The Secrets of the System

Carl Bildt posts a link to the text of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, delivered just 50 years ago. Bildt considers the effects of its contents on the Communist world:

Riots in Poznan in Poland were just the beginning. In October of 1956 Hungary exploded and literally threw the Communists out - only to be brutally surpressed by the Soviet invasion some weeks later. In China, Mao Zedong refused to accept the verdict on Stalin, and quietly the beginning of the rift between the Soviet Union and China began.

Read it all.