Was Stalinism made by one man or by the Soviet system?

The short answer

• The system depended on one man. Stalin’s colleagues had approved and carried out his policies, even while fearing him and privately doubting many of them. His concentration of power held the system’s extremes in place. After his death none of the heirs could claim his authority, and none had the authority or wish to continue mass terror. Within days they replaced personal rule with a collective leadership.
• The Gulag had become too large and too costly. The camps held about 2.5 million people in 1953, with another 2.7 million in special settlements. Forced labor was unproductive and expensive to guard; Gulag officials and economic ministers knew that the system cost more than it produced. Beria proposed reducing it. Releasing prisoners and abandoning huge projects such as the Arctic railway from Salekhard to Igarka promised savings as well as relief from fear.
• Prisoners and borderlands had stopped being afraid. Many political prisoners had served as soldiers or partisans and knew how to organize. In the special camps they built networks across national lines. Excluded from the amnesty, they refused to work, leaving the authorities to choose between reform and massacre. Tanks crushed Kengir in June 1954, while elsewhere the leadership mostly chose reforms. The strikes showed the limits of governing the camps through fear alone.
• Stalin’s heirs needed a new legitimacy. Khrushchev and his colleagues needed an explanation for the killing of so many loyal communists under their government. Dating the crimes from 1934 and blaming Stalin personally allowed them to condemn the Terror while retaining the party, collectivization and the planned economy. The Secret Speech also strengthened Khrushchev against rivals such as Molotov and Malenkov, more closely associated with the worst years. It served his political ascent as well as the party’s search for legitimacy.

What it changed

The return of the prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were released between 1954 and 1960, and many were formally rehabilitated, often after death. Historian Stephen F. Cohen called this “the victims return”: survivors came home to colleagues and neighbors who had denounced them. For a time literature could describe the camps in print, including Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

Restored homelands, for some. The state restored some homelands sooner than others. In 1957 it restored the Chechen-Ingush, Kalmyk, Karachay and Balkar autonomies and allowed those peoples to return. Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic. Crimean Tatars, whose homeland is still hatched on the 1956 map, could return only in 1989. Recognition of the wrong done to entire nations came slowly and unevenly.

Revolt and repression in the bloc. Reform in the Soviet bloc met different limits in Poland and Hungary. Polish protests in June 1956 brought Władysław Gomułka back without a Soviet invasion. Hungary’s October revolution was crushed by Soviet forces on 4 November, killing about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers. The speech had encouraged reformers, but the crisis showed that Moscow would allow changes of leadership without allowing a country to leave the Soviet alliance.

An unfinished reckoning. Stalin’s body left the Mausoleum in 1961, and cities bearing his name were renamed: Stalingrad became Volgograd. The reckoning did not reach the system itself. Under Brezhnev criticism was muted again, and only in the late 1980s did the full history of famine, Terror and the camps become public. The states that emerged in 1991 continue to debate his legacy.