(Since that time discredited officials have not been executed.) In 1955 Malenkov was forced to resign, and Marshal Bulganin was promptly elected to succeed him as premier.

De-Stalinization

Then, in a startling move at the 20th Party Congress, held in Moscow February 14-25, 1956, several Communist leaders denounced Stalin and repudiated much that he represented. The most violent attack was made by Khrushchev, who condemned Stalin for having replaced the collective leadership proper to Marxism with a cult of himself, which had generated disastrous consequences for the USSR. Khrushchev charged that Stalin had been guilty of "mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation…of honest and innocent Communists"; that he had not prepared adequate defences against the German invasion of June 1941, and that he had then mishandled the war effort, causing the needless deaths of "hundreds of thousands of our soldiers"; that he had been "sickly suspicious" of his colleagues and that he "evidently had plans to finish off the old members of the Politburo"; that he had been responsible for the break with Yugoslavia and had jeopardized "peaceful relations with other nations".

The attacks on Stalin profoundly shocked many Communists in the USSR and throughout the world. In the de-Stalinization campaign, portraits were removed from public places, institutions and localities bearing his name were renamed, and textbooks were rewritten to deflate his reputation.

Khrushchev's Ascendancy

The struggle for power finally resulted in the triumph of Khrushchev in 1957. He succeeded in ousting Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others. When Bulganin was forced to resign in 1958, Khrushchev stepped into the premiership, continuing his party secretaryship, and collective leadership appeared to have ended. By the time of the 21st Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev was in complete ascendancy, the centre of a new personality cult. He repeated some of his earlier denunciations of the old dictator, had Stalin's body removed from the mausoleum where it had rested beside that of Lenin, and demanded that the Stalinists who had opposed him in 1957 be expelled from the party. In the following years some of the extreme anti-Stalinism was softened, and Stalin was allowed some credit for building the Communist party and for the victory in World War II.

Khrushchev's Fall

Leonid I. Brezhnev, who in 1960 had succeeded the 79-year-old Voroshilov as president, was also assigned to the party secretariat in 1963. In July 1964, at Khrushchev's proposal, Brezhnev was relieved of the presidency to give full time to party work. Anastas I. Mikoyan, a veteran party functionary, became president.