Much of the rest of the speech was tendentious. Listing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev focused almost exclusively on the victims of 1937 and 1938, singling out the ninety-eight Central Committee members who were shot, as well as a handful of Old Bolsheviks. “The wave of mass arrests began to recede in 1939,” he declared—which was a patent falsehood, as in fact the numbers of prisoners increased in the 1940s.
