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07 Feb 2012, 07:01



If you'd like to cite it for some academic purpose, please send me a private message and I can send you a pdf complete with citation information and page numbers. Please forgive any grammar or stylistic errors, and note that some of them are the result of copy/pasting from a pdf file. I put the footnotes between the text because lots of them have important ideas in addition to the citations, though I realize that this breaks the flow of the essay tremendously. If you have suggestions on how I could fix this, please voice them.





Alexander Yakovlev, Glasnost, and the Destruction of Soviet Societal Consciousness





Introduction



In 1985, the USSR gave the outward appearance of a stable and powerful state, with no clear signs of national, ethnic or social discord, and a political base of nearly twenty million Communist Party members. Six years later, suffering from an array of political, economic and social crises, the country ceased to exist. In the last twenty years, a rich preliminary historiography on the collapse of the Soviet Union has been written. Historians and political scientists have presented a variety of theories explaining why the country fell apart. Some focus on the inherent ‘flaws of socialism,’1 others discuss the role of strong intellectual, nationalist and popular opposition to the Communist Party,2 while others still focus on external factors such as the Cold War and the country’s failure to integrate into the emerging global information society.3



One crucial aspect to understanding the country’s sudden crisis and disintegration which has been insufficiently explored by scholars is the conscious and systematic effort by liberal reformers, led by ideology secretary Alexander Yakovlev, to restructure Soviet societal consciousness.4 This endeavour was carried out via the re-evaluation of the present, the reinterpretation of the past and the disassembly of the old hegemonic ideology, social norms and moral values.5 Its ultimate result was the



1 Jack Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995).; Wisla Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

2 Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).; Alexander Dallin, “Causes of the Collapse of the USSR,” Post-Soviet Affairs Vol.8 (1992), p.279-302.; Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire (New York: The Free Press, 1998).; Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).; Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington D.C.: Brookings, 1997).

3 Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).; Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).; B. Wayne Howell, “Reagan and Reykjavik: Arms Control, SDI, and the Argument for Human Rights,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol.11, No.3 (Fall 2008), p.389-415.; Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselova, The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View from the Information Society (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995).

4 Merriam-Webster defines ‘consciousness’ as ‘the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought.’ <www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consciousness>. For the purposes of this essay, the elements of ‘societal consciousness’ include the society’s hegemonic ideology, worldview, conceptions of the legitimacy of the state, dominant historical and cultural narratives, and social ethics and norms.

5 In a book entitled Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, Russian historian, sociologist and journalist Sergei Kara-Murza details the powerful capacity of social institutions, mass culture and the media to program and manipulate people’s thoughts and behaviour. Kara-Murza documents the means by which these institutions successfully worked to influence and transform the Soviet and post-Soviet people’s mass consciousness during and after perestroika. In many ways Kara-Murza’s work supports and complements ideas and formulations arrived at independently by the author. See Sergei Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem (Moscow: Eksmopress, 2001).



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collapse of support for the Soviet project among elements crucial to its maintenance, including the mass intelligentsia and the nomenklatura. This essay will seek to complement the academic discourse on the collapse of the USSR by focusing on the effort to reform societal consciousness and its consequences.



A secondary goal of this essay will be to challenge a widespread association of glasnost, both as a theoretical concept and as a concrete historical process, with openness, transparency, and the freedom of information and debate. According to most scholarly accounts, if glasnost played a role in the collapse of the country, it was by means of its unleashing into the open of long-standing public dissatisfaction with the regime. This is said to have resulted in the speedy institutional collapse of the Communist Party and the frail Marxist ideology upon which it was based.6 This essay will argue that such an explanation is overly simplistic, and must be qualified with an understanding that, especially in the crucial period between 1986-1989, ‘glasnost’ was in actuality very much a state-directed project aimed at the radicalization and reorientation of public discourse away from formerly hegemonic political and socio-cultural norms. Using the extreme hierarchization of Soviet political and social power structures to their benefit, the reformers staffed the media, cultural institutions and academia with liberal, reform-minded intellectuals. Once conservative opposition to reform crystallized, the reformers came to use many of the traditional tools and resources of the pre-reform ‘totalitarian’ system to disarm opponents, including their monopoly over the mass media and cultural institutions, powers of appointment, and direct and indirect forms of censorship.7 Only after the successful radicalization of public discourse and the marginalization of anti-reformist forces were the mechanisms of totalitarian informational and ideological control gradually disassembled. This essay will thus argue that the theoretical concept of



6 See for instance Ofira Seliktar, Politics, Paradigms, and Intelligence Failures: Why So Few Predicted the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p.125-129.; John Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p.90-103.; Dmitrii Furman, “Historical Materialism Turned Upside Down? From the Ideology of Perestroika to the Ideology of “Building Capitalism” in Russia,” Trans. Michel Vale. Russian Social Science Review (1995), p.18.

7 This thesis is in essence an adaptation and expansion of an argument made by Russian-Armenian political scientist Sergei Kurginyan in Sud Vremini (Court of Time), a popular Russian historical television debate program. (“Glasnost: Shag k podlinnoi svobode ili informatsionnaya voina?” Sud Vremini. Petersburg – Channel 5. December 6, 2010.)



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glasnost must to a large extent be disassociated from concrete historical processes occurring in the Soviet Union during perestroika.



Beginning with a discussion of the Soviet media, cultural and academic environment in the pre-glasnost period, the essay will then move on to document the coming to power of Alexander Yakovlev and his work as Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda in placing liberal, reform-minded elements of the intelligentsia in positions where they could influence social discourse. It will then examine developments in the media, academia, and culture during perestroika, and analyze how these influenced popular thinking about the country’s political, social and economic system. Next, the essay will consider the implications which the extreme hierarchization of power in the Soviet system had on the process of reform, and some of the ways in which the reformers used the ‘totalitarian’ apparatus to their benefit. After that, the essay will discuss the causes and consequences of the 1988 climactic victory in the struggle against conservative opponents of reform. Finally, the essay will conclude with an analysis of the results of reform, namely the destruction of Soviet societal consciousness.



The USSR Pre-Glasnost



Glasnost, literally ‘voice-ness’ or ‘publicity,’ is a political term advocating openness in government institutions and the freedom of information. First used in the Russian political arena in the era of Tsars Alexander I and II,8 in the twentieth century it was first employed during the construction of Soviet power in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Lenin spoke of the need to subject the “economy, as well as the bureaucracy and party machinery” to media criticism, as part of “a constant struggle against ‘everything negative which remains from the old structure and has become manifest for one reason or another in the construction of the new.’”9 Throughout the reform period of the mid-to-late 1980s, Gorbachev would justify his own glasnost campaign on the basis of this ‘Leninist’ principle.



8 At that time, it was referred to as an open “exchange of opinions within the bureaucracy about the country’s much needed social and economic transformation.” (Brian McNair, “Glasnost and Restructuring in the Soviet Media,” Media, Culture and Society Vol.11 (1989), p.328.; See also Tomasz Goban-Klas, “Gorbachev’s Glasnost: A Concept in Need of Theory and Research,” European Journal of Communication Vol.4 (1989), p.248.)

9 McNair, 1989, p.328-329.



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In practice, throughout most of its history, the Soviet Union did not operate according to the ‘Leninist’ idea of glasnost. Nevertheless, especially after the post-Stalin thaw, a degree of openness in the media, the cultural sphere, and academia did exist. A mistake made by many Western observers when studying the perestroika period is to attribute certain long-established forms of social commentary and criticism to Gorbachev’s glasnost. Alaina Lemon comments on this tendency to misread “signs read locally as continuity…as signs of change because…they seem to clash against [the] socialist fabric.”10



Discussing the Soviet media apparatus, Jonathan Becker posits that in the post-Stalin period a “post-totalitarian press system” came into existence, resulting in “an increase in diversity in press content.”11 While retaining the power to exert “both positive and negative control,” the state came to tolerate much of what it did not explicitly endorse, and even allowed for a degree of “permitted dissent,” especially among publications with limited, elite audiences.12 As editors were given more authority to become first-line censors, a diversity of conceptions over what constituted the correct ‘socialist approach’ made it possible for a variety of viewpoints to be published among the vast array of Party, state and interest group publications.13 Michael Binyon confirms that while the Western image of the Soviet press was one “of a turgid…official prose,”14 Soviet journalism was in actuality quite effective in working to investigate and document a number of serious societal problems such as alcoholism, youth violence and government corruption.15



All throughout the cultural sphere, a degree of social criticism existed and thrived. Lemon notes that “[m]yriad Soviet cultural products –television, cartoons, films, variety shows, children’s



10 Alaina Lemon, “Sympathy for the Weary State?: Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 51, No.4 (2009), p.842.

11 Jonathan A. Becker, Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States: Press, Politics and Identity in Transition (London: MacMillan, 1999), p.15.

12 Ibid.

13 David Lane, Soviet Society under Perestroika (London: Routledge, 1992), p.321-322.

14 Michael Binyon, Life in Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 118.

15 Ibid., p. 59, 118-119, 195.



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plays…display[ed] slippages, contradictions, and non-sequiturs to hegemony.”16 Attributing this tendency to the explosive growth in cultural production and distribution during the post-war period, Kristin Roth-Ey notes that as a result:



"people found more spaces within to pursue their own interests, as they defined them…even as they appeared to contradict big-picture ideological and economic goals…Soviet culture had many taboos still, and people could be harshly punished for violating them. But with the renunciation of mass terror after Stalin’s death, these were penalties of an altogether different order. Now there were roomier pockets within the Soviet culture formation for individuals and institutions to pursue various interests –not freedom of action, but a broader scope for leveraging relationships, ignoring instructions, and playing one principle against another in the name of a third."17



David Lane suggests that the state’s decision to tolerate much of this material also came from a sense of necessity to bow to ‘public demand’ in order to avoid losing its effectiveness as the hegemonic disseminator of information, ideas, and values.18 Thus, satirical short films known as Fitil, describing the absurdities and shortcomings of daily life, played on television and in movie theatres in the place of advertising. The satirical journal Krokodil regularly pushed the boundaries of acceptable criticism through its cartoons. In the late 1970s, a number of novels by famous Soviet writers discussed problems such as the decay of the village, the spread of alcoholism, and the difficulties of working class life.19



Along with the media and cultural institutions, academia also benefited from the post-Stalin thaw. Linda Lubrano’s 1970s study of Soviet science confirms the existence of conditions “quite similar to [that] of scientists in other countries,”20 including tolerance for informal networks, pluralism among scientific elites, and a liberal political tradition among many scientists.21 Kara-Murza, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since the 1960s, argues that the liberal intelligentsia’s radical opinions and theoretical formulations were developed through thirty years of informal institutional debate, usually



16 Lemon, p.842.

17 Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p.13.

18 Lane, 1992, p.324.

19 Walter Laqueur, “Gorbachev and Epimetheus: The Origins of the Russian Crisis,” Journal of Contemporary History Vol.28 (1993), p.401.; Binyon, p.193.

20 Linda L. Lubrano, “The Hidden Structure of Soviet Science,” Science, Technology, & Human Values Vol.18, No.2 (Spring 1993), p.148.

21 Ibid., p.148-149.



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with little interference from the state.22 Former Gorbachev advisor Yevgeny Ambartsumov confirms that liberally-minded intellectuals had little difficulty in retaining their status, since the threat of removal from one institute or office in practice usually only meant transfer to another.23



Ultimately, within shifting and sometimes unclear boundaries set by the state, Soviet journalists, cultural workers, and academics had more flexibility to express independent opinions than is recognized by most Western observers. While explicitly questioning the legitimacy of the regime, the validity of socialism or the role of the Party was publically impermissible, pointing out the absurdities, injustices and frustrations of life within ‘real existing socialism’ was usually perfectly acceptable long before glasnost.



Tolerance for a level of social criticism did not by itself threaten to turn late-Soviet society against the hegemonic ideology, symbols and narratives being inculcated by the state. Marxism-Leninism formally remained the sole permitted “Weltanschauung imbued with incontestable scientific truth,”24 and the state retained control of the institutions disseminating the narratives which people used to conceptualize their identities and place within the system.25 While popular belief may have been strained by the difficult circumstances of daily life and by the partial disconnect between the explicit moral code expressed through propaganda and actually existing realities, Alexei Yurchak notes that “great numbers of people living in socialism” nevertheless “genuinely supported its fundamental values and ideals.”26 Vladimir Shlapentokh concurs, noting that the vast majority of Soviet people questioned in sociological surveys in the early-to-mid 1980s showed support for virtually all of the official dogmas put forth by the state, including the premise of the supremacy of public over private property, the doctrine



22 Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.82.

23 Yegeny Ambartsumov, “Perestroika Began in Prague: Interview with Yevgeny Ambartsumov,” Democratizatiya Vol.17, No.4 (October 2009), p.373.

24 Abdusalam A. Guseinov and Vladislav A. Lektorsky, “Philosophy in Russia: History and Present State,” Diogenes Vol.222-223 (2009), p.11-12.; See also Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p.44.

25 Donald Filtzer, “Red Warriors,” History Workshop Journal Vol.63 (Spring, 2007), p.345-346.; Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.310.; Alfred B. Evans, Jr., Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology (Westport: Praeger, 1993), p.4.

26 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p.484.



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of social equality, central economic planning, the state’s conception of patriotism, and the moral superiority of Soviet-Russian culture over that of the West.27 Ultimately the Soviet Union prior to glasnost was a unique and conceptually stable society with its own hegemonic ideology, worldview, historical and cultural narratives and social ethics and moral norms.

Gorbachev, Yakovlev and the Project to Reform Soviet Society



Soon after coming into office in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began a process of reshuffling the Politburo and the Central Committee, removing his political and ideological enemies, the aged holdovers of the Brezhnev era, and corrupted Party and state bureaucrats, replacing them with technocrats, pragmatic centrists, and what turned out to be liberal democratic socialists. Doubtlessly his most important new appointment was Alexander Yakovlev, former Soviet ambassador to Canada and director of the Institute for World Economic and International Relations (IMEMO), who became the head of the Central Committee Secretariat’s Department of Propaganda in September 1985.28 Characterized by his associates as a ‘pragmatic liberal,’29 Yakovlev would confirm the true intensity of his anti-communist convictions only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.30 Conceived of as the main intellectual force behind many of Gorbachev’s reformist ideas,31 Yakovlev quickly rose to prominence



27 Vladimiar Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How it Collapsed (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), p.141, p.181.

28 Gorbachev first met Yakovlev in 1983 as a result of an official trip to Canada as a member of a Soviet agricultural delegation. Yakovlev would later recall that at their first meeting, the two men took the opportunity to speak “completely frankly about everything…the main idea [being] that society must change, and must be built on different principles.” (Yakovlev cited in Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p.184.) Upon returning to Moscow, Gorbachev convinced Yuri Andropov to bring Yakovlev back to the USSR, and to appoint him to the directorship of the IMEMO.

29 Joseph Gibbs, Gorbachev’s Glasnost: The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), p.15.

30 Writing after the collapse, Yakovlev characterized the Bolshevik project as a “criminal” enterprise which carried out a “democide” against the Russian people and arose from a utopian ideology facilitating the promulgation of “inhuman concepts.” (Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia Trans. Anthony Austin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p.15, 151.)

31 Yakovlev’s role in formulating the postulates of Gorbachev’s reformist ideology and in surrounding him with ‘his people’ (other radical liberal reformers) is documented in the memoirs of many former members of the Soviet political elite, including Politburo members Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Gorbachev’s Chief of Staff Valery Boldin. (Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev Trans. Catherine A Fitzpatrick et al. (New York: Pantheon Books), p.97, 112.; Valery Boldin, Ten Years that Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed by his Chief of Staff Trans. Evelyn Rossiter (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p.73, 113.; Peter Shearman, “Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.26, No.1 (1997), p.130-131.)



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during the perestroika period in the areas of propaganda, ideology, and foreign affairs. Arguably the most important and underrated of his activities was his role in the promotion of a new cadre of liberal intellectuals in the media, the arts, and academia, the results of which ultimately led much of society to a re-evaluation and rejection of the Soviet system.



1986: The Breakthrough Year for the Liberal ‘Cultural Offensive’



In the aftermath of what appeared to be a traditionally conservative Party Congress in February-March 1986, Yakovlev was given authority to begin a series of personnel changes in the country’s leading media organs, artistic unions, and academic offices. Carrying out what Simon Cosgrove has called a “cultural offensive,” Yakovlev’s work “consisted of a series of direct interventions in literary and cultural institutions,” effectively constituting “‘a massive pre-emptive strike’ against conservative forces” opposed to reform.32



Within the space of a few months in mid-to-late 1986, crucial personnel changes were made in the central print media.33 Major publications including Ogonyok (a magazine published by the Pravda publishing house), Moskovskie Novosti (a weekly bilingual Russian/English newspaper, published by Novosti Press Agency), Kommunist (official Party theoretical journal), Trud (the labour unions’ paper), Krasnaya Zvezda (organ of the Ministry of Defence), and the literary journals Novi Mir, Voprosi Literaturi, Znamya, and Sovetskaya Kultura all received new chief editors. These people, including personalities like Vitali Korotich, Yegor Yakovlev and Sergei Zalygin, were known to Alexander Yakovlev for their liberal reformist, westernizing views, and came to run the publications which became known as the “flagships of glasnost.”34 Given the Soviet editor’s traditional responsibility to act as first-line censor



32 Simon Cosgrove, Russian Nationalism and the Politics of Soviet Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.92.

33 Given the intense centralization of the Soviet media apparatus, the importance of these changes cannot be overemphasized. Of over 8500 periodicals published in the USSR in 1987, the thirty-one all-union publications enjoyed over half of total annual circulation, many of the rest either emulating or extensively quoting from these central organs. (Paul Roth, “Soviet Media Policy Since 1985,” in ed. Federal Institute for Soviet and International Studies, The Soviet Union, 1987-1989: Perestroika in Crisis? (London, Longman, 1990), p.106.)

34 Cosgrove, p.93-94.



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and to hierarchically discipline his organization to promote the Party line, the promotion of these liberals to top posts effectively facilitated the gradual radicalization of social discourse.35



While some central organs received new editors, many others which had moderate or liberal-leaning editors prior to perestroika quickly aligned themselves to Yakovlev’s new Party line.36 Explaining their propensity to do so, John Murray posits that because the media was “an institution” which had since the time of Stalin “been the mouthpiece of the Party,” it was only natural for its organs to reflexively and nearly unanimously respond in support of the new Party-directed “crusade for glasnost.”37



Some publications, including the newspapers Literaturnaya Gazeta, Komsomolskaya Pravda and the central Party organ Pravda saw their moderate and conservative editors replaced later, between 1987 and 1989, as a result of their growing resistance to the new line. For instance, while Pravda editor Viktor Afanasyev was formally removed from his post in 1989 for publishing a defamatory article on Yeltsin,38 Gorbachev later revealed in his memoirs that the real reason for Afanasyev’s dismissal was his conservative opposition to ever-deepening glasnost.39



After the reform of the central press system, only a few major all-union print publications were left “as a rump in the hands of the opponents of reform,” including the monthly literary journals Moskva, Molodaya Gvardia and Nash Sovremennik, and the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya.40 Later characterizing these organs as the “heralds of hatred” and the “flagships of the ideological campaign



35 John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York: The Free Press, 1990), p.201.

36 These included monthlies and bimonthlies like Argumenti i Fakti, Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Druzhba Narodov, Yunnost, Innostrannaya Literatura, the Leningrad Writers Union organ Neva, the RSFSR Writers’ Union paper Oktiabr, youth newspapers Moskovskii Komsomolets and Sovetskaya Molodezh, and the well-known daily Izvestia (organ of the Supreme Soviet).

37 John Murray, The Russian Press from Brezhnev to Yeltsin: Behind the Paper Curtain (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994), p.101.

38 The piece, based on an article originally published in an Italian newspaper, had portrayed Yeltsin as an alcoholic (McNair, 1989, p.332.)

39 Gorbachev wrote: “the farther glasnost reached and the more boldly the editors of other newspapers spoke out, the dryer, duller and more orthodox the materials published by Pravda…became…We had to find a new editor.” (Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p.209.)

40 Cosgrove, p.94-95.



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against national democratic developments,”41 Yakovlev would wage an extensive and vigorous campaign against them in his capacity as head of propaganda.42



Contemporaneously with the print media, the realm of culture also saw speedy, hierarchically directed personnel changes after the 27th Party Congress. In mid-1986, reformers Vasili Zakharov and Yuri Voronov replaced their conservative predecessors at the Ministry of Culture and the Central Committee’s Cultural Department, responsible for supervising developments in the area of culture at the national level. Pragmatic centrist Mikhail Nenashev was made head of Goskomizdat, the State Committee for Publishing, managing the country’s entire system of publishing houses, book trade, and book censorship. Under his supervision, Goskomizdat issued a directive in November 1986 which allowed publishing houses “to adopt and change their own ‘thematic plans’ and to fix their own print-runs,” and by 1987 the first small cooperatively owned publishers were allowed to form.43



Throughout 1986 and 1987 Yakovlev worked to nominate liberally-minded artists to head creative unions such as the USSR Writers’ Union, the Theatre Workers’ Union, and the Cinematographers’ Union. Avant-garde filmmaker Elem Klimov, elected first secretary of the Cinematographers’ Union in May 1986, was among the most radical of these new union bosses, calling for the complete dismantling of ideological censorship and for “a real moral cleansing and…public condemnation” of past errors, and of the people who had made them.44 In December 1986 Gorbachev



41 Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia. Trans. Fitzpatrick, Catherine A. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p.135-136.

42 Republican, regional and local newspapers and periodicals varied in their enthusiasm to align to the Yakovlev line. While most of the local press reflexively moved toward emulating the central press, the process was not uniform, and some individual newspapers, regional publications, and even entire republics at least temporarily resisted the growing radicalism of the central media discourse. For example, while the Baltic press quickly aligned to and then surpassed the radicalism of the Yakovlev line, in Ukraine substantive reform and liberalization of the press did not begin until 1989, after the removal of conservative republican first secretary Vladimir Shcherbitsky. (Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1994), p.139-140.; Mykola Riabchuk, “A Perilous Way to Freedom: The Independent Mass Media in the Blackmail State,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies Vol.26, No.1/2 (Summer-Winter 2001), p.96.)

43 Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p.81-82.

44 Elem Klimov cited in Anthony R. Deluca, Politics, Diplomacy, and the Media: Gorbachev’s Legacy in the West (Westport: Praeger, 1998), p.67.; Klimov’s task would be aided by Alexander Kamshalov, new head of Goskino, the State Committee for Cinematography, who oversaw the reduction of central censorship, the promotion of financial autonomy for film studios, and more republican-level control of film output. (Josephine Woll, “Glasnost’ and Soviet Culture,” in Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus (eds.), The Soviet System: From Crisis to Collapse (Boulder, Westview Press, 1995), p.225.)



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invited leading members of the creative intelligentsia to a meeting where he formally approved the process of the liberalization of the arts begun by Yakovlev earlier in the year.45



During the early years of perestroika, academia also saw a quick, systematic and centrally directed promotion of reform-minded scholars to positions of authority in the country’s top universities and research institutes, often through the direct personal intervention of Gorbachev and Yakovlev.46 To name but a few important appointments: famous liberal sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya was made head of the Soviet Sociological Association and the director of the All-Union Centre for the Study of Public Opinion; Yevgeni Primakov (future member of the Yeltsin cabinet) became the head of IMEMO; radical liberal historian Yuri Afanasyev was made rector of the State Historical-Archival Institute at Moscow State University; and reformist economist and Gorbachev advisor Abel Aganbegyan became chair of the Economics Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.47



As a result of the new appointments, various schools and institutes gradually came to reject Marxism-Leninism as the ‘guiding’ paradigm in each of their respected fields, first implicitly and later explicitly. Yakovlev himself publicly participated in this process to transform academic discourse. In articles appearing in Pravda and the Party theoretical journal Kommunist in April 1987, he criticized the ‘infallible truths’ and ‘dogmatism’ inspired by the Marxist-Leninist approach to knowledge, arguing that these principles “elevated ‘authoritarian thinking’ to a new political, moral and intellectual principle.”48 The newly promoted liberal intellectuals, given license to promulgate their theories and opinions on economics, history, foreign policy and other important topics in the country’s central newspapers and periodicals, gained a hegemonic voice as perestroika progressed.



45 Brigit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2009), p.185.

46 Alexander Tsipko, “The Collapse of Marxism-Leninism,” in Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, (eds.) The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), p.182.; I.A. Butenko, “The Russian Sociological Association: Actors and Scenery on a Revolving Stage,” International Sociology Vol.17, No.2 (June 2002), p.242.; Euvgeny Novikov and Patrick Bascio, Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Communist Party: The Historical and Theoretical Background (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), p.55-57.

47 Alexander Dallin, “Soviet History,” in Alexander Dallin and Bertrand M. Patenaude (eds.) Soviet Scholarship under Gorbachev (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988),, p.33-36.

48 Ibid., p.30.



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Implications of the Appointments: The Transformation of Media and Cultural Discourse



The Media



With the onset of perestroika, much of the Soviet news media came to abandon its traditional ‘high brow’ style of journalism, along with its regular Marxist ideological analysis of events. From 1987 on, television and the pages of the central press came to be flooded with formerly sensitive and underreported topics such as drug abuse, child abuse, poverty, the inadequacies of the social welfare system, and problems in the military.49 While the appearance of much of this formerly censored information had potential for building a healthy and open media environment, it was regrettably very often formulated in the style of ‘yellow journalism,’ focusing only on negative trends, exaggerating their scale and scope, and attempting to blame them on the ‘system’ or the ‘legacy of Stalinism.’50 As perestroika progressed, much of the day-to-day journalistic narrative came to fetishize ‘negationism’51 and apocalyptic formulations of a ‘polnaya razruha’ (‘complete disintegration’) of society, which gradually took hold of societal discourse as a result.52



Editors’ desire to increase their periodicals’ subscription rates doubtlessly played a role in advancing the new sensationalist style of journalism.53 Popular periodicals like Ogonyok came to compete with television programs like Vzglyad (Viewpoint) and 600 Sekund (600 Seconds) in pushing the boundaries of the permissible.54



49 Peter Meylakhs, “Drugs and Symbolic Pollution: The Work of Cultural Logic in the Russian Press,” Cultural Sociology, Vol.3, No.3 (2009), p.377-378.; Sonja D. Schmid, “Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late Soviet Politics of Expertise,” Science, Technology, & Human Values Vol.29, No.3 (Summer 2004), p.360.; Natalia Danilova, “The Development of an Exclusive Veterans’ Policy: The Case of Russia,” Armed Forces & Society Vol.36, No.5 (2010), p.906.; Yang Zhong, “The Transformation of the Soviet Military and the August Coup,” Armed Forces & Society Vol.19, No.1 (Fall 1992), p.52-53, 60-64.; McNair, 1989, p.333.

50 Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p.170.; Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.399-400.

51 Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York: The New Press, 1995), p.302.

52 Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p.46-47.

53 This trend was even partially institutionalized at the Journalists’ Union at its Sixth Congress in March 1987, where a number of financial mechanisms incentivizing the production of news that would sell were introduced. (McNair, 1989, p.343.)

54 Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p.247.; Broadcasting imagery of shocking Afghan war footage, rotting corpses in morgues, murdered and mutilated children, and similarly grisly and offensive material, ‘shock’ was Vzglyad’s ‘trademark.’ (DeLuca, p.61.)



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Critics of the new style of journalism were quick to point out the socially harmful and sometimes outright libellous nature of much of the new material. Pravda editor Afanasyev noted his view that many of the “sensational stories” were concocted out of a desire to “to boost circulation” rather than to “inform readers.”55 Other commentators, often appearing in reader editorials of major newspapers, similarly noted the tendency among journalists to do shoddy research, to exaggerate, to lie outright, and to present “single mistakes as general patterns.”56



The transformation of media discourse during perestroika can be effectively illustrated by looking at the coverage and analysis of two contemporary issues –the war in Afghanistan and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the case of Afghanistan, discourse on the war began to shift in 1987, with Ogonyok magazine providing one of the earliest explicit criticisms.57 The war was transformed from a ‘demonstration of proletarian internationalism’ to a case of ‘imperialist adventurism,’ Soviet soldiers playing the role either of “war criminals,” or “victims” of criminal state policy.58 In the case of Chernobyl, media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the disaster focused on the courageousness of the people working to contain it and on feelings of national unity fostered by efforts to mitigate it.59 Between 1987 and 1988, discourse began to shift. First criticizing the organizational chaos in the work to extinguish the fires and to evacuate the disaster zone, the flagships of glasnost then began to argue that coercion, rather than courage, moved the firemen, builders, and specialists to continue their work.60 By



55 Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985-1990 (New York: Philip Allan, 1990), p.80.

56 For example, an editorial in Pravda from August 1987 by a court official noted the tendency by the press to distort, insult, and generate among readers “the impression of chaos, arbitrariness and mass violations of socialist laws.” (Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Public Opinion in Gorbachev’s USSR: Consensus and Polarization,” Media, Culture and Society Vol.12 (1990), p.156.). Another editorial, appearing in Izvestia in March 1988 grumbled that “if every press ‘sensation’ was carefully checked…half of them would be shown to be false.” (Brian McNair, Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media (London, Routledge, 1991), p.78.)

57 According to Ogonyok editor Vitali Korotich, Gorbachev personally telephoned him in 1987, instructing him to publish articles critical of the war, in order to justify the government’s decision to withdraw from the conflict. (Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (New York: Random House, 1990), p.103-104.)

58 Danilova, p.904, 906.

59 Nicholas Daniloff, “Chernobyl and Its Political Fallout: A Reassessment,” Demokratizatsiya Vol.12, No.1 (Winter 2004), p.122.

60 Schmid, p.361-362.



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1989, journalists were turning “to the social and political roots” of the disaster, citing the ‘inhumanity of the Soviet system,’ where the “human being [was just] a cog in the works.”61 In 1991, on the eve of the collapse of the country, the accident was written off as “the corpse of a bygone era…of lies and spiritual decay –fill[ing] the air with the stench of radiation.”62



Literature and the ‘Thick Journals’



Beginning in late 1986 and early 1987, popular ‘thick’ journals catering to the mass intelligentsia began publishing a torrent of formerly suppressed national and foreign literature by personalities like Bulgakov, Pasternak, Nabokov, Orwell and Koestler. By 1989, with the serialization of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in Novi Mir, few of the old literary taboos were left to be broken. Since most of these works were originally banned for their implicitly or explicitly political content, their appearance in print had major implications extending beyond the realm of literature, coinciding with a re-evaluation of the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet state being carried out by an increasingly radicalized mass intelligentsia.



The budding popularity of formerly censored work coincided with a growing disdain for many of the old established aesthetic and “ideological pillars” of Soviet literature, including Gorky, Maiakovski and Vyshnevski.63 Even Pushkin, adopted by the Soviet regime as the founder of Russian literature, became subject to criticism when an old article published abroad by Andrei Sinyavsky was reprinted in Oktiabr in 1989. In the article, entitled ‘Progulki s Pukshkinim’ (‘Strolls with Pushkin’), Pushkin’s tremendous literary stature was questioned and his work written off as ‘fetishized,’ ‘sacralised’ and overrated, prompting a wave of criticism from nationalist Russian writers accusing the author of ‘Russophobia.’64



61 Ibid., p.364.

62 Grigori Medvedev cited in R. Sich, “Truth was an Early Casualty,” Bulletin of Atomic Sciences (May/June 1996), p.42.

63 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, p.246.

64 C.I. Chprinin, Russkaya Literatura Segodnya: Putevoditel (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003), p.22.; A copy of the original article can be found online: Abram Terts (Andrei Sinyavsky), “Progulki s Pushkinim,” Oktyabr, No.4 (1989). <http://readr.ru/abram-terc-progulki-s-pushkinim.html>



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Among the contemporary work of the glasnost period, Anatoli Rybakov’s Deti Arbata (Children of the Arbat) was arguably the most famous piece –a novel of historical fiction set in the Stalinist 1930s. Conceived of by contemporary critics as ‘mediocre’ in the artistic sense, the work became popular mainly for its exploration and re-evaluation of a politically sensitive period of time.65 While authors like Rybakov focused on history, others, including Astafyev, Rasputin and Voinovich worked to criticize and savagely satirize the present. Discussing the intense politicization of Soviet-Russian literature during this period, Alexander Genis explains that all “its genres degenerated into journalism,” the “life of a literary work [coming] to be measured not in terms of generations, but in terms of months, weeks, and even days.”66 Noting the tendency among writers to constantly seek thematic ‘virgin soil’ and to publish on the basis of ideological rather than aesthetic conceptions, critics point out that consequently, little literature of lasting literary significance was created during the glasnost period.67



Cinematography



Beginning in late 1986, a small number of films from the ‘unshelved past’ began to appear in Soviet movie theatres, the most famous of which was Tengiz Abuladze’s 1984 allegorical anti-Stalinist Pokayanie [Repentance], a film receiving numerous state prizes and widespread local and international attention.68 At the same time, many of the old guiding conventions of Soviet cinematography, including socialist realism and filmmaking “geared toward satisfying spectators’ ‘aesthetic needs,’”69 were



65 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p.423.

66 Alexander Genis, “Perestroika as a Shift in Literary Paradigm,” in Mikhail Epstein et al., Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture Trans. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p.87.

67 Alexander Genis, “Onions and Cabbages: Paradigms of Contemporary Culture” in Epstein et al., p.398.; Helena Goscilo, “Introduction,” in Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey (eds.) Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature Under Gorbachev (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990), p.xxxii-xxxiii.; Julie Curtis, “Literature under Gorbachev –A Second Thaw?” in Catherine Merridale and Chris Ward (eds.) Perestroika: The Historical Perspective (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), p.173.

68 Woll in Dallin and Lapidus, p.225.

69 Joshua First, “From Spectator to “Differentiated” Consumer: Film Audience Research in the Era of Developed Socialism (1965-80),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Vol.9, No.2 (Spring 2008), p.322.



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removed from contemporary filmmaking, replaced by avant-garde and socially critical forms of film and documentary production.70



Films of the perestroika era came to be dominated by the chernukha, a style of filmmaking portraying unremitting bleakness, negativity and pessimism in the presentation of life, based in the desire to “chronicle…social horror…to reveal historical atrocity and ‘truth,’” to push “cultural production to the limit.”71 The main characters of these films, frequently from socially peripheral groups such as prisoners, criminals, and prostitutes, were often explicitly or implicitly portrayed as heroic individuals fighting ‘the system.’72 Film critics Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky argue that the chernukha’s portrayal of inhumanity and immorality, unmotivated cruelty and the death of all former ideals was specifically designed to leave film audiences “nauseated.”73



Apart from Alexander Proshkin’s 1987 Holodnoe Leto Pytdesyat Tretego (Cold Summer of 53’), the single popular contemporary political film with anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist undertones, the majority of the successful films of the late 1980s were chernukhas, attracting viewers through their sensational innovations and ‘gritty’ portrayal of Soviet reality. Malenkaya Vera (Small Vera/Small Faith) depicted the dilapidated state of working-class life, but was immortalized for containing the first sex scene in Soviet cinematic history. Interdevochka (Intergirl) sympathetically portrayed the life of a Soviet prostitute willing to sacrifice everything for “a different way of life,”74 and is noted among film critics for its shock value and profane dialogue.75 Released between 1988 and 1989, the above mentioned



70 Theatre and the performing arts underwent a similar reorientation, epitomized by Mikhail Shatrov’s work to critically re-evaluate Soviet history and contemporary Soviet reality through his plays. (Thomas Sherlock, “Politics and History under Gorbachev,” in Dallin and Lapidus, p.246.; Isaac Tarasulo, “Unofficial Groups and Soviet Youth,” in Isaac J. Tarasulo (ed.) Gorbachev and Glasnost: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press (Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 1989), p.128-129.)

71 Emma Widdis, “An Unmappable System: The Collapse of Public Space in Late-Soviet Film,” Film Criticism, Vol.21, No.2 (Winter 1996-1997), p.13.

72 Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.246.

73 Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky, The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p.164.

74 Yuri Bogomolov, “Cinema for Every Day,” in Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky (ed.) Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.22.

75 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.187-188.



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films were among the last of the Soviet blockbusters to draw millions of spectators.76 Panned by film critics for “formulaic storylines,” “vacant,” incoherent style and the tendency to reach for platitudes,77 chernukhas came to be rejected by the public as perestroika wore on since they “offer[ed] no positive outlook or spiritual guidance amid the chaos” of everyday life during perestroika.78 Public rejection, the collapse of state support for film distribution, the importation of movies and television series from abroad, and the increasing availability of videocassette players all contributed to the virtual collapse of the film industry in the early 1990s.79



Through the late 1980s documentary filmmaking underwent its own radicalization, coming to discuss sensitive historical issues and the contemporary problems of poverty, drug addiction, youth alienation, and prostitution. Like cinema, documentary filmmaking also gradually turned to the chernukha style. Stanislav Govoruhin’s 1990 film Tak Zhit Nelzya (It is Impossible to Live Like This), arguably the most famous of the perestroika era documentaries, epitomized this shift, mercilessly enumerating and condemning the problems in Soviet society, and ultimately indicting the whole record of Soviet rule.80



The New Intellectual Discourse: De-Stalinization and the Reinterpretation of the Past



In February 1987, Gorbachev made a speech in which he called upon historians, writers and intellectuals to begin a comprehensive campaign to fill in the beliye piatna (white spots) of history. Later that year, in preparation for the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, he called on the intelligentsia to reveal the full extent of the ‘criminal’ nature of Stalinism.81 As a result, between



76 Birgit Beumers, “Cinemarket, or the Russian Film Industry in ‘Mission Possible,’” Europe-Asia Studies Vol.51, No.5 (1999), p.877.

77 Bogomolov, p.19.; Horton and Brashinsky, 1992, p.163-164.

78 Beumers, 1999, p.891-892.

79 Ibid., p.874-875, 887.

80 Discussing the grim and dour tone of the picture, journalist Scott Shane recalls how, after going to see the film in Moscow upon its release, he overheard a conversation between two men as the credits rolled: “After that, you want either to shoot yourself or to emigrate. There’s nothing else left.” (Shane, p.223.)

81 Brian McNair, “Media in Post-Soviet Russia: An Overview,” European Journal of Communication Vol. 9 (1994), 1994, p.116.; Seliktar, p.147.; Only one year earlier, in a February 1986 interview for the French Communist daily L’Humanité, Gorbachev, asked about Stalinism, replied that it was a “notion made up by opponents of communism and used…to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole.” (Stephen White, After Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.80.)



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1987 and 1988, virtually every aspect of Stalin era Soviet history became subject to critical reinterpretation, including the once sacred historical narratives of collectivization, industrialization, and the great victory in the Second World War. Articles published in the flagships of glasnost quickly came to challenge dominant historical narratives, suggesting that the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s was a deliberate state policy, challenging the need for rapid industrialization, and arguing that Stalin facilitated the rise of Hitler.



In 1987, a campaign was initiated to assess the death toll resulting from Stalin’s leadership. As the campaign progressed, the ‘low’ figures based on KGB archives and government commissions (estimating 3.8 million people convicted of state crimes between 1917-1990, of whom 828,000 were shot)82 were overshadowed by higher and higher estimates, a 1988 Neva article citing 8-10 million killed, another 1988 article in Argumenti i Fakti by Roy Medvedev estimating 40 million,83 and a 1991 Komsomolskaya Pravda article citing Solzhenitsyn’s estimate of 110 million.84 In 1989, Medvedev’s figure was adopted into a new textbook on Soviet history,85 while the ever-rising death toll figures naturally resulted in implicit and explicit comparisons of Stalinism to Nazism.86 Discussing the radicalism of the new discourse, Moshe Lewin argued that the introduction of new figures was rarely followed up by critical analysis, noting: “If evidence show[ed] that there were several million camp inmates [critics would] insist that there must have actually been double or triple that number. To them, half a million or a million executions sound[ed] like a mere apology for murder [and they concluded] that there must have been millions more.”87





83 Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p.125, 352, n.10.

84 Sergei Kara-Murza, Sovetskaya Tsivilizatsiya (Moscow: Algoritm, 2001). Electronic edition: <http://www.kara-murza.ru/books/sc_b/sc_b_content.htm>

85 Laqueur, 1990, p.125.

86 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, p.241.

87 Lewin, 1995, p.302. 82 Vadim Medvedev, V Komande Gorbacheva: Vzglyad Iznutri (Moscow: Bilina, 1994). Electronic edition: < http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/GORBACHEV/medvedev.txt 83 Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p.125, 352, n.10.84 Sergei Kara-Murza, Sovetskaya Tsivilizatsiya (Moscow: Algoritm, 2001). Electronic edition: 85 Laqueur, 1990, p.125.86 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, p.241.87 Lewin, 1995, p.302.



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At the same time that broad historical trends and statistics were subjected to radical revision, so too were many important individuals in the Soviet historical pantheon, including Pavlik Morozov, Alexei Stakhanov, and Zoia Kosmodemianskaya. Morozov, whose heroism was first demythologized by articles in Ogonyok and Yunnost,88 was later reinvented from a symbol of class consciousness and dedication to the state to a “symbol of legalized and romanticized treachery.”89 Stakhanov’s personal record and the publicity given to his accomplishments underwent extensive criticism, and by mid-1988 articles appeared in Trud and Komsomolskaya Pravda revealing that he had died a “bitter drunkard.”90 Kosmodemianskaya, one of the country’s most famous wartime partisans, had her entire wartime record and personal character subjected “to the most ferocious and wide-ranging attacks” in the late period of perestroika.91 Kara-Murza concludes that the construction of new ‘black myths’ around these figures was usually conducted “through omission, misrepresentation and false association,”92 their builders’ goal being to destroy the important symbols of national historical consciousness.93 Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union were many of the new revisionist accounts on the lives and exploits of these individuals questioned or decisively refuted.94



As a result of the media campaign to reinterpret Soviet history, school history examinations were cancelled in 1988, the old pre-perestroika textbooks conceived of as woefully outdated and “full of lies.”95 Teachers were encouraged to incorporate the new interpretations made in newspaper and



88 His story de-idealized as a mere family squabble gone wrong. (Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p.91-92.; Laqueur, 1990, p.197.)

89 White, p.82.

90 Laqueur, 1990, p.196.

91 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum and Nancy M. Wingfield, “Gender and the Construction of Wartime Heroism in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union,” European History Quarterly Vol.39, No.3 (2009), p.481-482.

92 Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.315.

93 Ibid., p.303.

94 Kirschenbaum and Wingfield, p.481-482.; Teddy J. Uldricks, “War, Politics and Memory: Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II,” History & Memory Vol.21, No.2 (Fall/Winter 2009), p.69.; Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.314.

95 Suzanne Sternthal, Gorbachev’s Reforms: De-Stalinization through Demilitarization (Westport: Praeger, 1997), p.112.



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journal articles into their teaching, and to test on the basis of the new material,96 thus formalizing the introduction of the radical media discourse into the education system.



Constrained by the rules of the historical profession, which demanded methodical analysis, well-researched conclusions and solid reasoning, professional historians were slow to enter the historical debate. They were also outnumbered by publicists, novelists, playwrights and film and television writers, who could release their work faster, often producing “deliberately provocative historical works in order to strengthen the financial positions of their journals, theatres, and newspapers.”97 These groups were supported by a small number of prominent reformist historians including people like Yuri Afanasyev and Dmitri Volkogonov, who used their stature and the power of their office to explicitly and implicitly support the formulations made by journalists and artists.98 Only towards the end of perestroika, when historical discourse had already shifted decisively, did many moderate historians begin to incorporate themselves in a major way into the debate.99 They critiqued the journalistic style of much of the new historical analysis, warning against “black and white” analysis, “blanket rejections” and “the replacement of one half-truth with another.”100 Reformers counterattacked by defaming mainstream historians and charging their institutes with the “wholesale falsification of history,”101 Afanasyev writing off the entirety of Soviet historical studies of the past half-century as ‘pseudo-science.’102



Yakovlev personally participated in the campaign of historical revisionism at the highest levels of power, chairing several government historical commissions, including the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims (1988) and the Congress of People’s Deputies’ commission investigating



96 Hedrick Smith, p.140.

97 Sherlock in Dallin and Lapidus, p.251.

98 Discussing an assertion made in Rybakov’s Deti Arbata about Stalin’s plan to kill Sergei Kirov and to thus initiate the Great Purge, Dmitri Volkogonov noted in a 1988 issue of Oktiabr that though there was no archival evidence to support such a claim, “knowing Stalin as we know him today, his exceptional cruelty, his intrigues and perfidy, it is quite possible that this was done by him.” (Laqueur, 1990, p.75.)

99 For instance, only in 1990 and 1991 did Viktor Zemskov’s authoritative historical-archival analysis of Stalin-era repressions come to be published, challenging the hearsay and ‘guestimate’ evidence of A. Antonov-Ovseenko, Roy Medvedev, and other revisionists. (Kara-Murza, Manipulatsiya Soznaniem, p.269.)

100 D.W. Spring, “History: Remaking History –Soviet Perspectives on the Past,” in D.W. Spring, ed., The Impact of Gorbachev: The First Phase: 1985-90 (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), p.74.

101 Sherlock in Dallin and Lapidus, p.251-252.

102 Spring in Spring, p.74-75.



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This is an academic essay I wrote discussing the history of glasnost in the USSR. Its main point is to discuss the disconnect between the concept of glasnost and how it was actually presented and carried out in the USSR from 1986 on.If you'd like to cite it for some academic purpose, please send me a private message and I can send you a pdf complete with citation information and page numbers. Please forgive any grammar or stylistic errors, and note that some of them are the result of copy/pasting from a pdf file. I put the footnotes between the text because lots of them have important ideas in addition to the citations, though I realize that this breaks the flow of the essay tremendously. If you have suggestions on how I could fix this, please voice them.In 1985, the USSR gave the outward appearance of a stable and powerful state, with no clear signs of national, ethnic or social discord, and a political base of nearly twenty million Communist Party members. Six years later, suffering from an array of political, economic and social crises, the country ceased to exist. In the last twenty years, a rich preliminary historiography on the collapse of the Soviet Union has been written. Historians and political scientists have presented a variety of theories explaining why the country fell apart. Some focus on the inherent ‘flaws of socialism,’1 others discuss the role of strong intellectual, nationalist and popular opposition to the Communist Party,2 while others still focus on external factors such as the Cold War and the country’s failure to integrate into the emerging global information society.3One crucial aspect to understanding the country’s sudden crisis and disintegration which has been insufficiently explored by scholars is the conscious and systematic effort by liberal reformers, led by ideology secretary Alexander Yakovlev, to restructure Soviet societal consciousness.4 This endeavour was carried out via the re-evaluation of the present, the reinterpretation of the past and the disassembly of the old hegemonic ideology, social norms and moral values.5 Its ultimate result was the- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -collapse of support for the Soviet project among elements crucial to its maintenance, including the mass intelligentsia and the nomenklatura. This essay will seek to complement the academic discourse on the collapse of the USSR by focusing on the effort to reform societal consciousness and its consequences.A secondary goal of this essay will be to challenge a widespread association of glasnost, both as a theoretical concept and as a concrete historical process, with openness, transparency, and the freedom of information and debate. According to most scholarly accounts, if glasnost played a role in the collapse of the country, it was by means of its unleashing into the open of long-standing public dissatisfaction with the regime. This is said to have resulted in the speedy institutional collapse of the Communist Party and the frail Marxist ideology upon which it was based.6 This essay will argue that such an explanation is overly simplistic, and must be qualified with an understanding that, especially in the crucial period between 1986-1989, ‘glasnost’ was in actuality very much a state-directed project aimed at the radicalization and reorientation of public discourse away from formerly hegemonic political and socio-cultural norms. Using the extreme hierarchization of Soviet political and social power structures to their benefit, the reformers staffed the media, cultural institutions and academia with liberal, reform-minded intellectuals. Once conservative opposition to reform crystallized, the reformers came to use many of the traditional tools and resources of the pre-reform ‘totalitarian’ system to disarm opponents, including their monopoly over the mass media and cultural institutions, powers of appointment, and direct and indirect forms of censorship.7 Only after the successful radicalization of public discourse and the marginalization of anti-reformist forces were the mechanisms of totalitarian informational and ideological control gradually disassembled. This essay will thus argue that the theoretical concept of- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -glasnost must to a large extent be disassociated from concrete historical processes occurring in the Soviet Union during perestroika.Beginning with a discussion of the Soviet media, cultural and academic environment in the pre-glasnost period, the essay will then move on to document the coming to power of Alexander Yakovlev and his work as Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda in placing liberal, reform-minded elements of the intelligentsia in positions where they could influence social discourse. It will then examine developments in the media, academia, and culture during perestroika, and analyze how these influenced popular thinking about the country’s political, social and economic system. Next, the essay will consider the implications which the extreme hierarchization of power in the Soviet system had on the process of reform, and some of the ways in which the reformers used the ‘totalitarian’ apparatus to their benefit. After that, the essay will discuss the causes and consequences of the 1988 climactic victory in the struggle against conservative opponents of reform. Finally, the essay will conclude with an analysis of the results of reform, namely the destruction of Soviet societal consciousness.Glasnost, literally ‘voice-ness’ or ‘publicity,’ is a political term advocating openness in government institutions and the freedom of information. First used in the Russian political arena in the era of Tsars Alexander I and II,8 in the twentieth century it was first employed during the construction of Soviet power in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Lenin spoke of the need to subject the “economy, as well as the bureaucracy and party machinery” to media criticism, as part of “a constant struggle against ‘everything negative which remains from the old structure and has become manifest for one reason or another in the construction of the new.’”9 Throughout the reform period of the mid-to-late 1980s, Gorbachev would justify his own glasnost campaign on the basis of this ‘Leninist’ principle.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -In practice, throughout most of its history, the Soviet Union did not operate according to the ‘Leninist’ idea of glasnost. Nevertheless, especially after the post-Stalin thaw, a degree of openness in the media, the cultural sphere, and academia did exist. A mistake made by many Western observers when studying the perestroika period is to attribute certain long-established forms of social commentary and criticism to Gorbachev’s glasnost. Alaina Lemon comments on this tendency to misread “signs read locally as continuity…as signs of change because…they seem to clash against [the] socialist fabric.”10Discussing the Soviet media apparatus, Jonathan Becker posits that in the post-Stalin period a “post-totalitarian press system” came into existence, resulting in “an increase in diversity in press content.”11 While retaining the power to exert “both positive and negative control,” the state came to tolerate much of what it did not explicitly endorse, and even allowed for a degree of “permitted dissent,” especially among publications with limited, elite audiences.12 As editors were given more authority to become first-line censors, a diversity of conceptions over what constituted the correct ‘socialist approach’ made it possible for a variety of viewpoints to be published among the vast array of Party, state and interest group publications.13 Michael Binyon confirms that while the Western image of the Soviet press was one “of a turgid…official prose,”14 Soviet journalism was in actuality quite effective in working to investigate and document a number of serious societal problems such as alcoholism, youth violence and government corruption.15All throughout the cultural sphere, a degree of social criticism existed and thrived. Lemon notes that “[m]yriad Soviet cultural products –television, cartoons, films, variety shows, children’s- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -plays…display[ed] slippages, contradictions, and non-sequiturs to hegemony.”16 Attributing this tendency to the explosive growth in cultural production and distribution during the post-war period, Kristin Roth-Ey notes that as a result:"people found more spaces within to pursue their own interests, as they defined them…even as they appeared to contradict big-picture ideological and economic goals…Soviet culture had many taboos still, and people could be harshly punished for violating them. But with the renunciation of mass terror after Stalin’s death, these were penalties of an altogether different order. Now there were roomier pockets within the Soviet culture formation for individuals and institutions to pursue various interests –not freedom of action, but a broader scope for leveraging relationships, ignoring instructions, and playing one principle against another in the name of a third."17David Lane suggests that the state’s decision to tolerate much of this material also came from a sense of necessity to bow to ‘public demand’ in order to avoid losing its effectiveness as the hegemonic disseminator of information, ideas, and values.18 Thus, satirical short films known as Fitil, describing the absurdities and shortcomings of daily life, played on television and in movie theatres in the place of advertising. The satirical journal Krokodil regularly pushed the boundaries of acceptable criticism through its cartoons. In the late 1970s, a number of novels by famous Soviet writers discussed problems such as the decay of the village, the spread of alcoholism, and the difficulties of working class life.19Along with the media and cultural institutions, academia also benefited from the post-Stalin thaw. Linda Lubrano’s 1970s study of Soviet science confirms the existence of conditions “quite similar to [that] of scientists in other countries,”20 including tolerance for informal networks, pluralism among scientific elites, and a liberal political tradition among many scientists.21 Kara-Murza, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since the 1960s, argues that the liberal intelligentsia’s radical opinions and theoretical formulations were developed through thirty years of informal institutional debate, usually- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -with little interference from the state.22 Former Gorbachev advisor Yevgeny Ambartsumov confirms that liberally-minded intellectuals had little difficulty in retaining their status, since the threat of removal from one institute or office in practice usually only meant transfer to another.23Ultimately, within shifting and sometimes unclear boundaries set by the state, Soviet journalists, cultural workers, and academics had more flexibility to express independent opinions than is recognized by most Western observers. While explicitly questioning the legitimacy of the regime, the validity of socialism or the role of the Party was publically impermissible, pointing out the absurdities, injustices and frustrations of life within ‘real existing socialism’ was usually perfectly acceptable long before glasnost.Tolerance for a level of social criticism did not by itself threaten to turn late-Soviet society against the hegemonic ideology, symbols and narratives being inculcated by the state. Marxism-Leninism formally remained the sole permitted “Weltanschauung imbued with incontestable scientific truth,”24 and the state retained control of the institutions disseminating the narratives which people used to conceptualize their identities and place within the system.25 While popular belief may have been strained by the difficult circumstances of daily life and by the partial disconnect between the explicit moral code expressed through propaganda and actually existing realities, Alexei Yurchak notes that “great numbers of people living in socialism” nevertheless “genuinely supported its fundamental values and ideals.”26 Vladimir Shlapentokh concurs, noting that the vast majority of Soviet people questioned in sociological surveys in the early-to-mid 1980s showed support for virtually all of the official dogmas put forth by the state, including the premise of the supremacy of public over private property, the doctrine- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -of social equality, central economic planning, the state’s conception of patriotism, and the moral superiority of Soviet-Russian culture over that of the West.27 Ultimately the Soviet Union prior to glasnost was a unique and conceptually stable society with its own hegemonic ideology, worldview, historical and cultural narratives and social ethics and moral norms.Gorbachev, Yakovlev and the Project to Reform Soviet SocietySoon after coming into office in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began a process of reshuffling the Politburo and the Central Committee, removing his political and ideological enemies, the aged holdovers of the Brezhnev era, and corrupted Party and state bureaucrats, replacing them with technocrats, pragmatic centrists, and what turned out to be liberal democratic socialists. Doubtlessly his most important new appointment was Alexander Yakovlev, former Soviet ambassador to Canada and director of the Institute for World Economic and International Relations (IMEMO), who became the head of the Central Committee Secretariat’s Department of Propaganda in September 1985.28 Characterized by his associates as a ‘pragmatic liberal,’29 Yakovlev would confirm the true intensity of his anti-communist convictions only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.30 Conceived of as the main intellectual force behind many of Gorbachev’s reformist ideas,31 Yakovlev quickly rose to prominence- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -during the perestroika period in the areas of propaganda, ideology, and foreign affairs. Arguably the most important and underrated of his activities was his role in the promotion of a new cadre of liberal intellectuals in the media, the arts, and academia, the results of which ultimately led much of society to a re-evaluation and rejection of the Soviet system.In the aftermath of what appeared to be a traditionally conservative Party Congress in February-March 1986, Yakovlev was given authority to begin a series of personnel changes in the country’s leading media organs, artistic unions, and academic offices. Carrying out what Simon Cosgrove has called a “cultural offensive,” Yakovlev’s work “consisted of a series of direct interventions in literary and cultural institutions,” effectively constituting “‘a massive pre-emptive strike’ against conservative forces” opposed to reform.32Within the space of a few months in mid-to-late 1986, crucial personnel changes were made in the central print media.33 Major publications including Ogonyok (a magazine published by the Pravda publishing house), Moskovskie Novosti (a weekly bilingual Russian/English newspaper, published by Novosti Press Agency), Kommunist (official Party theoretical journal), Trud (the labour unions’ paper), Krasnaya Zvezda (organ of the Ministry of Defence), and the literary journals Novi Mir, Voprosi Literaturi, Znamya, and Sovetskaya Kultura all received new chief editors. These people, including personalities like Vitali Korotich, Yegor Yakovlev and Sergei Zalygin, were known to Alexander Yakovlev for their liberal reformist, westernizing views, and came to run the publications which became known as the “flagships of glasnost.”34 Given the Soviet editor’s traditional responsibility to act as first-line censor- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -and to hierarchically discipline his organization to promote the Party line, the promotion of these liberals to top posts effectively facilitated the gradual radicalization of social discourse.35While some central organs received new editors, many others which had moderate or liberal-leaning editors prior to perestroika quickly aligned themselves to Yakovlev’s new Party line.36 Explaining their propensity to do so, John Murray posits that because the media was “an institution” which had since the time of Stalin “been the mouthpiece of the Party,” it was only natural for its organs to reflexively and nearly unanimously respond in support of the new Party-directed “crusade for glasnost.”37Some publications, including the newspapers Literaturnaya Gazeta, Komsomolskaya Pravda and the central Party organ Pravda saw their moderate and conservative editors replaced later, between 1987 and 1989, as a result of their growing resistance to the new line. For instance, while Pravda editor Viktor Afanasyev was formally removed from his post in 1989 for publishing a defamatory article on Yeltsin,38 Gorbachev later revealed in his memoirs that the real reason for Afanasyev’s dismissal was his conservative opposition to ever-deepening glasnost.39After the reform of the central press system, only a few major all-union print publications were left “as a rump in the hands of the opponents of reform,” including the monthly literary journals Moskva, Molodaya Gvardia and Nash Sovremennik, and the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya.40 Later characterizing these organs as the “heralds of hatred” and the “flagships of the ideological campaign- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -against national democratic developments,”41 Yakovlev would wage an extensive and vigorous campaign against them in his capacity as head of propaganda.42Contemporaneously with the print media, the realm of culture also saw speedy, hierarchically directed personnel changes after the 27th Party Congress. In mid-1986, reformers Vasili Zakharov and Yuri Voronov replaced their conservative predecessors at the Ministry of Culture and the Central Committee’s Cultural Department, responsible for supervising developments in the area of culture at the national level. Pragmatic centrist Mikhail Nenashev was made head of Goskomizdat, the State Committee for Publishing, managing the country’s entire system of publishing houses, book trade, and book censorship. Under his supervision, Goskomizdat issued a directive in November 1986 which allowed publishing houses “to adopt and change their own ‘thematic plans’ and to fix their own print-runs,” and by 1987 the first small cooperatively owned publishers were allowed to form.43Throughout 1986 and 1987 Yakovlev worked to nominate liberally-minded artists to head creative unions such as the USSR Writers’ Union, the Theatre Workers’ Union, and the Cinematographers’ Union. Avant-garde filmmaker Elem Klimov, elected first secretary of the Cinematographers’ Union in May 1986, was among the most radical of these new union bosses, calling for the complete dismantling of ideological censorship and for “a real moral cleansing and…public condemnation” of past errors, and of the people who had made them.44 In December 1986 Gorbachev- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -invited leading members of the creative intelligentsia to a meeting where he formally approved the process of the liberalization of the arts begun by Yakovlev earlier in the year.45During the early years of perestroika, academia also saw a quick, systematic and centrally directed promotion of reform-minded scholars to positions of authority in the country’s top universities and research institutes, often through the direct personal intervention of Gorbachev and Yakovlev.46 To name but a few important appointments: famous liberal sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya was made head of the Soviet Sociological Association and the director of the All-Union Centre for the Study of Public Opinion; Yevgeni Primakov (future member of the Yeltsin cabinet) became the head of IMEMO; radical liberal historian Yuri Afanasyev was made rector of the State Historical-Archival Institute at Moscow State University; and reformist economist and Gorbachev advisor Abel Aganbegyan became chair of the Economics Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.47As a result of the new appointments, various schools and institutes gradually came to reject Marxism-Leninism as the ‘guiding’ paradigm in each of their respected fields, first implicitly and later explicitly. Yakovlev himself publicly participated in this process to transform academic discourse. In articles appearing in Pravda and the Party theoretical journal Kommunist in April 1987, he criticized the ‘infallible truths’ and ‘dogmatism’ inspired by the Marxist-Leninist approach to knowledge, arguing that these principles “elevated ‘authoritarian thinking’ to a new political, moral and intellectual principle.”48 The newly promoted liberal intellectuals, given license to promulgate their theories and opinions on economics, history, foreign policy and other important topics in the country’s central newspapers and periodicals, gained a hegemonic voice as perestroika progressed.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -With the onset of perestroika, much of the Soviet news media came to abandon its traditional ‘high brow’ style of journalism, along with its regular Marxist ideological analysis of events. From 1987 on, television and the pages of the central press came to be flooded with formerly sensitive and underreported topics such as drug abuse, child abuse, poverty, the inadequacies of the social welfare system, and problems in the military.49 While the appearance of much of this formerly censored information had potential for building a healthy and open media environment, it was regrettably very often formulated in the style of ‘yellow journalism,’ focusing only on negative trends, exaggerating their scale and scope, and attempting to blame them on the ‘system’ or the ‘legacy of Stalinism.’50 As perestroika progressed, much of the day-to-day journalistic narrative came to fetishize ‘negationism’51 and apocalyptic formulations of a ‘polnaya razruha’ (‘complete disintegration’) of society, which gradually took hold of societal discourse as a result.52Editors’ desire to increase their periodicals’ subscription rates doubtlessly played a role in advancing the new sensationalist style of journalism.53 Popular periodicals like Ogonyok came to compete with television programs like Vzglyad (Viewpoint) and 600 Sekund (600 Seconds) in pushing the boundaries of the permissible.54- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Critics of the new style of journalism were quick to point out the socially harmful and sometimes outright libellous nature of much of the new material. Pravda editor Afanasyev noted his view that many of the “sensational stories” were concocted out of a desire to “to boost circulation” rather than to “inform readers.”55 Other commentators, often appearing in reader editorials of major newspapers, similarly noted the tendency among journalists to do shoddy research, to exaggerate, to lie outright, and to present “single mistakes as general patterns.”56The transformation of media discourse during perestroika can be effectively illustrated by looking at the coverage and analysis of two contemporary issues –the war in Afghanistan and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the case of Afghanistan, discourse on the war began to shift in 1987, with Ogonyok magazine providing one of the earliest explicit criticisms.57 The war was transformed from a ‘demonstration of proletarian internationalism’ to a case of ‘imperialist adventurism,’ Soviet soldiers playing the role either of “war criminals,” or “victims” of criminal state policy.58 In the case of Chernobyl, media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the disaster focused on the courageousness of the people working to contain it and on feelings of national unity fostered by efforts to mitigate it.59 Between 1987 and 1988, discourse began to shift. First criticizing the organizational chaos in the work to extinguish the fires and to evacuate the disaster zone, the flagships of glasnost then began to argue that coercion, rather than courage, moved the firemen, builders, and specialists to continue their work.60 By- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -1989, journalists were turning “to the social and political roots” of the disaster, citing the ‘inhumanity of the Soviet system,’ where the “human being [was just] a cog in the works.”61 In 1991, on the eve of the collapse of the country, the accident was written off as “the corpse of a bygone era…of lies and spiritual decay –fill[ing] the air with the stench of radiation.”62Beginning in late 1986 and early 1987, popular ‘thick’ journals catering to the mass intelligentsia began publishing a torrent of formerly suppressed national and foreign literature by personalities like Bulgakov, Pasternak, Nabokov, Orwell and Koestler. By 1989, with the serialization of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in Novi Mir, few of the old literary taboos were left to be broken. Since most of these works were originally banned for their implicitly or explicitly political content, their appearance in print had major implications extending beyond the realm of literature, coinciding with a re-evaluation of the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet state being carried out by an increasingly radicalized mass intelligentsia.The budding popularity of formerly censored work coincided with a growing disdain for many of the old established aesthetic and “ideological pillars” of Soviet literature, including Gorky, Maiakovski and Vyshnevski.63 Even Pushkin, adopted by the Soviet regime as the founder of Russian literature, became subject to criticism when an old article published abroad by Andrei Sinyavsky was reprinted in Oktiabr in 1989. In the article, entitled ‘Progulki s Pukshkinim’ (‘Strolls with Pushkin’), Pushkin’s tremendous literary stature was questioned and his work written off as ‘fetishized,’ ‘sacralised’ and overrated, prompting a wave of criticism from nationalist Russian writers accusing the author of ‘Russophobia.’64- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Among the contemporary work of the glasnost period, Anatoli Rybakov’s Deti Arbata (Children of the Arbat) was arguably the most famous piece –a novel of historical fiction set in the Stalinist 1930s. Conceived of by contemporary critics as ‘mediocre’ in the artistic sense, the work became popular mainly for its exploration and re-evaluation of a politically sensitive period of time.65 While authors like Rybakov focused on history, others, including Astafyev, Rasputin and Voinovich worked to criticize and savagely satirize the present. Discussing the intense politicization of Soviet-Russian literature during this period, Alexander Genis explains that all “its genres degenerated into journalism,” the “life of a literary work [coming] to be measured not in terms of generations, but in terms of months, weeks, and even days.”66 Noting the tendency among writers to constantly seek thematic ‘virgin soil’ and to publish on the basis of ideological rather than aesthetic conceptions, critics point out that consequently, little literature of lasting literary significance was created during the glasnost period.67Beginning in late 1986, a small number of films from the ‘unshelved past’ began to appear in Soviet movie theatres, the most famous of which was Tengiz Abuladze’s 1984 allegorical anti-Stalinist Pokayanie [Repentance], a film receiving numerous state prizes and widespread local and international attention.68 At the same time, many of the old guiding conventions of Soviet cinematography, including socialist realism and filmmaking “geared toward satisfying spectators’ ‘aesthetic needs,’”69 were- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -removed from contemporary filmmaking, replaced by avant-garde and socially critical forms of film and documentary production.70Films of the perestroika era came to be dominated by the chernukha, a style of filmmaking portraying unremitting bleakness, negativity and pessimism in the presentation of life, based in the desire to “chronicle…social horror…to reveal historical atrocity and ‘truth,’” to push “cultural production to the limit.”71 The main characters of these films, frequently from socially peripheral groups such as prisoners, criminals, and prostitutes, were often explicitly or implicitly portrayed as heroic individuals fighting ‘the system.’72 Film critics Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky argue that the chernukha’s portrayal of inhumanity and immorality, unmotivated cruelty and the death of all former ideals was specifically designed to leave film audiences “nauseated.”73Apart from Alexander Proshkin’s 1987 Holodnoe Leto Pytdesyat Tretego (Cold Summer of 53’), the single popular contemporary political film with anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist undertones, the majority of the successful films of the late 1980s were chernukhas, attracting viewers through their sensational innovations and ‘gritty’ portrayal of Soviet reality. Malenkaya Vera (Small Vera/Small Faith) depicted the dilapidated state of working-class life, but was immortalized for containing the first sex scene in Soviet cinematic history. Interdevochka (Intergirl) sympathetically portrayed the life of a Soviet prostitute willing to sacrifice everything for “a different way of life,”74 and is noted among film critics for its shock value and profane dialogue.75 Released between 1988 and 1989, the above mentioned- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -films were among the last of the Soviet blockbusters to draw millions of spectators.76 Panned by film critics for “formulaic storylines,” “vacant,” incoherent style and the tendency to reach for platitudes,77 chernukhas came to be rejected by the public as perestroika wore on since they “offer[ed] no positive outlook or spiritual guidance amid the chaos” of everyday life during perestroika.78 Public rejection, the collapse of state support for film distribution, the importation of movies and television series from abroad, and the increasing availability of videocassette players all contributed to the virtual collapse of the film industry in the early 1990s.79Through the late 1980s documentary filmmaking underwent its own radicalization, coming to discuss sensitive historical issues and the contemporary problems of poverty, drug addiction, youth alienation, and prostitution. Like cinema, documentary filmmaking also gradually turned to the chernukha style. Stanislav Govoruhin’s 1990 film Tak Zhit Nelzya (It is Impossible to Live Like This), arguably the most famous of the perestroika era documentaries, epitomized this shift, mercilessly enumerating and condemning the problems in Soviet society, and ultimately indicting the whole record of Soviet rule.80In February 1987, Gorbachev made a speech in which he called upon historians, writers and intellectuals to begin a comprehensive campaign to fill in the beliye piatna (white spots) of history. Later that year, in preparation for the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, he called on the intelligentsia to reveal the full extent of the ‘criminal’ nature of Stalinism.81 As a result, between- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -1987 and 1988, virtually every aspect of Stalin era Soviet history became subject to critical reinterpretation, including the once sacred historical narratives of collectivization, industrialization, and the great victory in the Second World War. Articles published in the flagships of glasnost quickly came to challenge dominant historical narratives, suggesting that the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s was a deliberate state policy, challenging the need for rapid industrialization, and arguing that Stalin facilitated the rise of Hitler.In 1987, a campaign was initiated to assess the death toll resulting from Stalin’s leadership. As the campaign progressed, the ‘low’ figures based on KGB archives and government commissions (estimating 3.8 million people convicted of state crimes between 1917-1990, of whom 828,000 were shot)82 were overshadowed by higher and higher estimates, a 1988 Neva article citing 8-10 million killed, another 1988 article in Argumenti i Fakti by Roy Medvedev estimating 40 million,83 and a 1991 Komsomolskaya Pravda article citing Solzhenitsyn’s estimate of 110 million.84 In 1989, Medvedev’s figure was adopted into a new textbook on Soviet history,85 while the ever-rising death toll figures naturally resulted in implicit and explicit comparisons of Stalinism to Nazism.86 Discussing the radicalism of the new discourse, Moshe Lewin argued that the introduction of new figures was rarely followed up by critical analysis, noting: “If evidence show[ed] that there were several million camp inmates [critics would] insist that there must have actually been double or triple that number. To them, half a million or a million executions sound[ed] like a mere apology for murder [and they concluded] that there must have been millions more.”87- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -At the same time that broad historical trends and statistics were subjected to radical revision, so too were many important individuals in the Soviet historical pantheon, including Pavlik Morozov, Alexei Stakhanov, and Zoia Kosmodemianskaya. Morozov, whose heroism was first demythologized by articles in Ogonyok and Yunnost,88 was later reinvented from a symbol of class consciousness and dedication to the state to a “symbol of legalized and romanticized treachery.”89 Stakhanov’s personal record and the publicity given to his accomplishments underwent extensive criticism, and by mid-1988 articles appeared in Trud and Komsomolskaya Pravda revealing that he had died a “bitter drunkard.”90 Kosmodemianskaya, one of the country’s most famous wartime partisans, had her entire wartime record and personal character subjected “to the most ferocious and wide-ranging attacks” in the late period of perestroika.91 Kara-Murza concludes that the construction of new ‘black myths’ around these figures was usually conducted “through omission, misrepresentation and false association,”92 their builders’ goal being to destroy the important symbols of national historical consciousness.93 Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union were many of the new revisionist accounts on the lives and exploits of these individuals questioned or decisively refuted.94As a result of the media campaign to reinterpret Soviet history, school history examinations were cancelled in 1988, the old pre-perestroika textbooks conceived of as woefully outdated and “full of lies.”95 Teachers were encouraged to incorporate the new interpretations made in newspaper and- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -journal articles into their teaching, and to test on the basis of the new material,96 thus formalizing the introduction of the radical media discourse into the education system.Constrained by the rules of the historical profession, which demanded methodical analysis, well-researched conclusions and solid reasoning, professional historians were slow to enter the historical debate. They were also outnumbered by publicists, novelists, playwrights and film and television writers, who could release their work faster, often producing “deliberately provocative historical works in order to strengthen the financial positions of their journals, theatres, and newspapers.”97 These groups were supported by a small number of prominent reformist historians including people like Yuri Afanasyev and Dmitri Volkogonov, who used their stature and the power of their office to explicitly and implicitly support the formulations made by journalists and artists.98 Only towards the end of perestroika, when historical discourse had already shifted decisively, did many moderate historians begin to incorporate themselves in a major way into the debate.99 They critiqued the journalistic style of much of the new historical analysis, warning against “black and white” analysis, “blanket rejections” and “the replacement of one half-truth with another.”100 Reformers counterattacked by defaming mainstream historians and charging their institutes with the “wholesale falsification of history,”101 Afanasyev writing off the entirety of Soviet historical studies of the past half-century as ‘pseudo-science.’102Yakovlev personally participated in the campaign of historical revisionism at the highest levels of power, chairing several government historical commissions, including the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims (1988) and the Congress of People’s Deputies’ commission investigating- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Last edited by soviet78 on 07 Feb 2012, 07:27, edited 5 times in total. "The thing about capitalism is that it sounds awful on paper and is horrendous in practice. Communism sounds wonderful on paper and when it was put into practice it was done pretty well for what they had to work with." -MiG soviet78 +-] Soviet cogitations: 4490

Defected to the U.S.S.R.: 07 Oct 2004, 22:04

Ideology: Marxism-Leninism

Resident Soviet

07 Feb 2012, 07:03





the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1989). Yakovlev has been criticized in recent years for the biased way in which he chaired the latter commission,103 which one commentator has dubbed “less a proper investigation,” and more means of support for the Baltic “struggle for independence.”104



The Campaign to ‘Hit at’ Leninism through Stalinism



In 1999, Yakovlev recalled in his introduction to the Russian edition of the Black Book of Communism that prior to perestroika, a select group of intellectuals “informally developed a plan: to hit at Stalin and Stalinism through Lenin, and then, if successful, at Lenin and revolutionism in general through Plekhanov, the Social Democrats, liberalism, and ‘ethical socialism.’”105 This ‘informal plan’ was successfully carried out during perestroika, and would have a tremendously destructive effect on Soviet mass consciousness. Yurchak notes that because Lenin was traditionally the main ‘anchor’ upon which the Party and state leadership had relied to legitimize itself, the undermining of his status as the ‘master signifier’ of the system portended catastrophic consequences for the system itself.106



In May 1988, in the midst of the media and artistic community’s campaign against Stalinism, liberal journalist Vasili Seliunin published ‘Istoki’ (‘Sources’/‘Roots’), one of earliest and most well-known journalistic attacks on Lenin, where he questioned the idea that the distortions of socialism began with Stalin. Seliunin argued that the ‘command-administrative system’ built by Stalin was made possible by the harsh methods of Lenin, the utopianism of maximalist socialism, and the Bolsheviks’ monopolization of power in the aftermath of the October Revolution.107 Many other commentators, ranging from liberal westernizers to conservative Russian nationalists, soon came to advance similar arguments in the



103 Alexander Kapto, “Pakt Molotova-Ribbentropa: Mistifikatsiya ili Realnost?” Bezopasnost Evrasii Vol.38, No.4 (2009), p.224, 228-229.

104 David Pryce-Jones, The War that Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire: 1985-1991 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), p.95.

105 Alexander Yakovlev, “Bolshevism – Sotsialnaya Bolezn XX Veka,” in Robert Laffont (ed.) Chernaya Kniga Kommunisma Trans. E. Brailovskaya et al. (Moscow: Tree Veka Istorii, 1999), p.14.

106 Yurchak, p.74.

107 David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997), p.68.; Malia, p.434.; Yakovlev, disguising his disdain for Lenin during the reform period (in fact calling for a return to ‘true Leninism’), bluntly stated after the collapse that Stalin was “a worthy pupil of Lenin’s in his hatred and in his taste for blood.” (Yakovlev, 2002, p.91.)



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country’s central newspapers and journals.108 Like the campaign against Stalin and Stalinism, the one against Lenin and his cult was also aided by literary, theatre, and film productions. Vasili Grossman’s Vse Techet (Everything Flows), published in 1989, was the harshest, portraying Lenin as a “cruel and despotic prophet…a product of one thousand years of Russian serfdom and…an apostle of a new, Communist slavery.”109



In July 1989, explicitly questioning the moral basis for Soviet power in the USSR, Yuri Afanasyev argued that because the Soviet regime “was brought into being through bloodshed and with the aid of mass murderers and crimes against humanity,” it had no historical justification for existence.110 Through similar arguments, reformist intellectuals wrote off the entire Bolshevik project as cruel, bloody, and ultimately meaningless.111 Discussing the legacy of Bolshevism, famous liberal histor