The NCP began internally to criticise Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union in 1988 and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union established relations with communist and workers' parties globally. In the 1990s Party Congresses adopted resolutions repudiating and denouncing Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalin 20th Congress speech (Secret Speech) and defining its ideology around the "great revolutionary teachers of humanity, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" and the "great revolutionary leaders of the struggling masses, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh".