Seventy years after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (14-25 February 1956), the time for euphemisms has long passed. What occurred in February 1956 was not a minor rectification within the socialist project, nor a supposedly neutral “de-Stalinization” necessary for renewal. It was a decisive political reorientation that reshaped the trajectory of the international communist movement and altered the balance within the socialist camp. The Congress did not overthrow socialism, but it changed the theoretical and strategic line of the Soviet state in ways that strengthened revisionism, legitimized opportunism, and weakened the dictatorship of the proletariat from within.























