"Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint and the correctness of his position was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the XVIIth Party Congress, when many prominent Party leaders and rank-and-file Party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of Communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism."

Nikita Khrushchev, 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences', speech delivered to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, 25 February 1956.