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It is difficult to characterize the reactions of whole organizations, and to separate out the reaction to the speech from the reaction to the 20th Party Congress as a whole, and to the other events of 1956. Many groups were internally split between those who saw it as a call for renewal and others as a betrayal. Because the Russian Revolution had progressed ...

The main historiography, which you should really have searched prior to asking the question. Most obviously Sheila Fitzpatrick's work on everyday Stalinism at the work unit level, particularly Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (1999). Rossman (2005) Worker resistance under Stalin. Andrle (1988) Workers in Stalin's Russia.

For me at least, this question may be re-phrased thus: To what extent were the contours of the Communist regime in Russia determined by Russian national peculiarities? Scholars like Richard Pipes hold that the Soviet regime was a development of some sort of immanent Russian matrix. Here is a wiki summary: Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of ...

I wish to supplement choster's answer. Communist Party of Australia (CPA) CPA leadership discovered the Secret Speech as the CPNZ leadership transhipped through Australia early in the year. According to the then informal organisation of International fraternal parties, the CPA was dependent on the CPGB for material at this level. They didn't find out ...

According to the official internal Soviet statistics, the number of excessive mortality in Ukraine in 1932-1933 was 1,532,700 people, of which 1 million 385 thousand in 1933. A paradoxical fact of this is that in 1933 the total harvest for the USSR was 69 million tonnes (some think this number is overestimation due to the counting method used in the USSR ...

Well, the accounts claim one could get all necessary papers for an artel in just one day. The management of the artel should be elected by the employees. By the 1941 enactment the new artel was for two years exempt from most taxes and state price control, except that the prices should not exceed the state prices more than 10-13%. Artels were allowed to buy ...

I'm not sure there's going to be a definitive source for an answer to this. From a (sociopathic autocrat's) political standpoint, I do think it was good timing. If he'd done it earlier when the guy was still in the news and had lots of followers, he would have created more of a martyr. Better to let things cool down for a while, perhaps spend a few years ...

The modern period was characterized by a belief that the world could be reinvented in light of the superior understanding provided by modern thinking. The communists were major proponents of this movement. The result of this ego-driven idea was that it attracted people who believed their understanding of the world was superior to a traditional view hewn from ...

First of all, Lysenko did not oppose genetics in general, he was against so-called "formal genetics". He was the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1940. In 1939 he said in a speech: Unfairly comrades Mendelists alledge that we profess closing of Genetics (...) Genetics is necessary and we struggle for ...

Basically, this is a lot of tosh. This, ahem, quaint theory is a nice specimen of the modern neo-Stalinist cottage industry. Reality was much simpler: the purges were ordered and organized by Stalin; no alternative elections were ever held in the Soviet Union (till the late 1980s when the system was in its death throes). This was of course by design - the ...

There is a strain of historical thought that some of the features of Russian/Soviet state are strongly influenced by Mongol conquest and rule by the Horde. So if you agree with that line of thought, you need to go back to 13th century.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Death_toll A 2002 study by Vallin et al. utilizing some similar primary sources to Kulchytsky, and performing an analysis with more sophisticated demographic tools with forward projection of expected growth from the 1926 census and backward projection from the 1939 census estimate the amount of ...