One Life is Not Enough

by K. Natwar Singh

On the night of 24-25 February 1956, he addressed a secret meeting at the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. His criticism of Joseph Stalin shook the communist world from Peking to Prague. The speech gradually leaked out. He said, ‘It is clear that here, Stalin showed in a whole series of cases, his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power.’ The first nail in the coffin of Communism had been hammered. China was an exception. Publicly, Mao Tse Tung supported Nikita Khrushchev but in private he condemned him and his unbridled denunciation of Stalin. In 1964, Khrushchev was the victim of a coup led by L.I. Brezhnev, who assumed the mantle of the General Secretary of the Party. The rot had set in. The US was bleeding the USSR in insidious and clandestine ways. The USSR in those years was spending 25 per cent of its budget on the military—navy, air force and the nuclear programme.