Samizdat and the Historical Self

After Stalin’s death the party and citizens faced pressure to confront the trauma caused by his regime and the challenges to the sense of legitimacy of Soviet society posed by his legacy. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech set off a process of reexamining the history of the Stalin era, to understand his “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti), and to think again about the role of individuals and their relationship to history. Signals from the top leaders set off a wave of questioning that encompassed the whole society as people in formal and informal ways reviewed the past and considered what it meant