Ukraine 450,000 ethnic Germans from Ukraine and more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars were victims of forced deportations. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the new leader of the USSR. Having served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukrainian SSR in 1938–49, Khrushchev was intimately familiar with the republic; after taking power union-wide, he began to emphasize "the friendship" between the Ukrainian and Russian nations. In 1954, the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav was widely celebrated. Crimea was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. By 1950, the republic had fully surpassed
Nikita Khrushchev while it did not fundamentally change Soviet society, had wide-ranging effects. The speech was a factor in unrest in Poland and revolution in Hungary later in 1956, and Stalin defenders led four days of rioting in his native Georgia in June, calling for Khrushchev to resign and Molotov to take over. In meetings where the Secret Speech was read, communists would make even more severe condemnations of Stalin (and of Khrushchev), and even call for multi-party elections. However, Stalin was not publicly denounced, and his portrait remained widespread through the USSR, from airports to Khrushchev's Kremlin office. Mikhail Gorbachev, then