It should serve as the basic guideline for all official [propaganda] output. Posts were informed that Guidance on the Far East was forthcoming.
After four pages of background, the document included the following policy guidance. The best available evidence indicates that the U. For more detail on how the U. Norton, , p. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The full document is here. CIA chief, Allen Dulles , struck by the unexpected reversal in policy espoused in the speech, wondered if Khrushchev had been drunk and speaking extemporaneously.
Eisenhower agreed, and it was sent to the New York Times. In the immediate aftermath of the speech, the course of de-Stalinization suited U. The Eisenhower Administration watched, but did not interfere, as the speech became the impetus for a series of grassroots movements demanding democratic reforms in Eastern Europe.
Protests broke out in Poland and Hungary in the summer and autumn of , both with tragic consequences. In Poland, the Communist Party leadership proved uncertain how to address the demonstrations, and overreacted by sending in a military force to put down the protest. The situation in Hungary was even more extreme and month-long demonstrations ended with Soviet military intervention and thousands of casualties.
Although Khrushchev played a role in shutting down the rebellions in the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, he followed up on his address to the Twentieth Party Congress by continuing to advocate reforms and increased cooperation with the West.
It was intensely cold, but we stayed outside where there were no microphones. Thick snow lay on the ground but we tramped through it, pausing only now and then for me to consult my notes under the streetlamps.
We noted that Orlov had often given me scraps of information that had always proved correct, though not of major importance. His story fitted with the limited reports circulating in the Western community. And we noted that a temporary New York Times correspondent was leaving the next day and would certainly write about these reports. So we could be beaten on our own, far better, story.
We decided we had to believe Orlov. My name, I insisted, must not appear on either story, and they should both have datelines other than Moscow: I did not want to be accused of violating the censorship on my return to Moscow. Then, after several hours writing up my notes, I dictated the two stories over the telephone to the Reuters copytaker.
Still nervously determined to conceal my identity, I assumed a ridiculous American accent. The ploy failed dismally. Back in Moscow, everything continued as before. During that summer of , Khrushchev's thaw blossomed and Muscovites relaxed a little more. But in central Europe the impact of the speech was growing. By autumn Poland was ready to explode and in Hungary an anti-communist revolution overthrew the Stalinist party and government, replacing them with the short-lived reformist Imre Nagy.
In Moscow, the Soviet leaders were thrown into turmoil. For six weeks not one appeared at any diplomatic function. When they reappeared they looked haggard and older. This was especially true of Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev's right-hand man, who had constantly urged him on to greater reforms. According to his son, Sergo, that was because Mikoyan had spent long days in Budapest desperately trying to save the Nagy regime, without success.
In the end, the diehard conservatives won the argument, insisting that for security reasons the USSR could not let a neighbouring country leave the Warsaw Pact.
Khrushchev and Mikoyan reluctantly agreed it should be crushed. In the West, the impact of the speech received a colossal boost from the publication of the full, albeit sanitised, text in The Observer and the New York Times.
This was the first time the full text had been available for public scrutiny anywhere in the world. Even local party secretaries who read it to members had to return their texts within 36 hours. Those texts were also sanitised, omitting two incidents in the speech that Orlov related to me. According to William Taubman, in his masterly biography of Khrushchev, the full text leaked out through Poland where, like other central European communist allies, Moscow had sent an edited copy for distribution to the Polish party.
In Warsaw, he said, printers took it upon themselves to print many thousand more copies than were authorised, and one fell into the hands of Israeli intelligence, who passed it to the CIA in April. Exactly how he obtained it is not recorded. But on Thursday, 7 June, at a small editorial lunch traditionally held every week in the Waldorf Hotel, Crankshaw 'modestly mentioned that he had obtained complete transcripts of Khrushchev's speech', according to Kenneth Obank, the managing editor. The meeting was galvanised.
Such a scoop could not be passed over and, with strong support from David Astor, the editor, as well as Obank, it was agreed that the full 26, words must be published in the following Sunday's paper. This was a heroic decision bordering, it seemed, on folly. In those days everything had to be set in hot metal to be made up into pages. By that Thursday, according to Obank, 'half the paper had been set, corrected and was being made up. Worse, we found that we would have to hold out almost all the regular features - book reviews, arts, fashion, bridge, chess, leader-page articles, the lot.
The Khrushchev copy, page by page, began flowing. As we began making up pages, it became clear that still more space would be needed, so we gulped and turned to the sacred cows - the advertisements. An endless number of headlines, sub-headings, cross-heads and captions had to be written as the copy wound its way through the paper.
But the gamble paid off. Reader response was enthusiastic. One said: 'Sir, I am just a chargehand in a factory, hardly a place where you might expect The Observer to have a large circulation.
But my copy of the Khrushchev edition has been going from hand to hand and from shop to shop in the administration offices, transport etc. I was quite amazed at the serious interest shown as a result of the very minute examination of the speech.
The paper sold out and had to be reprinted. That, surely, was justification for the extraordinary decision to print the full text at three days' notice. Khrushchev was clearly shaken by developments. His opponents gained strength, and in May came within an ace of ousting him. When a majority in the Presidium of the Central Committee the Politburo voted to depose him, only his swift action to convene a full Central Committee meeting gave him a majority.
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