John Dunlop of Princeton University attributed the democratization program to traditional considerations of Kremlin power politics: Gorbachev needed to isolate and remove Politburo competitors. Within weeks, Gorbachev gave a major speech referring to competitive elections of Party officials. Jerry Hough of Brookings suggested the Plenum signified the coming switch from Party to state rule. “He [Gorbachev] had already surely decided to change his base of power from the Party apparatus to a presidency.”369
Actually, the political change in January 1987 represented something far more significant than a crude struggle for personal power, or a simple foreshadowing of new forms of governance. As defined by Gorbachev at this stage, democratization was tantamount to a shift from Marxism to social democratic notions of Party structure. Gorbachev was rejecting Lenin’s doctrine of the leading role of the Party and democratic centralism as the principle of Party organization. Kotz and Weir, Gorbachev sympathizers, observed that, like social democrats elsewhere, “Gorbachev and his circle came to view democracy as an end in itself. They appeared to view it as an aim nearly equal in importance to their traditional goal of building socialism.”370
Those seeking demolition of a Communist Party rarely call the move by its true name. At first, destruction of the CPSU assumed the form of a subtle, stealth attack, because, to most Soviet people, on the surface, the new policies appeared to be part of the effort to tackle long-standing, widely recognized problems of socialist construction. The constructive reform agenda of the CPSU leadership in 1985-1987 aimed to speed up economic growth, to slow the arms race, to raise Party standards, and to deepen socialist democracy. At first, the “democratization” drive of 1987 did not obviously conflict with such goals. Supporters claimed democratization would speed up and guarantee Party reform, make perestroika irreversible, and separate Party and state functions. Moreover, at no time did Gorbachev openly proclaim: “Let us now curb the CPSU’s role, make the CC Secretariat non-functioning, substitute impotent commissions for the CC Secretariat, abandon check-up and control, and relieve the general secretary of responsibilities for implementing decisions. Let us deprive the local Party branches of advice from the center.” Yet, this was precisely what occurred. Such left-sounding phrases as “ever more radical” reform and “truly revolutionary” perestroika cloaked the real pro-capitalist direction. In addition, the idea that a General Secretary of the CPSU would advocate doing away with his own Party seemed preposterous. Lastly, all this was occurring in a confusing context, where the Soviet media used a perplexing, upside down terminology in which genuine Communists who wanted to preserve the Party and socialism were called “conservatives,” and those who worked for capitalist restoration were called “democrats,” a terminology knowingly shared by the Western capitalist media.
In warfare, when an army surrenders one stronghold and retreats, its other positions are harder to defend. In politics, similarly, a retreat on one battleground often leads to retreats elsewhere. For example, Gorbachev’s use of the media to weaken his Politburo opponents undermined collective leadership and deepened splits within the CPSU. Splits thwarted decisive and unified action on the economy and the national question. Similarly, the strident anti-Stalin campaigns and the rehabilitation of Bukharin and his economic ideas represented no balanced search for the truth about Party history. Successfully, these campaigns sought to throw the anti-revisionists on the defensive and to ready the doctrinal ground for ending CPSU management of the economy.
In March and April of 1988, a serious confrontation within the Party leadership occurred. Participants and commentators both offered widely differing accounts of what happened and its meaning. The variation in existing accounts makes it impossible to construct an exact and fully coherent chronology of events. Still, the basic outlines and significance are beyond dispute.
All commentators agree on these elements. First, the approach of the special Party Conference in June at which Gorbachev would seek approval of far-reaching political reforms increased the tensions in the top leadership and, no doubt, precipitated the crisis. Second, the affair began on March 13, 1988, when Sovietskaya Rossiya published a letter by Nina Andreyeva, a chemistry teacher at the Leningrad Soviet Technological Institute, entitled “I Cannot Renounce My Principles.”371 The letter sharply criticized some of the ideological consequences of glasnost. Third, when the Andreyeva crisis ended a month later, Gorbachev had routed and discredited his left wing opponents on the PB. Hence, the Nina Andreyeva crisis constituted the decisive turning point in the transformation of perestroika from an Andropov-inspired reform effort within the traditional context of Soviet socialism to an open attack on the major pillars of socialism—the Communist Party, socialized property, and central planning.
Gorbachev, his apologists, and many Western commentators, have propagated a one-sided interpretation of the events of March and April 1988. They characterized Andreyeva’s letter as a “neo-Stalinist,” anti-Semitic, Russian nationalist, anti-perestroika manifesto and asserted or implied that its publication resulted from a conspiracy headed by Ligachev intent on derailing perestroika.372 Some even suggested the whole affair was a “micro-model for a coup d’etat.”373 These views, however, rested entirely on hearsay, rumors, and a tendentious reading of events. More plausibly, Gorbachev and Yakovlev deliberately used the occasion of this letter and Ligachev’s support of it as a pretext to strike at Ligachev and throw their opponents into disarray before the upcoming Party conference. In any case, that was what happened.
Andreyeva’s letter fell far short of a “rabidly anti-Semitic,” “frontal attack” on perestroika from a “neo-Stalinist nationalist point of view.”374 Its title, which an American journalist called “provocative,”375 actually came from a Gorbachev speech, and the letter closed with a quotation from Gorbachev on the importance of Marxist-Leninist principles. The letter contained no discussion of Gorbachev’s economic, political or foreign policies. Instead, it confined its criticism to ideological matters, about which it warned of the ideological “confusion” and “one-sidedness” being sown by certain glasnost writers, confusion that was affecting her students. Andreyeva criticized the historical treatments of the playwright, M. Shatrov, and the novelist, A. Rybakov, for their distortions of history, particularly of Stalin’s place in history. She also criticized two anti-socialist tendencies, the “neo-liberals” or “left-liberals” and “neo-Slavophiles” or Russian nationalists. She assailed the former for favoring a humanist socialism devoid of class partisanship, for favoring individualism over collectivism, for “modernistic quests in the field of culture, God-seeking, technocratic idols, the preaching of the ‘democratic’ charms of present-day capitalism and fawning over its achievements.” She scored the neo-Slavophiles for romanticizing pre-revolutionary Russia and the peasantry, while ignoring the terrible oppression of the peasants and the revolutionary role of the working class.376