20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

For the moment Rikosi appears to have won.

But then in February 1956 and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in a closed session the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivers the so-called secret speech.

denouncing Stalin's personality cult and some of his crimes.

The speech is not a rejection of communist rule.

He specifically recommended removing Stalin from the position of the general secretary.

Now, Lenin's wife tried to have that testament read aloud to party Congress, and Stalin managed to suppress it.

The Congress voted by slim margin to keep it secret.

And that vote was possible in part because Stalin had spent two years filling that Congress with people who owed him their position.

That right there, that moment, a founding leader's own written warning was suppressed by the person being warned about using the very power that made that warning very necessary.

So after Lenin's death, what happens is Stalin formed a strategic alliance with two other senior Bolsheviks, Grigory and Lev, to marginalize Trotsky.

It's not loyalty.

It is an absence of agency in people closest to you because you have spent decades training them and punishing them if they do something otherwise.