70 years ago, Khrushchev broke the USSR’s silence on Stalinism. Meduza explores what the ‘Secret Speech’ revealed about Soviet terror — and what it left unsaid.

On February 25, 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered what would become known as the “Secret Speech.” This denunciation of Joseph Stalin and his “cult of personality” at the 20th Party Congress marked the first time top Soviet officials publicly described state terror as the result of abuses of power and violations of “socialist legality.” However, the condemnation remained selective. The terror’s true scale and the Communist Party’s complicity were never openly addressed, and much ...