Obituary: John Rettie

The speech to the Soviet Communist Party's 20th congress detailing the dictator's crimes as a tyrant, murderer and torturer of party members was smuggled out of Moscow and published in the West.

Fifty years later Rettie recalled that its consequences, not fully foreseen by Khrushchev, shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its communist allies, notably in central Europe.  Forces were unleashed that eventually changed the course of history.

Stalin had died only three years previously and was still mourned by most people in the Soviet Union. Much later, Soviet sources said  some were so convulsed as they listened that they suffered heart attacks; others committed suicide afterwards.

In the days after the congress diplomats of central European communist states began to whisper that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin at a secret session.

"No details were forthcoming. I was working as the second Reuters correspondent in Moscow to Sidney Weiland, who - more for form's sake than anything - tried to cable a brief report of this bald fact to London. As expected, the censors suppressed it."

Then, the evening before Rettie was due to go on holiday to Stockholm, a Russian informant who he suspected was a KGB agent told him (over a gramophone record played loudly to confuse microphones assumed to be in the walls of his flat) of Khrushchev's indictment.

The informant had no notes, far less a text of the speech. "He told me that the party throughout the Soviet Union heard of it at special meetings of members in factories, farms, offices and universities, when it was read to them once, but only once. At such meetings in Georgia, where Stalin was born, members were outraged at the denigration by a Russian of their own national hero. Some people were killed in the ensuing riots and trains arrived in Moscow from Tbilisi with their windows smashed.

"My problem was: could I believe him? It is easy now, with hindsight, to realise that of course what he told me must have been true. But it was a colossal risk to believe such a tale from a single and somewhat dubious source, with little corroborating evidence, and to stake the authority of Reuters on it. I had only a few hours to make up my mind before flying to Stockholm. That raised another problem. In the 1930s many foreign correspondents had found censorship so restrictive that they often flew to the capital of then independent Latvia, Riga, to file their stories before returning to Moscow. Surprisingly, the Soviet government did not object. But after two decades of Stalinism no western correspondent dared to do the same in the 1950s. At the very least, expulsion would have resulted, if not worse.

"I didn't know what to do, so I called Weiland, my boss. It was nearly midnight, but we agreed to meet on the street outside the Central Telegraph office, where no hidden microphones could overhear us. It was a very cold winter, and we tramped through the snow as I recounted the tale, pausing from time to time under street lamps to consult my voluminous notes.”

In the end they decided to believe the informant, who had been reliable in the past. Besides that, a New York Times correspondent was also flying out the next day and they suspected he would immediately report on the rumours. “We would be beaten on a story of which we had an incomparably better - and exclusive - account. Unthinkable!”

The next day, feeling tense, Rettie flew with his wife to Stockholm, the fat notebook burning a hole in his pocket.

“We stayed in a hotel for the first night, much of which I spent typing out the two stories and dictating them by telephone to London. I had spoken earlier to the news editor and explained that under no circumstances should either story bear my name or even a Moscow dateline, and that the speech had to be based on ‘communist sources’ – no others were possible.

"When I was ready, Reuters called me back and put me through to ‘copy’ – the copytakers. I was extremely nervous and assumed a false American accent to disguise my identity. In vain. ‘Thank you, John,’ said the familiar voice when I finished my long dictation. When the Swedish papers appeared with Khrushchev's ‘Stalin Sensation’ splashed across the front pages, it was datelined Bonn, with the riots in Georgia sourced from Vienna.

"In the West, the impact of the speech received a colossal boost from the publication of the full, albeit sanitised, text in The Observer and The New York Times. This was the first time the full text had been available for public scrutiny anywhere in the world."

Later, after being subjected to KGB pressure, Rettie asked the British ambassador to send a message to Reuters seeking his recall. 

Rettie subsequently worked for the BBC and also wrote for British newspapers. He returned to Moscow for The Guardian 32 years after his world-beating scoop and tried to find out who had authorised the leak of the speech to him. He concluded it must have been Khrushchev himself.

A fluent Spanish and Russian speaker, Rettie was known as a stickler for the correct use of English. He often used to rant about the wording of some BBC World Service news bulletin or other or else sputter over a mispronunciation of a name, usually Russian.

Rettie died of cancer in hospital on 10 January. ■