The year of the Montgomery boycott had also been the year of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin as a tyrant, murderer, and traitor to Communist principles. Endorsement of these revelations by the Kremlin caused massive psychological trauma among American Communists. Some beat their hands bloody against the wall. Despair only deepened in the fall of 1956 when Khrushchev himself sent Soviet tanks to crush a rebellion by Hungarian workers whom the Kremlin had portrayed as blissfully socialist and free.
