What hurt French/European communists more: Secret Speech or Hungarian Revolution?

What hurted French and European communist parties more - Secret speech made by Nikita Sergeievih Khrushchev and condemnation of Stalin's crimes or bloody suppression of Hungarian Revolution?
 
It's gotta be awkward to be in the position of saying "We worshiped Stalin as a god for thirty years, but we now believe he was a mass-murdering scumbag, because that's what Khrushchev, the man we now worship as a god, told us."

I'm gonna say that alone would have been enough to make Moscow-aligned parties a laughingstock. At least the invasion of Hungary didn't contain such a blatant contradiction at the heart of it, ie. it could plausibly be portrayed as an attack against reactionary(ie. anti-Communist) elements.
 
It's gotta be awkward to be in the position of saying "We worshiped Stalin as a god for thirty years, but we now believe he was a mass-murdering scumbag, because that's what Khrushchev, the man we now worship as a god, told us."

I'm gonna say that alone would have been enough to make Moscow-aligned parties a laughingstock. At least the invasion of Hungary didn't contain such a blatant contradiction at the heart of it, ie. it could plausibly be portrayed as an attack against reactionary(ie. anti-Communist) elements.

Maybe but everything indicate that Hungary hurt the Western Communists more.
 
I can believe it. But what are your reasons for saying that?

The Danish Communist party was one of the first which splintered over it, and that was a result of the Hungarian Revolt, which made the leader of the party decide he could no longer defend USSR, remember pretty much all of Western Europe had been under occupation a few years earlier, with a lot of the Communist top being in the resistance. As such the Hungarian Revolt meant they ended up seeing a comparison with their own occupation by the Nazis.
 
In Italy the invasion of Hungary was a very big hit for the communist and the socialist, many decided to leave the party or rethink to their alliance with the PCI and basically the only thing that really keep all together was Togliatti leadership; nevertheless after that the voice for a more independent political line started to be heared...or at least were not ruthlessy suppressed
 
By itself the Secret Speech would not have hurt the Communist parties of the West that much, if there had been no violence in eastern Europe and if Hungary had followed a reformist path similar to Poland. Yes, the criticism of Stalin was embarrassing for those leaders who had previously lauded him, but remember that western communist leaders had successfully coped with reversal after reversal in the CPSU's line. (Social democrats could be a brother party one day and no better than fascists the next, etc. Indeed, the very *word* fascism could be almost entirely eliminated from the Communist vocabulary of abuse from late 1939 to June 22, 1941.) Moreover, Khrushchev still maintained that Stalin had been basically right about problems of socialist construction--there was no criticism of forced collectivization, for example (indeed, no admission that it *was* forced) , and no attempts as of 1956 to rehabilitate Bukharin (let alone Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc.) Stalin's faults were portrayed as *personal* ones--vanity, vengefulness, paranoia, etc., of which people like Beria had taken advantage. Thus, western communist leaders could still maintain that the Soviet *system* was basically sound (and had even shown a readiness to "renew" itself, to "admit past mistakes" etc.). All that was necessary was for the cult of the CPSU to fully supplant that of Stalin, and what made that easier is that already in 1953-5 the cult of Stalin had been toned down somewhat and there had been a greater emphasis on the collective wisdom of the CPSU and its leaders.
 
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