. The crisis showed that de-Stalinisation in the bloc could change leaders but could never be allowed to take a country out of the Soviet alliance.

An unfinished reckoning. Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum in 1961, and cities named after him were renamed, Stalingrad becoming Volgograd. Yet the reckoning stopped short of the system itself, and under Brezhnev criticism was muted again. Only in the late 1980s did the full history of the famines, the Terror and the camps become public, and debate over Stalin’s legacy continues in the states that emerged in 1991.