Yet, within days, the word Stalinism was being expunged from a new Soviet dictionary, and three years later my grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality” in his famous “Secret Speech” to the Communist Party’s XXth Congress. The Khrushchev thaw that followed may have been short-lived, but for the first time in Soviet history the possibility of change was opened – a possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev seized upon in 1985.