The scholarship on the impact on communists of
Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1956 is limited.
Generally it is located
within broader studies of organisational upheaval
s and ideological debates at the leadership
level of communist parties. Ra
rely has there been analysis of the reverberations at the
individual level. Consistent with James R. Barrett’s pioneering
approach, this paper seeks to
incorporate the personal into the political, and in
ject a subjective dimension into the familiar
top-down narrative of American communism. It
will do this by focusing on the motivations,
reactions and consequences of the defection of one Party member, the writer Howard Fast. It
will thereby illuminate the story of personal angu
ish experienced by thousands in the wake of
Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin.