The post-1953 political relaxation, often referred to as the “Thaw,” ushered in an era of doubt and criticism. Gone were the times of absolute certainties dictated by a presumably infallible supreme leader. Totalitarian imagery that had functioned for decades through “tremendum et fascinosum(the alternation of fear and hope, terror and salvation)”27 found its spell radically questioned. In spite of its limitations, Khrushchev's Secret Speech, one of the most important political documents of the twentieth century, revealed, to a limited extent, the crimes against the party. But its significance lay in the fact that it “stretched the limits of unbelief in postwar Soviet Russia.”28 Most importantly, the first wave of de-Stalinization put an end to terror as an instrument of governance: “The reforms to criminal justice, especially the amnesties, and the debunking of the Stalin cult in the Secret Speech stand as lasting achievements of the period, for they ensured that full re-Stalinization—of the Gulag, and of the Stalin cult—would never again be possible.”29 As early as March 1953, K. P. Gorshenin, the minister of justice, argued in Pravda that the amnesty decree, which released a total of 1,201,738 people, was evidence of “Soviet humanity.” He advocated for “socialist legality” as the correct way to ensure the country's “transition from socialism to communism.”30
However, de-Stalinization advanced reforms that “threw up more questions than they answered.”31 In the realm of culture and public life, de-Stalinization generated a panoply of initiatives aimed at moving away from the petrified doctrine toward the origins of Marxism as a philosophy, toward the so-called young Marx as the archetype of a pure, non-adulterated socialist impetus. In the Soviet Union, but also Eastern Europe, “de-Stalinization did not mean the end of the communist ideal. To the contrary, it meant a rejuvenation of the idealism and the intellectual identity of the pre-Stalin period.” Or, in the words of acclaimed Soviet poetess Bella Akhmadulina, “The Revolution isn't dead; the Revolution is sick, and we must help it.”32 Consequently, the political emancipation (de-Bolshevization) of Soviet and East European intellectuals coincided with—and was catalyzed by—the wave of liberalization touched off by Nikita Khrushchev's historical revelations.33 While the campaigns that followed the Soviet leader's Secret Speech “set out to emancipate the popular consciousness from the Stalin cult, it also inadvertently risked the ‘de-Sovietization’ of public opinion, as swathes of the Soviet population reacted in violent, unpredictable and ‘anti-Soviet’ ways to de-Stalinization.”34 All the Stalinist theoretical and political constructions had been denounced as a horrible hoax: the illusions could no longer cover the squalid reality. The dogmas had proved their total inanity. Yearning for moral reform of Communism was the basic motivation for the neo-Marxist revival in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed, “it was a Marxism that led back to a European tradition of social-democratic reformism.”35 The intellectuals' rebellion against totalitarian controls threatened the endurance of Soviet-type regimes. The terrortainted legitimacy of Sovietism was questioned by critics who could not be accused of belonging to the defeated social classes. With their outspoken advocacy of humanism and democracy, they contributed to eroding the apparently monolithic consensus.
In a certain way this movement had been anticipated by Yugoslav theorists (Moša Pjade, Milovan Djilas, the Praxis group) who felt compelled, by the very logic of the political conflict with the Soviet Stalinist elite, to rediscover the initial impulses of Marxist anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.36 Those most active, however, in the struggle against Stalinist obscurantism were Hungarian and Polish intellectuals, the exponents of a radical political outlook that inflamed the masses throughout the hectic months after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This fact has to be related to the traditions of the Left in those countries, but also to the existence of a confusion within the Communist nomenklatura heightened by the growing antibureaucratic radicalism of the working class. We have to take into consideration, in this respect, the evolution of the class consciousness of both the working class and the intellectuals and the existence of a certain psycho-emotional communication, even osmosis, between these two social groups. I stress these facts in order to suggest an explanation—beyond the sheer force of the political police—for the relative political passivity of the working class in other Communist countries (such as Romania and Bulgaria) and for the astonishing neutrality of the Czech and Slovakian intellectuals during the Hungarian and Polish revolts in 1956.