De-Stalinization, aborted with the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, started with new vigour. Articles about Stalin poured from the pages of Moskovskie novosti. But the real repentance – a way of coming to terms with the past – never took place. That would have required the re-examination not just of Stalin, but of the entire system that led him to power. It would also have meant ‘digging out’ the bodies of millions of people who supported the regime. And this was something that the 1960s generation was still not ready to do. Faithful to the memory of their fathers, they continued to perpetuate the myth that Stalinism was a distortion rather than a consequence of the Soviet system based on ‘a thousand-year-old model of statehood’, as Alexander Yakovlev put it. Publications about the crimes of Stalinism appeared next to those about the virtues of Lenin. Perestroika was carried out under the slogan of ‘more socialism’.
In January 1987 – the year of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution – Moskovskie novosti launched a new rubric: ‘Byloe’ (the Past). The first article in ‘Byloe’ was written in the form of a Q&A with Lenin: the newspaper posed questions to Lenin and provided answers from his works. On the same pages, Mikhail Shatrov, the playwright who specialized in plays about Lenin, and Stephen Cohen, a biographer of Bukharin and a left-wing historian at Princeton University, discussed the relevance of Lenin’s ideas under the headline: ‘TO RETURN IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD’. ‘Of course we must again and again go back to Lenin, to the full volume of his ideas, particularly to the ideas of the last years of his life. We must understand and make use of them to move forward,’ Shatrov said.14 The notion that the ideas of Bukharin and Lenin were still relevant in the late 1980s was validated by Cohen.
The Stalinists were not about to surrender history to the liberals, however: they hit back. In March 1988 Sovetskaya Rossiya, a mouthpiece of the hardliners in the party, printed a reader’s letter headed ‘I Cannot Forsake Principles’, signed by one Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacher from the Leningrad Polytechnic. A nearly full-page Stalinist attack on Glasnost and Perestroika, it was a manifesto of conservatives in the country. ‘The subject of repressions has been blown out of all proportions and overshadows an objective interpretation of the past,’ she wrote. ‘They try to make us believe that the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes.’15
In particular, Andreeva singled out Shatrov for attack – not only as an ideological opponent but as competition for control over historic discourse. The letter also contained more than a grain of anti-Semitism. The Soviet national interests had been betrayed by the Jewish followers of Trotsky, she wrote, while ethnic Slavs had heroically stood up to fascism.
As David Remnick, who met Andreeva at the time, wrote, she was a woman of letters. She used to write false anonymous denunciations about her colleagues’ ideological faults and was even thrown out of her institute’s party cell, though she was restored at the request of the KGB. The letter was expanded and printed by Sovetskaya Rossiya on the instructions of Yegor Ligachev – Yakovlev’s opposite number on the conservative flank of the party.
After the publication of Andreeva’s letter, Ligachev gathered media chiefs in his office to tell them that everyone must read this ‘wonderful’ article and instructed provincial papers to reprint it, giving it the prominence due to a party line. Many obediently followed the instruction.
Both Gorbachev and Yakovlev were out of the country when the letter came out and took it as being ‘nothing less than a call to arms, an attempted coup’. ‘It was meant to overturn everything that had been conceived in 1985… It had a firm, sort of Stalinist accusatory form as in the style on the front pages of our old newspapers… This was a harsh bellow of a command: “Stop! Everything is over!”’ Yakovlev said later.16 He interrupted his visit to Mongolia and urgently flew back to Moscow.
Andreeva’s letter was meant and, more importantly, perceived as a signal of a shift in the party line. There was a history of such ‘impromptu’ letters in the Soviet press. In 1952 there was a letter from a woman called Lidia Timashuk that prompted an ugly prosecution of Jewish doctors who were accused of deliberately harming senior Soviet figures, the so-called Doctors’ Plot.
In the same week as Andreeva’s letter was published, Vzglyad, the liberal television show, was taken off air. But the fact that the anti-Perestroika manifesto was printed in a newspaper rather than broadcast on television or radio gave it weight, permanence and most importantly historic context. The article put the intelligentsia into a state of stupor. The liberal press fell silent for nearly three weeks. Almost nobody dared to respond. ‘It was a terrifying time,’ Yegor Yakovlev said. ‘Absolutely everything we had ever hoped for and dreamed of was on the line.’17 Moskovskie novosti was the first to break the silence. Gorbachev also took the article as a frontal attack on his policies and convened a special Politburo meeting which lasted two days.
Alexander Yakovlev was charged to draft an editorial in Pravda that would spell out the party line. Liberal editors and journalists breathed a sigh of relief. Vzglyad was put back on air. The Andreeva affair was the last test of the ‘signalling’ system which had operated throughout Soviet history. The whole point of the printed word was its permanence. But when two opposing signals went through two party newspapers within two weeks, the system went into convulsions. It was clear that there was no single party line. As Korotich, the editor of Ogonyok, told Yegor at the time: ‘We used to keep trying to find out what’s going on. We overlooked the fact that we ourselves were creating the situation.’18
The clash over Andreeva’s letter was part of a wider conflict between two opposite ideologies. Behind Andreeva and her backers stood a centuries-old ideology of the absolute and sacred power of the state, which had been exemplified by Stalinist rule. A human being in that system was only a small cog. Closely related to the ideas of National Socialism or fascism, which Yakovlev had risen against back in the early 1970s, it was a noxious compound of anti-Semitism and chauvinism. The opposite ideology was one of ‘socialism with a human face’ that extolled individual human values such as dignity and privacy as supreme. It rejected Stalinism in all its forms and looked back to Bukharin and the New Economic Policy as a way towards a Western lifestyle.
The Communist hardliners, who resorted to Stalin, and the liberals, who extolled Bukharin, were both using history merely as a proxy for current political battles. In the process, both sides distorted history either by demonizing it or by idealizing it. Bukharin’s actual rehabilitation was an act of historic justice (in the same way Beria should have been rehabilitated from the false charges of spying for Britain). But there was a big difference between rehabilitation – a legal act of clearing a person of false charges – and turning him into a myth.