It's not true that the Secret Speech almost caused the USSR to unravel. The only serious violence in the USSR itself was in Georgia where there was rioting to protest the denunciation of the "great son of the Georgian nation" Stalin. The rioting turned into a Georgian nationalist manifestation and there were calls for the independence of Georgia. But the disturbances were quickly crushed by the Soviet army. The central authorities in 1956 had both the will and the means to keep the country from falling apart.
It would be a little closer to the truth--but still inaccurate--to say that the downgrading of Stalin almost caused the Soviet empire
in east Europe to fall apart. But the existing regimes managed to survive everywhere except Poland and Hungary, and in Poland the new Gomulka government proved satisfactory to the Soviet Union. The only nation which really tried to break away from the Soviet bloc was Hungary. The only meaning I can see to "Suez saved the USSR" would be the following extremely dubious idea: that if not for Suez, the Soviets might not have intervened in Hungary, and that might have led not just to a non-Communist Hungary but to the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe, which in turn would have led to the collapse of the USSR decades earlier than in OTL.
The reason I call that extremely dubious is that in the first place the Soviets would almost certainly have intervened in Hungary, Suez or no Suez. As I wrote here a couple of years ago (I have updated a link):
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...vention-in-hungary-1956.423175/#post-15373254
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(3) *The role of the Suez Crisis*: As I recall from my reading of Charles Gati's *Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt* (2006) on which I relied heavily for Part One, Gati like most historians, rejects the idea that Hungary would have turned out differently if not for Suez. OTOH, the minutes of the October 31 Presidium meeting do contain the words by Khrushchev: "If we withdrew from Hungary, it would encourage the American, English, and French imperialists. They would attribute it to our weakness and would swing into attack. We would demonstrate our weakness [with the withdrawal]. In that case our Party would not understand us. *Besides Egypt, we would give them Hungary as well.*" [my emphasis] Gusztav Kecskes comments:
"On October 30, the previous day, the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party assented to the Soviet government statement that Soviet military units--whenever the Hungarian government asked--would be withdrawn from Budapest and the Soviet government was ready to discuss the eventual complete withdrawal from Hungary. What explains such a radical change in Khrushchev's and Presidium's views by the 31st? Soviet archival resources at our disposal--which is still minimal despite the recent discoveries--do not make an unambiguous answer possible. Is it the Suez case? There is no direct evidence for that since the most recent developments of the Suez crisis--the deployment of British and French troops--did not come up during that session of the Presidium's.33 On the other hand, in similar situations--Berlin in 1953 and Czechoslovakia in 1968--the Soviet leadership never needed a Suez-type stimulation to come to such a decision. The first Soviet military intervention in Hungary--on October 23, 1956--could also be brought up in this context. In other words, in all likelihood the Soviet troops would have been deployed to crush the Hungarian uprising even without the Suez events since, by the end of October, the extent of changes in Hungary exceeded the threshold the Soviet leaders found acceptable: a vision of the total collapse of a communist dictatorship had emerged while a democratic regime was developing. All these automatically threatened the unity of the Soviet bloc.34
"At the same time the Suez action might have *facilitated* the decision about the Soviet military intervention by extending an excellent distraction to thwart a probable international uproar in the wake of the bloody crush of the uprising in Hungary."
http://www.coldwar.hu/publications/kecskes_suez.html
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Even if we assume that the Soviets would have allowed a non-Communist Hungary if not for Suez, this would not necessarily prevent them from maintaining their hold on the rest of east Europe--it would simply indicate that they saw Hungary as less strategically important than East Germany or Poland or Czechoslovakia--let alone on the USSR itself (and don't forget that the USSR had survived for decades after 1917 without any satellites in eastern Europe). But it's not even necessary to explore this, because Suez almost certainly wasn't responsible for "saving" Communism even in Hungary, let alone the USSR.
