Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation’s defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatsoever. All that was certain was that the Soviet system and the party itself remained impeccably pure and bore no responsibility for the tyrant’s atrocities.

Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 1149