In excerpts from a conference organized in 2003 to re-evaluate the figure of Stalin fifty years after his death, Losurdo harshly criticized the revelations contained in Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech". According to Losurdo, Stalin's bad reputation derived not from the crimes committed by the latter, which he compared to others of his time, but from the falsehoods present in the report that Khrushchev read during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. Losurdo gave credit to one of the main accusations that were at the base of the bloody repression against the opponents, i.e. the existence of the "full-bodied reality of the fifth column" in the Soviet Union ready to ally with the enemy. Losurdo reiterated that he did not want to rehabilitate Stalin, but only to put him in the historical context and present a more neutral analysis of the facts, implementing a revisionism of the general experience of real socialism, considered a past yet useful study to understand the future dynamics of socialism.