The Electronic Library of Historical Documents, which is part of the Federal Historical and Documentary Educational Portal, has digitized a collection of resolutions of the CPSU Central Committee from the 1950s. Among other documents, the following are now available in digital form: available and the resolution “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences”, adopted on June 30, 1956.
RIA Novosti
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (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 cult of personality and its consequences.” It was at that meeting that Nikita Khrushchev’s famous report was made, exposing Stalin’s cult of personality, after which a new program for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was developed.
The Central Committee of the Party instructed “to consistently implement measures to ensure the complete overcoming of the cult of personality alien to Marxism-Leninism and the elimination of its consequences in all areas of Party, state and ideological work.”
By the time the Central Committee of the CPSU adopted the resolution, the fight 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 the nature of its manifestation.
Along with this, the resolution noted that Stalin, while holding the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, together with other leading figures of the Party and the Soviet state, actively fought for the implementation of Lenin’s ideas.
“As a theorist and major organizer, he led the struggle against the Trotskyists, bourgeois nationalists, and against the machinations of the capitalist encirclement,” the document noted.
On the other hand, the resolution also stated that Stalin’s personality cult had caused serious damage to the cause of the Communist Party and Soviet society. “But the personality cult could not and did not change the nature of our socio-political system,” the authors of the historical document believed.
The Central Committee of the CPSU 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, the entire Soviet people, fraternal communist and workers’ parties, workers of the great commonwealth of socialist countries, and 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?” – this question was also asked in the resolution.
And the answer was immediately given: “They are doing this in order to distract the attention of the working class and its parties from the main issues that were put forward at the 20th Party Congress and which clear 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 broadest masses of people in all countries of the world, expands the front of peace-loving states and causes a deep crisis in the policy of the “cold war”.
“It is no coincidence that the greatest noise around the fight against the personality cult in the USSR was raised by imperialist circles in the USA,” the document noted. “It was advantageous for them to have negative phenomena connected with the personality cult, in order to use these facts to fight against socialism.”
The position of capitalism was supposed to be weakened by boldly overcoming the consequences of the personality cult. But the capitalists did not give in. A “broad slanderous anti-Soviet campaign” was launched in the “bourgeois press”, the purpose of which was “to muddy the waters and hide the fact that we are talking about a stage in the life of the Soviet country that has already passed”.
“We are used to hearing such incantations from our enemies,” the resolution printed in the newspaper Pravda concluded with these words. “Their predictions always burst like soap bubbles…
This is how it will be in the future. No malicious, slanderous attacks of our enemies will be able to stop the irresistible course of the historical development of mankind towards communism.”
Source: rodina-history.ru
