The news a few days ago of the death of Viktor Grayevsky allowed some to bring some clarity to the events. It was not widely noted, not even in Britain, despite Michael Ledeenâs flattering comment in his column on Pajamas Media.It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall.
Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)
The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.
For many years after coming to Israel Grayevsky also worked as a double agent, posing as a Soviet spy but in fact serving the Israelis by feeding disinformation to Soviet intelligence officers. His Soviet handlers in Israel were KGB officers working under diplomatic cover or posing as clergy from the so-called Russian Orthodox Red Church in Israel.Given that all the priests in the âRedâ Church were KGB agents, inside and outside the country, I do not quite see why anybody had to âposeâ.
Grayevsky had been able to obtain a copy with the help of his lover, Lucia Baranowski, wife of Poland's deputy prime minister.As there was no mention of the fact that Stalinâs second purge just before his death was largely anti-Semitic, Zionist convictions do not seem to me to be a good enough reason for Grayevskyâs actions. An understanding of the documentâs importance need not have relied on any political conviction though, obviously, he had slipped far enough away from Communism not to react the way most East European leaders did and that is suppress all knowledge of the speech.
He had come to see Lucia at the headquarters of the Communist Party, where she worked as secretary to Edward Ochab, the party leader.
Grayevsky recalled: "I noticed a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: 'The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev' written on it." The booklet was one of the few top-secret copies sent from Moscow to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Lucia allowed Grayevsky to remove the booklet for a couple of hours, and he took it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, where it was photocopied.
The document provided a unique insight into the workings of the Soviet leadership. It was also the first official Soviet admission of the horrors perpetrated under Stalin. At the time Grayevsky was not employed as a spy, and he was not paid for his action, which arose from his Zionist convictions.
The speech made headlines around the world, and Khrushchevâs revelations were vigorously exploited by the United States, shocking the Communist faithful. But even more importantly, the speech provided a clear window into the world of Soviet Communism for American analysts both in and outside the government. Until then, it was possible for intelligence analysts and foreign service officers to believe that the Soviet system wasnât all that horrible. The speech put paid to that delusion.Makes one wonder about those intelligence analysts and foreign service officers. After all, it is not as if there had been no information about the Soviet Union before. Had they not read Alexander Orlov, Walter Krivitsky or Viktor Kravchenko? Clearly not.
In keeping with the general rule that the most important information about the Soviet Union invariably came from âwalk-ins,â and not from âagentsâ recruited by CIA, Grayevsky performed his world-changing act solely out of personal conviction. He had recently visited Israel to be with his dying father, and he had become a Zionist, secretly determined to emigrate to Israel as soon as he could manage it. But he was not working for the Israeli Government, or indeed any Western country.