ANDREW WHITEHEAD
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​Communist Voices:
John Rettie

Communist Voices: John Rettie
​


John Rettie was a good friend - not a Communist at all, but a tremendous journalist, and when a rookie Reuters correspondent in Moscow he broke the biggest story of his career: the details of Khrushchev's secret speech at the CPSU Congress in 1956. I recorded this interview with him when we were both in Delhi - him for the Guardian and me for the BBC - in 1995. The photo which you see above was taken when John was reporting from Colombo in the 1980s. There's an affectionate obituary of John (1925-2009) here by Richard Gott. 

​
At my prompting, John wrote a detailed account of how he broke the story for History Workshop Journal in 2006. Here's an abstract of that article:



   On the night of 24 February 1956, the Moscow headquarters of the Communist Party's Central Committee was humming with activity into the early hours, with the great black limousines of the Party elite parked all round it. This puzzled westerners in Moscow such as journalist John Rettie, since the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) had formally ended that afternoon. Soon, Rettie recalls, rumours began to circulate, fuelled by western diplomats with good connections to their Central European communist colleagues and by western correspondents of communist newspapers. It was whispered that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the CPSU, had made a sensational speech denouncing Stalin for heinous crimes including murder and torture. As it was a mere three years since Stalin's death, this seemed barely credible. Nothing appeared in the Party or government press. The unsubstantiated rumours were nevertheless so insistent that Sidney Weiland, Rettie's colleague in Reuters news agency, filed a brief report. He fully expected it to be censored and indeed it vanished into the censor's maw and was never heard of again.
   The following week one of Rettie's local contacts, Kostya Orlov, set up a meeting in which he confirmed and expanded the story of the speech. He also reported that in Georgia reading of the speech had provoked riots against the ‘insult’ to their national hero, and a number of Georgian civilians and Soviet soldiers had been killed. Rettie was about to leave for Sweden, where he wrote up his notes from this meeting and filed the report (with strict instructions to disguise its origins) which broke the story to the world. In Britain it appeared in the Observer in March 1956.
   After recounting these events Rettie goes on to explore the question who told Orlov to leak the speech, and why to Rettie. He points to the strong evidence that Khrushchev wanted the speech to be known in the rest of the world as well as in the Soviet Union, and suggests why he had been a logical person to select as the conduit.

​
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        • John Sommerfield, 'More Room for Us'
      • Lynne Reid Banks
      • "Against the Tyranny of Kings and Princes": radicalism in George Gissing's 'Workers in the Dawn'
      • 'Beyond Boundary Passage'
      • 'London' by Dorf Bonarjee
    • A Mission in Kashmir >
      • Full text: A Mission in Kashmir
      • 'The People's Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s'
      • The Rise and Fall of New Kashmir
      • The Making of the 'New Kashmir' manifesto
      • 'For the Conversion of Kashmir'
      • 'I shall paint my nails with the blood of those that covet me'
      • Freda Bedi looking 'From a Woman's Window' on Kashmir
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      • Kashmir @ 70
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      • FOOC: Working at Westminster 1990
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      • FOOC: Sri Lanka's Missing Leaders 1995
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      • FOOC: Kerala's Jewish Community 1996
      • FOOC: India's Corruption Scandals 1996
      • FOOC: The Maldives Crowded Capital 1996
      • FOOC: India's Polluted Capital 1996
      • FOOC: Jinnah, Pakistan's Quaid 1997
      • FOOC: Mauritius, an Indian Ocean melting pot
      • FOOC: The Hijras Blessing 1998
      • FOOC: Massacre at Baramulla 2003
      • FOOC: An Old Photo from Kashmir 2007
      • FOOC: Prosperity Driven from Detroit 2008
      • FOOC: An Atheist in MLK's Atlanta2013
      • FOOC: San Francisco's City Lights 2014
      • FOOC: Kashmir Revisited 2014
      • FOOC: By Ferry in Burma 2014
      • FOOC: Toyah's Grave 2017
      • FOOC: The Tibetan Colony in Kashmir 2017
      • FOOC: Stars of Tamil Politics 2018
      • FOOC: Koreans in Chennai 2018
      • FOOC: Epitaph to Empire 2019
      • FOOC: Armenians in India 2019
      • FOOC: Lahore's Bradlaugh Hall 2020
    • What's your favourite political song?
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  • Gallery
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