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Tremendous quotes! Hope you don't mind one possible correction: I suspect that the correct translation of Nikita Krushchev's phrase is "the cult of personality". This was a direct reference to Joseph Stalin. His address was (for the time) was a breathtaking repudiation of the Stalinist era and ushered in a slight but important loosening of the repressive Soviet regime. Krushchev, among other things, permitted the publication of Solzhenytsin's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, possibly the first officially sanctioned literary description of the Gulag. Despite Kruschev's shoe-banging rhetoric, he was more liberal domestically than his predecessors or successors until Gorbachev.