Letter of the Twenty Five
Open-knowledge reference entry
Letter from 25 figures of Soviet science, literature and art to Leonid Brezhnev against the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin (Russian: Письмо 25 деятелей советской науки, литературы и искусства Л. И. Брежневу против реабилитации И. В. Сталина) known as the Letter of the Twenty Five (Russian: Письмо двадцати пяти) is an open letter from figures of science, literature and art, written on February 14, 1966 to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev about the inadmissibility of "partial or indirect rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin".
Prerequisites
According to the authors of the letter, "in recent times, in some speeches and articles in our press, tendencies have emerged that are aimed, in fact, at the partial or indirect rehabilitation of Stalin." In connection with this, the authors of the message considered it their duty, on the eve of the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, to convey their opinion on this issue to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev.
In the spring of 1966, Ernst Genry instructed Marlen Korallov to collect signatures for this letter from artists (this is how the signatures of Oleg Efremov, Marlen Khutsiev, Georgy Tovstonogov, Maya Plisetskaya, and Pavel Korin were obtained). Henry himself collected the signatures of famous physicists. As Sakharov recalled:
Now I assume that the initiative for our letter belonged not only to Ernest Genry, but also to his influential friends (where – in the party apparatus, or in the KGB, or somewhere else – I do not know). Henry was in no way a "dissident".
Contents
In their letter, the cultural figures expressed their "deep concern" about the possibility of a partial revision of the decisions of the 20th and 22nd Congresses, after, in the authors' opinion, "truly terrible facts about Stalin's crimes" became known:
To this day, we have not learned of a single fact, not a single argument that would allow us to think that the condemnation of the personality cult was in any way wrong. On the contrary, it is difficult to doubt that a significant portion of the striking, truly terrible facts about Stalin's crimes, confirming the absolute correctness of the decisions of both congresses, have not yet been made public.
They spoke of Stalin's responsibility for the deaths of countless innocent people, the country's unpreparedness for the Great Patriotic War, and the departure from Leninist norms in party and state life. Stalin, in the opinion of the authors of the letter, "perverted the idea of communism".
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