The electronic library of historical documents, part of the Federal Portal of Historical and Documentary Education, has digitized a collection of resolutions of the CPSU Central Committee from the 1950s. Among other documents, the resolution “On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences,” adopted on June 30, 1956, is now available in digital format.
RIA Novosti
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Joseph Stalin and member of the Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev at the presidium of the Tenth Congress of the Komsomol.
The resolution was adopted in accordance with the decision of the 20th Congress of the CPSU “On the personality cult and its consequences”. It was at this meeting that Nikita Khrushchev’s famous report was drawn up, exposing Stalin’s personality cult, after which a new program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was developed.
The Party Central Committee ordered “consistent implementation of measures to ensure the complete overcoming of the personality cult, alien to Marxism-Leninism, and the elimination of its consequences in all areas of ideological, state and party work.”
By the time the CPSU Central Committee resolution was adopted, the struggle against the consequences of Stalin’s personality cult had already been going on for three years. It revealed the specific historical conditions and reasons for the emergence of the personality cult, its essence and nature of manifestation.
In addition to this, the resolution noted that Stalin, while serving as General Secretary of the Party Central Committee, along with other prominent figures of the party and the Soviet state, actively fought for the implementation of Lenin’s ideas.
“As a theoretician and great organizer, he led the fight against the Trotskyists, the bourgeois nationalists, against the machinations of the capitalist encirclement,” the document states.
On the other hand, the resolution also stated that Stalin’s personality cult caused serious damage to the cause of the Communist Party and to Soviet society. “But the personality cult could not and did not change the nature of our socio-political system,” the authors of the historic document believed.
The CPSU Central Committee also noted with satisfaction that “the decisions of the historic 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union met with the full approval and warm support of our entire Party, of the entire Soviet people, of the communist and working-class brothers of all parties, of the working people of the great community of socialist countries, of millions of people in capitalist and colonial countries.”
“Why do the enemies of communism and socialism focus their fire on the shortcomings that were mentioned by the Central Committee of our party at the 20th Congress of the CPSU?” – the following question was raised in the resolution.
And the answer was immediately given: “They do this to divert the attention of the working class and its parties from the main issues that were raised at the 20th Party Congress and that pave the way for new successes in the cause of peace, socialism and the unity of the working class.”
It was also stated that the bold and consistent foreign policy of the USSR to ensure peace and cooperation between states, regardless of their social system, finds support among the broad masses of all countries of the world, expands the front of peace-loving states and provokes a deep crisis in the politics of the Cold War.
“It is no coincidence that the biggest fuss about the fight against the personality cult in the USSR was made by the imperialist circles of the United States,” the document notes, “they benefited from the presence of negative phenomena associated with the personality cult and, based on these facts, began to fight against socialism.”
The position of capitalism had to be weakened by boldly overcoming the consequences of the personality cult. But the capitalists did not give up. A “widespread anti-Soviet smear campaign” was launched in the “bourgeois press,” the aim of which was “to muddy the waters and conceal the fact that we are talking about a bygone stage in the life of the Soviet country.”
“We are not strangers to hearing such spells from our enemies,” concludes the decree published in the newspaper Pravda with these words: “Their predictions have always burst like soap bubbles…
It will remain so. No malicious and slanderous attacks by our enemies will be able to stop the irresistible course of the historical development of humanity towards communism.”
