Just as, during the war, newspapers had been glued over windows for protection against flying shards, the role of newspapers in the Soviet political system was to block out information and protect the facade of the state. A few hundred copies of Khrushchev’s speech were printed for internal use and marked “strictly secret.” The first public text appeared in English a few weeks later in The New York Times, but it did not make it into the Russian press until 1989.
