WHEN Nikita Khrushchev took the podium on the last day of the Communist Party congress 50 years ago today, his words were so shocking that some fainted.

The Soviet leader had done the unthinkable, denouncing his predecessor Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier, as a fanatical tyrant who had hundreds of thousands of citizens executed or sent to prison camps.

So sensitive was Khrushchev’s “secret speech” that his daughter, Rada Adzhubei, did not learn of it for two weeks, when excerpts were read out at party meetings. “I was shocked, like everyone else,” Mrs Adzhubei, now 76, told The Times in her apartment a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. “Millions knew about these things, but millions did not know. And we were all brought up in an atmosphere where Stalin was the great leader — it was in the air we breathed.”

Looking back, she now sees her father’s speech as an heroic step that ended the terror of the Stalinist era and paved the way for perestroika and glasnost 30 years later. “It was an act of justice,” she said.

Few people would disagree in the West, where the speech caused a sensation when it was leaked to the foreign press months later. Poland’s leader, Boleslaw Bierut, died of a heart attack after reading it a month afterwards. But in Russia, the anniversary is being marked by a reassessment of Khrushchev’s role in history that, analysts say, reflects the increasingly repressive climate under the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin.

The only official commemoration is a tiny exhibition in the Historical Museum, featuring a few documents and memorabilia including Khrushchev’s embroidered Ukrainian shirt. Russian state television has cancelled a planned documentary on the subject, and a growing number of academics and journalists are portraying the “secret speech” as an act of revenge or a cynical ploy to avoid sharing blame for the bloodshed of previous decades.

“Since then we have lived increasingly useless and dirty lives,” wrote Yelena Prudnikova, a St Petersburg-based journalist, in her recent book Stalin: The Second Murder. “The country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has rotted to the ground.”

Stalin, meanwhile, is enjoying a revival; several statues are planned in his honour and a museum is being opened next month in the city of Volgograd, previously named Stalingrad.

A recent poll by the AllRussian Public Opinion Research Centre found that 50 per cent of respondents thought Stalin’s role in history was positive. This historical irony, analysts say, reflects the political atmosphere in Russia as President Putin reasserts central control over the media, business and politics.

Today’s Kremlin neither promotes Stalin nor denigrates Khrushchev, but President Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

The “secret speech”, which led directly to the Hungarian Uprising later in 1956 and the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, opened the cracks in the system that eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a young Party activist in 1956, told a conference this month that the “secret speech” had inspired him to launch the liberal reforms of the 1980s.

“I do not think that a concept like perestroika could have appeared without it,” he said.

Russia, he said, was now going through a political backlash similar to the one under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev.

Stalin’s rehabilitation began in 1965, when Brezhnev mentioned him positively in an address, while the “secret speech” was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Thus, many Russians still see Stalin not as a brutal tyrant, but as the man who oversaw the victory against Nazi Germany, and turned the Soviet Union into a superpower.

Khrushchev’s reputation, on the other hand, remains tarnished. In the past five years, several Russian academics have produced evidence showing that Khrushchev personally signed orders for thousands of people to be executed or sent to labour camps.

Mrs Adzhubei, a retired biologist, says she has no illusions about her father’s past. “You had to sign the orders, because if you didn’t your name would be on the next list,” she said. “They were all guilty, but some were more guilty than others.”

For the descendants of Stalin’s victims, however, the “secret speech” remains one of the most important events of the 20th century.

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” said Helen Lezvinskaya, a 64-year-old doctor, who visited the Historical Museum’s exhibition this week.

Her aunt and uncle spent 20 years in the Gulag, but were rehabilitated after Khrushchev’s speech. “Only now can we understand in what terrible times we lived,” she said.

SHOCKING TRUTHS

‘Stalin . . . practised brutal violence, not only towards everything which opposed him, but also towards that which seemed — to his capricious and despotic character — contrary to his concepts’

‘Stalin . . . instead of proving his political correctness and mobilising the masses, often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the Party and the Soviet Government’

‘It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person . . . into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god’

Nikita Khrushchev, February 25, 1956

ALSO IN 1956...

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April Khrushchev visits UK

June Polish workers riot against Communists

July-November Suez crisis after Nasser nationalises canal. British, French and Israeli troops invade

September Heartbreak Hotel is Elvis’s first No 1

November Soviet troops crush Hungarian uprising; President Eisenhower wins second term; Vladimir Kuts, a Russian, wins 5,000m and 10,000m at Melbourne Olympics