NINETEEN FIFTY-SIX WAS one of the most difficult and contradictory years in the history of international Communism. It began in a promising way, with Nikita Khrushchev's so-called “secret speech” at the twentieth congress of the CPSU, in which the leader of the USSR did the previously unthinkable: he denounced Stalin and his crimes. Khrushchev's speech sent shock waves through the socialist world, including the GDR, and it led democratic reformers to believe that they now had an ally at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. This belief was not completely naive. Khrushchev was indeed a reformer. He criticized East German leader Walter Ulbricht's dogmatic approach in the presence of other high-level Communists and urged the SED leadership to give up its “rigid approach” and finally address “the problems facing the SED and the GDR,” as one of the Soviet leader's East German interlocutors later remembered. But the year that had begun with such promise ended eight months later with the Hungarian revolution and a Soviet intervention in Hungary that crushed hopes for democratic reform. The year 1956 in the socialist world could reasonably be described, in the words of Charles Dickens, as “the best of times” but also “the worst of times,” “the season of Light” and “the season of Darkness,” “the spring of hope” and “the winter of despair.”

Gustav Just was one of the GDR's key democratic reformers in 1956. He had previously worked for the SED Central Committee in the realm of culture and was now serving as the associate editor of Sonntag. Because of his work at Sonntag, Just was in a position to exert considerable influence on other East German intellectuals. After Khrushchev's speech he decided to make use of that influence. He and his fellow reformers believed that the events in the Soviet Union had changed everything. The way was now clear, they argued, for democratic reforms throughout the socialist world, especially in the GDR. In the 1930s Stalin had persecuted anyone who showed signs of independence. Khrushchev now seemed to be welcoming reformers like Just—perhaps because he was a reformer himself. “We believed that after the twentieth Party Congress it was simply impossible that Stalinist trials … could still take place.