he following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday February 25 2006
English point: In the article below, the following description of the speech was used: "a coruscating indictment of Stalinism that would roll out across the world". This is the wrong use of "coruscating". As the Guardian stylebook says - supported by a great weight of dictionaries: coruscating means sparkling, emitting flashes of light; people seem to think, wrongly, that it means the same as excoriating, which means censuring severely.
Many of those who were present recall the "deathly silence" that fell across the hall. It was the evening of February 25 1956. Unexpectedly, delegates at the 20th congress of the Communist party had been ushered into a final, closed session at central committee headquarters in Moscow. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took the tribune and began to speak, some members of the audience fainted. Others clawed their heads in despair. Most could not believe their ears.
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Without warning, Khrushchev had launched a fierce attack on his predecessor, the revered Joseph Stalin. The great vozhd (chief) who had guided the country through the second world war and died three years earlier was a "capricious and despotic character", Khrushchev said. In a four-hour indictment he condemned Stalin for creating a personality cult and unleashing "brutal violence" on anyone who stood in his way.
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