This Day in Military History (Western Democracies Pledge Mutual Security With North American Treaty)

April 4, 1949—The countries who put their signature to the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, DC, looked just like the Allied coalition that had recently won World War II in Europe—but with one notable exception: the Soviet Union, whose postwar threats to elected governments had alarmed its former partners.

Since the formation of this defensive pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has increased from its original 12 to 32 members. Its recent growth derives from the same factor that brought it into existence: a septuagenarian dictator who, in his quest to annex neighbors and subvert republics, inspires other nations to band together in mutual support.

Back in 1949, that authoritarian ruler was Joseph Stalin, who saw the chaos and devastation in the wake of WWII as an opportunity to expand Soviet influence, including through:

*reneging on its Yalta Conference promise of free elections in Poland;

*exploiting its continued military presence in Hungary to pressure non-Communist parties into submission;

*covertly backing an overthrow of the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Communist party;

*blockading Allied-controlled West Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate the whole city into its orbit.

In 2024, the dictator is Vladimir Putin, whose revanchist nostalgia for the return of Russian influence has led him to invade Ukraine—a move that, in turn, led to a prompt application to join NATO by Finland and Sweden.

The West’s attempts to begin new eras of cooperation with Stalin and Putin quickly foundered as perceptions grew that these dictators were intent not just on cracking down on internal dissent but on posing a threat to Eastern Europe.

American, Britain, and French leaders had hoped to include the Soviets in a postwar Council of Foreign Ministers, according to a Truman Library oral history interview with John D. Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State generally credited with writing the text for what became the North Atlantic Treaty.

But, after 1947 conferences in Moscow and London that went nowhere because of Soviet intransigence, the three transatlantic partners determined to go their own way.

The genesis for the new system of cooperation came from British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, but the indispensable forces were the two American Secretaries of State when the treaty was hammered out in 1948 and early 1949, George Marshall and Dean Acheson.

The most important element of the North American Treaty may be Article 5, in which the signatories agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all" and that following such an attack, each Ally would take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" in response.

The first time that mutual-aid pledge would be invoked came not in response to a move by the USSR, but after 9/11—and it did not involve the US coming to the aid of the organization’s European members, but them supporting us in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Hickerson’s oral history interview gives a strong sense of the improvisational nature of the discussions shaping the North Atlantic Treaty. 

The diplomats, he explained, were talking about “what we would do in the event of an attack, without considering anything beyond the political commitment to do that. And frankly in the back of our minds was the hope that that commitment itself would be enough to restrain any aggression.” 

It would not be until the following year, with the outbreak of the Korean War, before the “machinery” of NATO would be set up.

This brief history is worth keeping in mind in the present US. Presidential cycle, with one all-but-certain party nominee saying he would encourage Putin to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that falls behind on its defense spending guidelines.

That Presidential candidate’s complaint about failing to meet these guidelines echoes the chief  American opponent of the pact back in 1949, Robert Taft, who saw it as “arming Western Europe at American expense.”

But the deeply conservative, anti-communist Republican Senator from Ohio was under no illusions about Stalin’s intentions and never praised his “strength.”

Moreover, the national defense spending percentages on which today’s isolationists fixate are, as mentioned earlier, guidelines, not ironclad commitments.

The Cold War between the US and USSR was often conducted without nuance and sometimes risked catastrophe. But NATO created a defensive alliance based on collective security—an arrangement missing before WWII that would have eased the task of countering Nazi aggression.

That alliance resulted in 75 years of peace, encouraging international commerce—the kind of minimal-cost arrangement that one might have hoped a once and future businessman might have better appreciated.

(The photo accompanying this post shows President Harry Truman with the diplomats from the countries signing the North Atlantic Treaty.)

This Day in Russian History (Lenin Final Rites Strengthen Stalin’s Hold on Power)

Jan. 27, 1924—The Moscow funeral of V.I. Lenin, who seven years before had led a small cadre of revolutionaries to seize power over a Russian population of 158,000,000, took on all the characteristics of a secular sanctification, with the city of Petrograd renamed in his honor and even a special mausoleum containing his carefully preserved body erected in a mere three days.

Braving temperatures 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, lines of mourners more than a mile long waited patiently to segue past his coffin.

Already signaling the credulous reporting he would display in downplaying the Soviet terror famine of the early 1930s, The New York Times’ Walter Duranty reported that the Lenin-related pageantry would lay “the foundation of a revival campaign to infuse new energy, enthusiasm, unity, and discipline in the Communist party.”

While acknowledging an attack by Lenin’s emerging successor, Joseph Stalin, on his rival, Leon Trotsky, the day of Lenin’s death, Duranty brushed it off, seeing potential for harmony in the offing:

“The best-informed people here are confident that Trotsky, Radek, and other insurgents will join hands with the ‘machine’ leaders, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, over Lenin’s grave. If Trotsky gives no sign to the latter, they may make the first step toward reconciliation.”

No such “reconciliation” took place. Unity would be achieved by fear and capitulation.

This was more than the kind of mass grief that followed, for instance, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy in the United States. 

This was a form of mass indoctrination, a means of smothering internal dissent about the meaning of Lenin’s life and the Soviet regime he had agitated, plotted, and fought to bring into being, and the beginning of what became a familiar sight for decades: 

The entombment of the Communist leader, performed against the express wishes of his family and several key Party leaders, reflected the wishes of Stalin, who—mindful of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church belief that a divine body would not deteriorate—used the last rites to position himself as Lenin’s successor and to help fashion his own “cult of personality.”

Somehow, architect Aleksei Shchusev managed to build this temporary mausoleum within the three days that Stalin allotted. Then he was asked to revise his plans twice more, with each revision producing a more grandiose structure.

What ordinary Russians couldn’t perceive over several decades was the sleight of hand needed to manufacture all this reverence. A phrase from The Wizard of Oz comes to mind: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, published after the collapse of the USSR, noted that control room staffers supervised the optimal temperature and degradation of Lenin's corpse, and that beneath the mausoleum there was also a workout room for the guards, in which the reporter imagined "some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts."

In addition to successfully wrapping Stalin in Lenin’s mantle, the creation of Lenin as a revolutionary icon later served the purpose of Stalin’s opponents. The ceremony at Red Square substituted a revolutionary form of devotion for a religious one, with Lenin joining Karl Mark as the crucial icon.

With Stalin’s unmasking as a paranoid director of a police state a few years after his death in 1953, Lenin became the great “what-if” alternative for Communists who couldn’t abide any questioning of the legitimacy of the U.S.S.R.—or, according to Lenin biographer Christopher Read, “a ‘good’ Lenin, a democrat blown off course by Russian backwardness and the exigencies of the [Soviet] Civil War, as opposed to a ‘bad’ Stalin.”

Starting in spring 1922, three strokes had progressively undermined the Soviet leader’s health and, more important for the state he hoped to direct, limited his day-to-day control of Party affairs.

With his physical strength waning but his anxiety mounting, he sought to stave off a split between two of his closest associates, Stalin and Leon Trotsky, that might divide the Soviet leadership while he was alive and spark a succession struggle after his death.

Yet, though he chastised both men for behavioral traits that gave rise to tension in the ranks, he viewed Stalin—to whom he had often turned to implement his directives—as s figure who should be blocked from assuming ultimate authority in the state.

As Lenin grew feebler, he had attempted to curb Stalin’s increased accumulation of power by issuing in late December 1922 a “testament” to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. As General Secretary of the committee, he noted, Stalin now possessed “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

A couple of weeks later, after Stalin had insulted Lenin’s wife, the ailing leader went further in an addendum to his report, observing that the younger man’s rudeness was intolerable in a party leader, and that the committee should “think about a way of removing Stalin from that post” and appoint somebody “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

When Stalin’s death came in 1953, he joined his old chief in the mausoleum. But his period as an object of devotion was much shorter. 

After Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” to the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing his crimes, it was only a matter of time—five years, to be exact—before he was removed from Lenin’s tomb and re-buried in a far humbler resting place.

But the cult of Lenin remained intact for decades more. “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live” became a longtime mantra of Soviet society, and even beyond, as the ubiquitous image of the international Communist movement at parades. Amid regimes that placed a premium on censorship, his works continued to be produced in mass quantity, year after dreary year.

There was far less distance than one might suspect between the current dictator of the sprawling Russian land mass named Vladimir and the one a century ago. (Lenin’s initials, V.I., stood for “Vladimir Ilich.” His surname was adopted as a pseudonym to evade the Czar’s secret police.)

Russia’s first kleptocratic ruler and the world’s first Marxist dictator embraced the same means to power: ruthless force that crushed opponents. 

Indeed, Vladimir Putin learned about the dark arts of poisoning, targeted assassinations, even striking at critics in foreign lands as a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB, a descendant agency of the Cheka, or Soviet state security police, set up by Lenin and under the direction of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

For a deeper, contemporary consideration of Lenin’s legacy—not just in the Soviet Union well into the glasnost era, but even among American right-wingers like Steve Bannon who emulate the Communist’s style of disruption if not his ideology—Cathy Young’s recent article from The Bulwark is well worth reading.

Flashback, August 1945: Orwell’s Long-Delayed ‘Animal Farm’ Satirizes Soviet Tyranny

Though now virtually a canonical text of the Cold War, Animal Farm initially encountered significant roadblocks to publication. Secker and Warburg, which released the satire by George Orwell 75 years ago this month, was the fifth house that the iconoclastic left-wing journalist had approached, only to be turned down—including for explicitly political reasons.

At Faber and Faber, poet-editor T.S. Eliot, after conferring with colleagues, informed Orwell although his writing was good, “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.”

Outside of the context of the original letter, Eliot’s rationale sounds opaque notes that readers of his poetry might appreciate. But Orwell had little trouble deciphering it, for elsewhere in the message, Eliot took note of the “Trotskyite” perspective of the narration. Anyone reading between the lines would immediately understand that this might upset a key partner in Great Britain’s “Grand Alliance” against Nazi Germany: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Orwell conceived his devastating depiction of the Soviet Union as a failed utopia in the form of a beast fable about “Manor Farm”—so called because of the aristocrats who controlled it for years. The granular details of his allegory were inspired by time spent from 1936 to 1940 in a cottage in Wallington, near London, where the journalist kept chickens, goats and geese.

But, for contemporary readers, the primary interest of Orwell’s bitter satire—what led it to be banned in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries now falling under its sway—lay in characters whose motives, decisions and fates resembled the ideological battles among Socialists, Communists and the latter’s Trotskyite splinter faction. In particular, they were modeled on world-famous leaders of the prior three decades dating back to the Russian Revolution:

* Mr. Jones, the failing farmer whose misrule eventually leads to a revolt by his animals, stands for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was overthrown in 1917 and, with the rest of his family, put to death a year later;

* Old Major, the pig who organizes the animal revolt and insists on their equality, represents Vladimir Lenin—and, like the Bolshevik leader, dies before many of his ideas can become reality;

* Napoleon signifies Stalin—even to the point of being named for another dictator who used the chaotic aftermath of a revolution as a ladder to absolute power;

* Snowball, who loses out in a power struggle with Napoleon—and then is driven off the farm by dogs acting at the behest of the vengeful victor—is based on Leon Trotsky, who  was driven into exile by Stalin in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico on the dictator’s orders in 1940.

Swiftly, Orwell traces how his bestial revolutionaries become acclimated step by step to erosions of their freedom to the point where they yield to a Soviet-style cult of personality:

“It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days,’ or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”

The infamous Moscow “show trials” of the mid-to-late Thirties, when a paranoid Stalin set in motion trumped-up charges against longtime major Communist Party leaders, are also evoked:

“They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

With Napoleon amending to absurdity one of Old Major’s foundational principles (“All Animals Are Equal But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”), Orwell anticipated a notion he would explore a few years later in greater depth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: doublethink, or indoctrination-induced acceptance of a patently false idea or of two ideas mutually contradictory to each other.

Orwell hinted in Animal Farm at the major enablers of the new absolutist regime in Europe: the silent intellectuals who could have sparked widespread dissent:

“Several of [the animals] would have protested if they could have found the right arguments. Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say.”

This bewilderment over the complicity of the intellectuals—first triggered by Orwell’s service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, when he was shocked into disillusionment by Stalinist purges in Barceleona—hardened into contempt as he attempted to find a publisher for his new satire.

To fulfill the obligations of a contract calling for the submission of his next two novels, Orwell sent the manuscript to the man who published his first nonfiction title, Down and Out in Paris in London: Victor Gollancz. The old-line left-wing publisher, who preferred to mute any of his own reservations about Stalinism, did not surprise Orwell in the least when he quickly rejected this satire.

Eliot’s refusal, less expected because it came from some with more conservative political and religious convictions, was more painful. But the turndown of the manuscript that provoked Orwell the most came at the hands of the British publisher Jonathan Cape, which had committed to accepting it until being warned off by a government official. Orwell included their timorous critique in the preface he eventually wrote for Animal Farm:

I mentioned the reaction I had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste of the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

Orwell did not name that “important official in the Ministry of Information,” but he had a hunch that this bureaucrat harbored pro-Soviet sentiments—a belief given concrete form in 1949, when the writer included him on a list given to a friend in Britain's Foreign Office of 38 intellectuals who were “crypto-communist fellow travelers or inclined that way.”

Although some names on that list emerged more from Orwell’s prejudices than any real fact, he was correct to be suspicious of Peter Smollett. Only in 1990, a decade after his death, with the brief opening of Soviet intelligence archives, was it confirmed that Smollett, a past London correspondent for several European papers, was in reality Hans-Peter Smolka, part of the Soviet spy ring centered around Kim Philby.

Smollett’s interference delayed publication of Animal Farm for a year, leaving Orwell smoldering enough to blast “the servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards.” It was safe to print criticisms of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during this period, but not the nation’s Soviet ally, he charged.

Orwell’s denunciation of these abject intellectuals has lost none of its bite with the passage of 75 years, nor has his eloquent defense of the right to advocate the unfashionable and inconvenient: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 

Worn down by his struggle against tuberculosis, he would continue through the four years remaining to him to raise the alarm against threats to freedom, particularly in his last novel, when he dispensed with the fable form for a searing dystopian nightmare: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the Nazi Invasion of Russia)

“I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, so delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey. And behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who planned, organized and launched this cataract of horrors upon mankind.”— Winston Churchill, radio address on Germany’s invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941

Even as he made history, Winston Churchill sought to shape how it would be interpreted. He didn’t wait until he penned his bestselling six-volume  war memoirs in retirement, nor even as he departed Whitehall in 1945, when he carted off 68 bundles of state papers to help him with this massive proect (as revealed in David Lough’s recently published No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money). 

The British Prime Minister did so, quite memorably, as early as Adolf Hitler’s disastrous decision to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on this date 75 years ago today.

Twenty-two months before Hitler’s troops opened fire on the Soviets, without either a declaration of war or even an ultimatum, Joseph Stalin had made a cynical secret deal with his fellow dictator: a division of the spoils that allowed them spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, subjecting that region's inhabitants to exploitation by these conquerors. (See my prior post on the background to the event.)

Though stunned by Hitler’s treachery—initially, it seems, almost to the point of paralysis—Stalin should not have been. Hitler had shown an insatiable appetite for land; he had broken the Munich agreement that Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had naively negotiated; and, as secret agents and Allied leaders (such as Churchill himself) had told the Soviet dictator, Hitler planned to turn on him.

When he addressed his country after hearing this news, Churchill was already calling it one of four “climacterics,” or “intense turning points,” of World War II. (The others to that point, as listed in the speech, were the British decision to fight Germany alone after the fall of France, the performance of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and the American decision to provide aid through the Lend Lease Act). This, though, may have been the turning point that sealed Hitler’s fate, for Great Britain would no longer be facing Germany by itself on the battlefield.

In the quote above, Churchill resorted to benign images of the common Soviet folk because he wanted his own countrymen to identify with people who had just become their allies. Even this, however, wasn’t enough. He also felt compelled to acknowledge his own past: “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years.” Nor would he retract a word of it even now.

But the crimes of Hitler were so “monstrous,” he noted, that “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose….to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.”

Though Hitler had approached the decision to invade the U.S.S.R. with mounting anxiety, he could not shed the same logic that had doomed Napoleon Bonaparte over a century before, General Walther Warlimont would note later:

“Why Hitler invaded Russia is, in my opinion, that he found himself in exactly the same situation as Napoleon. Both men looked upon Britain as their strongest and most dangerous adversary. Both could not persuade themselves to attempt the overthrow of England by invading the British Isles. Both believed, however, that Great Britain could be forced to come to terms with the dominating continental power, if the prospect vanished for the British to gain an armoured arm as an ally on the Continent. Both of them suspected Russia of becoming this ally of Britain’s.”

For all his vivid imagery, Churchill surely could not foresee the extent of the grievous harm inflicted by Germany on the U.S.S.R.: more than 26 million lives lost. Nor, for all the fighting spirit he praised among the Russian common people, could he have anticipated that the Soviet military would ultimately be responsible for approximately 70% of the Wehrmacht loss of life over the next four years, as the powerful German war machine first became trapped by the winter weather, then by Hitler's refusal to walk away from a quagmire. Churchill remained convinced, as he wrote in his memoir The Gathering Storm, that “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism.”  But he also believed that allying now with the Soviets was the only feasible way to destroy Nazism and to preserve Britain as a nation.

This Day in Cold War History (Khrushchev Denounces Stalin’s Terror in ‘Secret Speech’)

Feb. 25, 1956—In an address that shredded the hopes placed in the Soviet Union by believers around the world, Nikita Khrushchev (pictured) disclosed to the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party that the nation’s former leader, Joseph Stalin, had subjected opponents of his rule to “moral and physical annihilation.”

The night before the speech, Khrushchev faced down high-level Soviet leaders who did not want any news of this kind to come out. They rightly feared that some would ask why they had not acted to stop the terror.

Khrushchev may have wondered the same thing about his own role. His decade as First Party Secretary would be characterized by a hypomania marked by what one psychoanalyst described in a 1960 CIA assessment as exuberance coupled with feeling “covertly ... guilty about aggression towards others, incapable of being alone ... corruptible and lacking a systematic approach in cognitive style.” He improvised a great deal of the speech, even appearing overwrought at times, maybe remembering his own role in carrying out Stalin’s tyranny. (As Moscow leader in the 1930s, Khrushchev ordered the shooting of more than 55,000 officials, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.)

During Stalin’s nearly three decades as Soviet dictator, it was suicide to criticize or even joke about him. Nearly three years after his death, nobody still dared to breathe a word about his crimes. Nor, even now did Khrushchev address Stalin’s brutality against the Soviet people at large, let alone other nations undermined and absorbed within the Soviet empire. (Moreover, the first Soviet leader, V.I. Lenin, was upheld as a shining example of everything Stalin had destroyed, with his own crimes not detailed until Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s.)

So when Khrushchev now got around to denouncing Stalin, it was in the context of what mattered most to his immediate listeners, for having “ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.” Tumult broke out in the hall when Khrushchev laid out, in categorical detail, a particular example of this:  “of the 139 members and candidates of the party's Central Committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38).”

Like so much about the Iron Curtain, these shattering revelations were made behind closed doors and initially unbeknownst to most Soviet citizens, leading it to be dubbed “The Secret Speech.” But even as it was being delivered (estimates I’ve seen vary as to its length, ranging from four to eight hours), Khrushchev’s belated denunciation of his predecessor’s “cult of personality” had an immediate impact.

The delegates present uniformly listened in shocked, numb silence. The editor of Pravda, concerned that he might have a heart attack, gulped down five nitroglycerin pills, while the head of the Polish Communist Party, being treated in the U.S.S.R. for pneumonia, did suffer a fatal heart attack right after reading it. Still other delegates are believed to have killed themselves afterwards.

In terms of Communist believers beyond the walls of the Kremlin, the effects were not as visceral but ultimately more important for the propaganda war that the U.S.S.R. was waging against the United States and its allies in the Free World. The speech was read once only to party members throughout the Soviet Union in factories, farms, offices and universities.

Polish printers, having obtained the full text meant for distribution to Central European communist allies, printed thousands more than the authorized number. One of these copies came into the hands of Israeli intelligence, who, in the early spring, gave it to the CIA, which in turn leaked it to The New York Times and the British Kremlinologist (and eventual Khrushchev biographer), Edward Crankshaw. After the Times printed it in early June, the speech became fodder for the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Agency in their campaign against “Red Colonialism.”

In Poland and Hungary especially, the speech catalyzed resentment against Soviet puppet regimes, and though this unrest was smothered in the former and brutally crushed by Soviet troops in the latter, ordinary citizens now knew the extent of the crimes of their Communist overlords.

For longtime American apologists of the Soviet regime, the speech put them face to face with what they had long tried to avoid.  As Harvey Klebr, John Hayes, and Kyrill Anderson write in The Soviet World of American Communism:

“For more than 20 years, both the mainstream press and scholarly books had carried hundreds of stories, refugee accounts, and exposes of the nature and horrors of Stalin's regime. Yet although the insistence of American Communists that the news was a revelation was literally false, it was psychologically true. Since the beginning of the movement, American Communists had worn special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that rendered all else invisible. But when Moscow finally opened its own eyes, when Khrushchev pointed to the bodies of Stalin's victims littering the Soviet landscape, American Communists saw those bodies as well. And this vision offered a shattering revelation.”

Like Mikhail Gorbachev three decades later, Khrushchev mistakenly believed that the Soviet Union could be reformed from within. The revelations about Stalin were meant to energize a rank and file still suffering from the impact of Stalinist terror. As painful as his knowledge of his complicity was, he felt, light had to be shed on this shadowy past. "All of us were involved in this,” he recalled in his memoir. “And we have to tell the truth about everything."