Tag #149964 - Interview #90532 (Grigoriy Fihtman)

In 1956, by the time of the 20th Party Congress [13], I had been a member of the Party few years. In February 1956 we were invited to a Party meeting at 8 o’clock in the evening. –This meeting lasted until 2 o’clock in the morning. They read Khrushchev’s  [14] report to us about who Stalin was and who was Beriya [15], and so on and so forth. They told us that what we were going to hear was not to be disclosed. Later newspapers published it. They couldn’t keep it a secret for longer. People got to know about it. It was a shock.  We sincerely believed that Stalin was not guilty for arrests and that Stalin didn’t know about them.  If he had known, he wouldn’t have allowed them.