1956 February: Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev
delivers speech denouncing Joseph Stalin’s “Cult of Personality” at the
Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress. June: Riots in Poznan,
Poland, are suppressed by police, with 80 killed. October: Soviet tanks
ring Warsaw, but war is avoided. Soviet forces intervene to crush Hun-
garian independence.1957 KGB Chair Ivan Serov helps Nikita Khrushchev win victory
over party opponents in Antiparty Group.1958 25 December: A. N. Shelepin named head of KGB; Ivan Serov
moves to GRU.
1961 August: Soviet military and East German authorities close the
inter-German border and begin construction of the Berlin Wall.1961–1962 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British Secret Intel-
ligence Service successfully run Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy as an agent
within the Soviet military establishment. Penkovskiy’s information
plays critical role in American successes in resolving the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
1962 June: Novocherkassk riots are repressed by troops of the MVD
(Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the Red Army; there are more than a
hundred casualties.1964 October: KGB plays crucial role in coup that replaces Nikita
Khrushchev with Leonid Brezhnev.
1967 May: Yuri Andropov is named head of KGB. July: John Walker
volunteers in Washington to work for the KGB. (Walker spies for
Moscow until 1985, and betrays U.S. government communication pro-
grams.) November: KGB reconstitutes the Secret Political Directorate
of the Joseph Stalin years as the Fifth (Counterintelligence among the
Intelligentsia) Directorate.1968 August: Soviet military and KGB crush the “Prague Spring.”
1970 December: Major workers protests commence in Poland.1971 First Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) is signed in
Moscow; verification is guaranteed by “national technical means.”
1974 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union.xviii •CHRONOLOGY06-313 (00) FM.qxd 7/27/06 7:53 AM Page xviii