Abstract
The reconsideration of the Soviet past was central to the mental revolution launched by Gorbachev. In the course of 1987 and 1988 the Soviet press and other media described with increasing frankness grim aspects of the past on which they had been utterly silent for twenty years or more. The intense interest of the Soviet public in the truth about their own history led to a huge rise in the circulation of the hardest-hitting journals. The circulation of the literary monthly Novyi mir increased from 495,000 in 1987 to 1,560,000 in 1989, and of the weekly Ogonek from 1,500,000 to 3,200,000.
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Notes
For developments in 1987–88, see A. Nove, Glasnost in Action (1989), chs. 2 and 3; and R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (1989), and sources there cited.
For this controversy see R. W. Davies (ed.), From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy (1990), where both views are represented.
Cited by G. L. Smimov (director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism), Pravda, February 1, 1990.
See for example the article by G. Bordyugov, V. Kozlov and V. Loginov in Kommunist, no. 14, 1989, and their reply to critics in ibid. no. 5, 1990, and the commemorative but not uncritical article by the respected Leningrad historian V. Startsev ‘We are with Lenin’, published on the occasion of the 120th Anniversary of Lenin’s birth in Pravda, April 3, 1990.
The most important are N. I. Bukharin, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (1988), Put’ k sotsialivnu (Novosibirsk, 1990), and Problemy teorii i praktiki sotsialivna (1989); his plenum speech appears on pp. 253–308 of the latter volume.
EKO, no. 1, 1990, pp. 47–62; the same number contains (pp. 63–6) an article by A. V. Pantsov, ‘Trotskii i Preobrazhenskii’. The full text of the notes on Trotsky’s speech by Bazhanov (who later emigrated), with full explanatory notes, was later published by V. P. Vilkova and V. P. Danilov in Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 5, 1990, pp. 32–43.
M. M. Gorinov, NEP: poisk putei razvitiya (1990) — Znanie, Istoriya series, no. 2, 1990. In another article Gorinov even more pessimistically comments that ‘a realistically acceptable “alternative” variant was not proposed in the party’ (Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 1, 1990, p. 18).
Yu. I. Korablev, I. A. Fedosov, Yu. S. Borisov, Istoriya SSSR: uchebnik dlya desyatogo klassa srednei shkoly (1989).
Dialog, no. 11, 1990, pp. 22–3 (note by V. I. Startsev).
See Harold Shukman’s account of history lessons which he attended in Moscow schools in September 1989 (The Times Higher Educational Supplement, March 2, 1990).
See Izvestiya TsK, no. 9, 1990, pp. 29–31.
Pravda, June 6, 1990.
Pravda, May 31, 1990.
Izvestiya, November 6, 1988 ( V. Anan’ev, a chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR).
Moscow News, no. 18, 1990 (this account by a journalist has several important inaccuracies); Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 5, 1990, pp. 112–30 (in Russian) and International Affairs, June 1990, pp. 98–115, 144 (in English).
Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 6, 1990, pp. 47–9 (Yu. N. Zorya); this is followed on pp. 49–57 by the texts of relevant documents, with specific references to file numbers, prepared for publication by the Director of the Central State Special Archive A. S. Prokopenko.
Disk. listok 4, Pravda, January 24, 1990 (V. Varfolomeev, Rostov region).
Disk. listok 27, Pravda, April 28, 1990 (L. I. Sukhov, non-party, from Khar’kov; he agreed not to resign because the electors told him ‘go back to the Kremlin and fight’.
Disk. listok 3, Pravda, January 17, 1990 (A. Evtushenko, Novocheboksarks).
Disk. listok 37, Pravda, May 26, 1990 (S. Maksimovich, Pushchino).
Pravda, July 8, 1990. See also the speech by the author Chingis Aitmatov (a member of the Presidential Council) in ibid., July 9, 1990; he implicitly rejects the whole course of development since 1917.
See Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, no. 6, 1987, pp. 61, 68–70. For extracts from this report, see Davies (1989), p. 131.
Literaturnaya gazeta, August 22, 1990 (Karen Khachaturov).
Literaturnaya gazeta, July 4, July 18, 1990 (V. Golovanov).
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© 1992 Jonathan Haslam
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Davies, R.W. (1992). History and Perestroika . In: Rees, E.A. (eds) The Soviet Communist Party in Disarray. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389205_6
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