Stalingrad lost its name and Stalin lost his tomb in 1961
Within a decade of his death, Joseph Stalin's body was carried out of Lenin's mausoleum, his name was cut from the Soviet anthem, and Stalingrad became Volgograd. The turning point was a closed-door speech in February 1956 in which Nikita Khrushchev stunned party delegates by denouncing the dictator.
Change began quietly after Stalin died on 5 March 1953. A collective leadership of Georgi Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria and Khrushchev took over, and Beria started releasing Gulag prisoners before he himself was arrested and executed that year. Rehabilitations followed in secret, since attacking a figure still revered at home and abroad was risky, but some 90,000 prisoners returning in 1954 and 1955 made silence impossible. A commission Khrushchev set up in December 1955 found that of 1,920,635 people arrested for anti-Soviet activity, 688,503 had been executed.
On 25 February 1956, addressing a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev condemned Stalin's personality cult, the killing of Old Bolsheviks and the climate of fear. Motives are debated. Solzhenitsyn saw a movement of the heart; historian Martin McCauley argues Khrushchev wanted to free officials from fear and to undercut rivals such as Molotov and Kaganovich, who had been closer to Stalin in the 1930s. Others say the speech pinned everything on one man to shield the party and Marxism–Leninism from deeper scrutiny. Many members resigned in protest when it was published.
The physical erasure was sweeping. Cities, streets and a Moscow metro station were renamed; the highest Soviet summit, Stalin Peak, became Communism Peak; East Germany's Stalinstadt became Eisenhüttenstadt. Hundreds of statues came down, from Berlin to Prague, where the largest was removed in November 1962. The campaign peaked at the 22nd Congress in 1961, when Stalin's body moved to the Kremlin Wall on 31 October and Stalingrad was renamed on 11 November. The Gulag itself was formally closed in January 1960.
The consequences spread abroad. Mao's China and Enver Hoxha's Albania branded Khrushchev a revisionist, and the speech was cited as a cause of the Sino-Soviet split. In North Korea, party factions used its arguments in a failed 1956 attempt to unseat Kim Il Sung. At home the process stalled under Brezhnev until Gorbachev's glasnost; Anne Applebaum described the Thaw as two steps forward and then one, or sometimes three, back.
Source: De-Stalinization
