“In the post-Stalin period much changed, but the party remained inviolable. Khrushchev’s attempt to relax the party’s tight hold on everyone and everything by granting a larger role to the government apparatus cost him the post of general secretary of the party.
During Perestroika a policy was adopted of fundamentally reorganizing party activity, democratizing it internally, and later changing its very role in society.
…The fact is that the CPSU began the reforms when leaders who were adherents of reform were in its leadership. Moreover, those changes would not have begun at all if the initiative for them had not come from the CPSU…[thus, resulting in the formation of] the reform group at the head of the party.”
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Source: Gorbachev, M. (2000). English edition of the “Razmyshleniia o proshlom i budushchem”, USA: Columbia University Press, pp. 22.
probably not an original thought but it occurs to me that maybe the 40 years of "de-Stalinisation" was actually just fighting against the idea of having to use force to keep a besieged nation together