February 25th, 1956. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev surprises delegates present at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with a speech entitled On the cult of personality and its consequences. Presented in a closed session of the Congress, this speech would become famous worldwide in only a few days and it would end up as the starting point of the USSR’s destalinization and of the changes that shook down the entire socialist block. The objective of the present report is not a thorough evaluation of Stalin’s life and activity. Concerning Stalin’s merits, an entirely sufficient number of books, pamphlets and studies had already been written in his lifetime. Stalin’s role of Stalin in the preparation and execution of the Socialist Revolution, in the Civil War, and in the fight for the construction of socialism in our country, is universally known. Everyone knows it well. At present, we are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the Party now and for the future – with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality. The CPSU’s 20th Congress began on February 14th, 1956 and it was the first one held after Stalin’s death in 1953. Despite the death of the person who had ruled the Soviet Union for over two decades, Stalin’s name wasn’t at all mentioned during the Congress’s meetings before February 25th, and then it was only spoken of in a session closed to outside participants (foreign journalists and members of the other communist parties around the world). Through his famous report, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult and his crimes, including the execution, torture and imprisonment of party members under false ac