Although the speech itself remained secret, on 5 March 1956, Khrushchev distributed a written account of Stalin's crimes to the 18 million Soviet citizens who were also Communist Party members, and who now discovered that their idol was a mass murder (at least, according to his successor). Reactions in the Soviet Union were mixed and confused. When the revelations of the crimes committed by Stalin and his followers found their way to the party leadership in East Germany, they were accompanied by an internal document which included a guide on how the revelations should be interpreted, together with an estimation of how the revelations would be impacting Soviet society. Towards the end of March 1956, Schirdewan again encountered Nikita Khrushchev, this time at the funeral of the Polish leader, Bolesław Bierut who had died suddenly - some said he was poisoned - a couple of weeks after returning to Warsaw following the 20th Party Congress in Moscow. Khrushchev took the opportunity to express his fury over the way his publicising of Stalin's crimes had been communicated to the party leadership by the Ulbricht government in Berlin.