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A History of Twentieth Century Russia and the 20th Congress of the CPSU
In the April 1999 issue of the Newsletter Nina Fishman has a somewhat uncritical reference to Robert Service's A History of Twentieth-Century Russia [1] which, on the face of it, lays to rest once and for all the question of the wider availability of Khrushchev's Secret Speech. According to Service, foreign communist party leaders attending as observers at the CPSU 20th Congress were apparently given transcripts of the speech as they departed home. Service also claims that the CIA was directly given a copy of the speech by the KGB on Khrushchev's orders.
When I consulted Service's account, I was surprised to find that he offered no evidence for these contentions. At the very least one could have expected a footnote or two to indicate where he has drawn this new information from. After all, this overturns what has been the generally accepted consensus that only the leaders of the Cominform parties received copies of the transcript and that the speech was leaked to the west via the Polish party. Khrushchev in secretly recorded interviews — published as Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes — expressed his regret over the leaking of the speech and that it found its way, via the 'Polish route', into the hands of 'reactionary forces', i.e. the USA. Now presumably Service has based what he has written on some new sources, perhaps newly available archive material: but what? I've written to him to ask exactly what, but as of yet have received no reply.
I have no problem believing that if the CPGB leaders R Palme Dutt or Harry Pollitt had been given a transcript of the speech they would have suppressed it. But what about the Danish Communist Party (DKP) leader Aksel Larsen, who was also an observer at the 20th Congress? It just doesn't make sense to suggest that Larsen received a copy of the speech and just 'kept mum', as in that case he would have immediately used it in his fight within the Danish party against the stalinist old guard — a fight that would lead within two years to Larsen's break with the Communist Party and the establishment of a new party, the Socialist People's Party. As it was the Danish party newspaper Land og Folk had to rely upon the bowdlerised Sam Russell account of the speech that was printed in the British Daily Worker (the report in Land og Folk is a straightforward translation).
I have corresponded with Aksel Larsen's biographer Kurt Jacobsen, who is of the same opinion and moreover has informed me (letter of 6 August 1999) that he has recently come across material in the Russian archives which records that Aksel Larsen and Alfred Jensen (DKP Deputy General Secretary) were allowed to read the speech at the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen on 5-6 April 1956. This seems fairly compelling evidence that the Danish Party leadership did not receive a copy of the speech during or immediately after 20th Congress at the end of February 1956 or even before the Reuter telegram of 16 March 1956 which first revealed the fact of the speech's existence to the world at large. It was at the DKP's Central Committee meeting of 21-22 April 1956 that a split in the top leadership first materialised when Aksel Larsen gave his own 'personal' highly critical report on the 20th Congress and thus broke with the principle that the political bureau always spoke with 'a single voice'.
