On February 25th, 1956 at the closed XX Congress of the CP SU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev - the First Secretary of the Central Committee of Communist Party of the USSR made the most unexpected and sensational speech “On the Personality Cult and its Consequences”. In this speech all the essential values that were imposed by the totalitarian state upon its population for the period of three decades were revealed and condemned. Khrushchev’s speech remained secret, until the Gorbachev’s era. Despite this fact, the document can be viewed as the pivoting point in the Soviet system’s historic changes. Information on “the Personality Cult of Stalin” was perceived by the population in the Soviet Union, especially by the younger generation in Georgia . This statement, led to mass protests in Georgia.
Along with the “Top Secret” archival documents IDFI publishes excerpts from the official periodic media of the Soviet Georgia issued in March 1956. These newspapers were selected in the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia. We would like to emphasize, that in the Soviet Georgian printed media we were not able to find a mere mention of the events developing in Tbilisi and other cities of Georgia in March 1956.
We think that our collection of newspapers, together with the archival documents will fully display the events of 1956 and hope this will help researchers, scholars, experts, Soviet Studies specialists and society interested in this topic to better interpret the issue. Also we hope this will give the opportunity to the interested society to make a distinction between official propaganda of those times and actual political reality.