Zhang Shuhua: The Collapse of the Soviet Union Began with the CPSU's Comprehensive Denigration of Its Own History
How to correctly treat the Party’s history and objectively evaluate historical figures—especially the role, merits, and demerits of leaders—is an important hallmark for testing whether a Party is mature. To evaluate the achievements and mistakes of leading figures, it is even more necessary to integrate the specific historical environment and summarize the historical experiences and lessons therein. Reflecting on history must never be a sudden impulse or a swarming movement; nor should it merely emphasize the dark side, fail to look at problems comprehensively and historically, or engage in a wholesale negation of the past simply to cater to current political needs. In essence, this repeats past mistakes and is not only harmful but shameful. However, in the late 1980s, the leadership of the CPSU [1], headed by Gorbachev and Yakovlev, played precisely this role of comprehensively slandering the history of the CPSU.
Soviet history had possessed a fixed interpretation since the political criticism movement in the Soviet historiography circles of the early 1930s, and particularly since the publication of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course in 1938. However, Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin’s "cult of personality" at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 caused ideological confusion. After Brezhnev took power in the mid-1960s, he raised criticisms regarding Khrushchev and his methods. During the Gorbachev period, certain extremist forces in the Soviet ideological and cultural spheres once again touched off a wave of "historical reflection fever," directing the spearhead of public opinion straight at Stalin and the history of the CPSU. They became endlessly entangled in old historical accounts and unscrupulously denied everything about the CPSU’s past—first negating and cursing Stalin, then subsequently negating Lenin, the October Revolution, the Soviet system, and Marxism-Leninism.
From the mid-1980s onward, the movement to negate history during the late period of the CPSU’s rule exhibited the following characteristics in terms of content and form:
(I) Historical reflection activities were personally organized and planned by the top leadership of the CPSU
In evaluating the "historical reflection" movement stirred up during the Gorbachev era, some contemporary historians have written that in the early stages of "Restructuring" (Perestroika), the calls by Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and others to fill in "blank spots" and rewrite history were highly political and ideologically biased. They were not interested in historical issues for their own sake, but primarily sought to create public opinion to promote "Restructuring" and achieve their political goals.
In November 1986, at a meeting of the heads of social science departments across the Soviet Union, Gorbachev accused Soviet history textbooks of formulaic thinking, dogmatism, and formalism. He demanded that textbooks be rewritten. After the January 1957 Plenary Session of the CPSU Central Committee, Gorbachev repeatedly issued orders to the press, emphasizing that "there should be no hiding or covering up on historical issues." To ensure that the "propaganda tone" [2] of journalistic thought was correct, Gorbachev and Yakovlev frequently "synchronized watches" with leaders of the press. In July 1987, at a symposium with leaders from the press and artistic circles, Gorbachev remarked that the events of 1937–1938 could not and should not be excused or forgiven.
In 1987, the CPSU held a grand meeting to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution. Prior to the meeting, Yakovlev and others meticulously planned and drafted Gorbachev’s report for the anniversary. The report raised sharp criticisms of Stalinism. Gorbachev later recalled with pride that the innovation of this report was the "shift from exposing and criticizing Stalin to criticizing the Stalinist system." Yakovlev confessed that his aim was to use the 70th-anniversary meeting to push "New Thinking" forward. In this report, titled October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues, Gorbachev claimed he would continue the unfinished cause of the 1960s and restore historical justice. At a briefing during the commemorative meeting, Yakovlev told reporters that the analysis of history offered at this meeting should not be viewed as a final conclusion, nor should the report’s conclusions be dogmatized or fixed. He continued to fan the flames, fueling and emboldened the forces seeking a comprehensive negation of history.
It should be noted that at the time, the attitude toward this "history fever" was not unanimous among the CPSU leadership. Politburo member Ligachev and Politburo member and KGB Chairman Chebrikov both opposed "ideological pluralism" and the one-sided vilification of Soviet history. Chebrikov warned that imperialist spies were sponsoring writers to demonize the history of the Soviet Union. The Soviet historiography community expressed deep concern over "reflecting on history" and "settling old historical scores," and the voices of ordinary CPSU members and the masses against the vilification of history were also very strong. On March 13, 1988, Sovetskaya Rossiya published a letter to the editor by Nina Andreyeva, a female teacher at the Leningrad Leningrad Technological Institute, titled "I Cannot Forsake My Principles," which criticized the waves of "historical reflection" surging through society. The letter pointed out that the sensationalist articles currently in the press could only lead people astray and were a smear on the socialist Soviet Union. The article raised many abnormal phenomena in the media at the time: the activities of "informal organizations," the promotion of Western parliamentary separation of powers, the denial of the leading position of the Party and the working class, and vicious attacks on Soviet history. The article pointed out that after several years of "Restructuring," not only were no results visible, but it had led to a decline in living standards. Restructuring lacked a clear program and goal and concealed cosmopolitan tendencies. After the article was published, newspapers in several provinces reprinted it, and some Party organizations began to discuss it.
Nina Andreyeva’s letter caused a massive uproar. The "liberal reformers" viewed it as a counter-attack by "conservative forces and the old CPSU guard." The CPSU Politburo held emergency meetings for two consecutive days to discuss countermeasures. Finally, under the direct instigation of Yakovlev, Viktor Afanasyev of Pravda personally organized the publication of a rebuttal article on April 5, titled "The Principles of Perestroika: The Revolutionary Nature of Thinking and Action," which launched a comprehensive counter-attack and suppression of Andreyeva. Pravda called Nina Andreyeva’s letter a "manifesto of anti-Perestroika elements" and labeled her an "enemy of reform, a Stalinist, a conservative, an apparatus bureaucrat, and a representative of the Party nomenklatura." Pravda argued that Andreyeva was defending Stalin and was the voice of conservative forces in Soviet society attempting to block the reform process. Following this debate, the CPSU leadership not only began to expose and criticize Stalin but went a step further, criticizing Marxism-Leninism as utopian and dogmatic. From then on, with the direct participation of Gorbachev and Yakovlev, the CPSU went even further down the path of negating Stalin and negating its past historical trajectory.
(II) Taking advantage of the "historical reflection" in the press to launch a movement to rehabilitate historical cases, creating an atmosphere of public condemnation against the CPSU
During Stalin’s time in power, due to specific historical conditions and the error of expanding the scope of class struggle, some unjust, false, and wrongly decided cases occurred. It was not until the Khrushchev era that these cases began to be corrected. Correcting such cases was entirely necessary; the problem was that after Gorbachev advocated “democratization” and “glasnost” (openness), articles by rehabilitated individuals or their relatives describing their cases appeared more and more frequently in the press, forming a powerful public opinion shockwave that seriously shook the foundations and basis of the CPSU and the Soviet system.
In early 1988, the CPSU Central Committee established a Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of the "Great Purge" of the 1930s. Later, Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee Secretariat, personally took charge of re-examining historical events. Even more notably, on July 4, 1988, acting on Gorbachev’s suggestion, the CPSU Central Committee Politburo decided to erect a monument in Moscow to the millions of people who were persecuted to death during the Stalin era. Simultaneously, so-called "grassroots" historical rehabilitation activities were carried out with the tacit approval of the top CPSU leadership. On November 26, 1988, the weekly magazine Ogoniok [3] held a large-scale mass activity called "Week of Conscience" to solemnly commemorate the victims of the Stalin era. The Union of Architects of the USSR, the Union of Cinematographers, Ogoniok, and Literaturnaya Gazeta jointly organized a historical education society called "Memorial." The purpose of this society was to promote the rehabilitation of historical cases across the Soviet Union, restore historical truth, and build monuments for the victims of Soviet history. After 1988, radical "historical reflection" publications like Ogoniok and Moscow News gradually revealed their true faces: using the negation of the past, the CPSU, and socialism to change the direction of reform and force it down the path they had designed.
(III) Non-professional historians, such as journalists and writers, acted as the "vanguard" in this "historical reflection fever"
As I.V. Vorobiev, a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, pointed out in early 1989: "It was not we professional historians who awakened people's interest in history, but publicists, writers, and economists. It is they who turned history into the kind of social force it has now become. As for professional historians (of whom there are thousands in our country, as everyone knows), those who have been actively involved in this work can be counted on one's fingers."
Nevertheless, a small number of radical historians joined the "rewriting history" movement, such as Yuri Afanasyev and Dmitri Volkogonov. The former was once packaged as a "fighter for democracy" but fell silent after the mid-1990s; the latter went from being a general in charge of propaganda in the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army to becoming Yeltsin’s court historian, vigorously attacking Lenin and Stalin. This tide of historical reflection created a situation where the entire history of the Soviet Union supposedly needed to be rewritten. In June 1988, relevant Soviet departments decided to cancel the history exams for primary and secondary schools that semester, stating that history textbooks for schools would be rewritten in the future. Encouraged by Soviet officials, the "history fever," characterized primarily by "exposing the truth," swept through society like a massive tornado, blowing harder and harder.
Faced with the chaotic situation in the field of history, on October 3, 1989, the CPSU Central Committee held a symposium of historians, chaired by Vadim Medvedev, Secretary of the Central Committee Secretariat. In his opening remarks, he defended the trend: "The current socio-political atmosphere depends on views of history. We should not defend what deserves exposure. Conscience cannot be traded. The liquidation of past mistakes must be carried out to the end, without any restrictions!" Authoritative figures from the Soviet historical community attending the meeting—members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences such as G. Smirnov, Y. Kukushkin, and I. Kovalchenko—spoke one after another, expressing concern about the historical fever in society. Academician G. Smirnov stated that he did not agree with blackening Soviet history as a whole, including the Great Patriotic War [4] and post-war reconstruction. Academician Y. Kukushkin suggested that without respect for Marxism and theoretical preparation, it would be difficult to expect Perestroika to succeed; reform cannot be carried out under the banner of historical nihilism [5] and "de-ideologization," and the mass media and extremist forces cannot force the science of history to de-ideologize. Academician Y. Kukushkin and Academician I. Kovalchenko, Academic Secretary of the History Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, demanded that the CPSU Central Committee should have its own principled position. Faced with the academics' questions, Medvedev, in his capacity as Secretary of the Central Committee, brushed them off lightly, summarizing the Party's stance in just a few words: Lenin, the October Revolution, and the socialist choice. There was no follow-up to this Central Committee symposium.
(IV) Reflecting on history led to a deluge of historical nihilism, negating the history of the CPSU and socialism
Since the 20th Congress of the CPSU, a trend of thought toward the wholesale negation of Stalin had always remained latent in Soviet society. Under the impetus of Gorbachev’s "democratization" and "glasnost," this trend was revived and quickly became a spreading epidemic. Opposing forces selectively and purposefully publicized historical documents and archives from the Stalin era, using "unjust, false, and wrongly decided cases" to prepare for a total negation of Stalin.
In June 1987, the 26th issue of Ogoniok, controlled by CPSU dissidents, disclosed a public letter written by Lenin’s comrade-in-arms Raskolnikov to Stalin on August 17, 1939, which severely condemned Stalin for the arrest and murder of innocent and famous figures in the military and cultural circles. Soon after, Moscow News published a previously unpublished letter written by Sholokhov to the veteran Party member Levitskaya in 1927, criticizing the excesses of agricultural collectivization: "The kulaks were suppressed, but the middle peasants were also crushed, and the poor peasants are starving," causing "people to be furious and in an extremely bad mood." The magazine Science and Life published "Historical Lessons and the Duty of the Writer," written by the writer Simonov twenty years earlier, which condemned Stalin for executing three batches of high-ranking military cadres before and during the early stages of the war, causing incalculable losses to the army and serious harm to the country, and so on.
This movement of reckoning with the past began in late 1987 and reached its climax in 1988. The spearhead of criticism shifted from Stalinism toward the social system of the 1920s through the 1950s, negating the Soviet system and asserting that the Soviet model represented by Stalin was a typical "administrative-command" system, "totalitarianism," and the source of all evil. After 1989, materials exposing and criticizing Stalin began to decrease, as criticisms of Stalinism gradually transformed into critiques of Bolshevism and the October Revolution. Some articles suggested, either explicitly or implicitly, that there was a direct link between the October Revolution and Bolshevism, and between Lenin and Stalin. Between 1988 and 1989, one of the most influential events in the Soviet ideological sphere was the publication of a long article titled "The Origins of Stalinism" by Dr. Alexander Tsipko in the journal Science and Life (Nauka i Zhizn). While superficially upholding Marxism, the article actually negated the October Revolution and the history of Soviet socialism. It argued that the Russian October Revolution was the product of radicalism and that it had interrupted the normal course of Russian history. The article juxtaposed "good" Leninist thought against Stalin’s "bad" socialism. The author proposed that the ideas and practices of Soviet radicalism from 1917 to 1988 were the primary obstacles to contemporary society.
The movement to "rethink history" [6] began with the exposure and criticism of Stalin, proceeded to the negation of the October Revolution and the questioning of the post-revolutionary system, and finally led to the glorification of Tsarist Russian history, self-negation, and a blind cult of the Western path. The vilification of the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) eventually led the Russian theoretical community to willfully "expose and criticize Russia's historical defects and defame the state." Historical nihilism [7] concerning the "historical defects" of Russian civilization relative to Western civilization, along with the practice of worshiping the West, constituted the theoretical and historical-philosophical foundation of Russian neoliberalism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, the Soviet media proclaimed that reform meant "comprehensively replacing the Russian civilizational model and its national socio-cultural customs." Opening a book of jokes published at the time, one could read the following: "An American car is parked in Moscow, and several Soviet citizens are lying in the mud beneath it, stabbing the tires. A passerby asks: 'What are you doing there?' They reply: 'We want to breathe some of that free air from America.'"
In academic seminars at the time, one could frequently hear remarks such as: "What kind of economy can one talk about in the Soviet Union? It is merely a primitive caveman economy." Sometimes, one could even hear sighs of regret: "Alas! Why weren't we occupied by the Germans?" During this period, the speeches of certain "towering figures" of reform and "trendsetters" of liberal democratization usually began with a bitter denunciation of the Soviet past and ended with praise for the West. "If the people's hopes are dashed, then for this unqualified and uncivilized nation—possessing innate totalitarian characteristics dating back to Ivan the Terrible—there is a simple and natural way out: to lead the country comprehensively into a colonial status in the economic, social, and ideological spheres." Some newspaper articles even argued for the necessity of introducing United Nations arbitration, "peacekeeping forces," and "humanitarian aid" onto Soviet territory, as well as the establishment of UN supervisors and observers. A newspaper named The Chiming Clock (Chimes) once published the sentence: "We sincerely look forward to such an end; besides, what is so bad about colonial status?" The article then proceeded to discuss how to become a colony and suggested seeking help from Western businessmen.
It was precisely under the impetus of CPSU leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev, under the guise of re-evaluating history, that the CPSU was negated, the history of socialist revolution and construction was negated, and the Soviet socialist system was negated. This led to social and ideological chaos, opening the door for the ideological disintegration of the CPSU. In the late 1980s, certain books, articles, and speeches concerning historical issues openly and completely negated Stalin, mocked and ridiculed Lenin, negated the October Revolution, and negated Marxism. They viewed the CPSU as the "material carrier of the bureaucratic-inhibitor mechanism" and a "complacent organizational structure mired in lies and self-deception," thus pushing the CPSU step-by-step onto the stage of historical judgment.
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