After the XIX Party Congress…everyone in the orchestra was playing on his own instrument anytime he felt like it, and there was no direction from the conductor.N.S. KhrushchevSome time ago a leading biographer of Joseph Stalin observed with a touch of irony that de-stalinization was a process “not only made possible but actually initiated by the death of Stalin.” Accordingly, some have turned to events in the final months of the dictator's life for evidence that, to the last, Stalin retained a firm grip on the levers of power; others have pointed to the new era of moderation in agriculture, literature and criminal justice which appears to have set in following Stalin's death. It was, so it seems, only with the conclusion of Stalin's reign that the hopes for stability and liberalization first raised at the end of World War II could finally be met. Only the dictator's death, it has been argued, could have put an end to absolute autocracy and opened the way for a new era of oligarchical rule.