The reasons for the collapse of the CPSU and the collapse of the Soviet Union are manifold: historical, realistic, internal, external, political, ideological, and so on. But the most immediate and crucial reason is that Gorbachev pursued a wrong line that deviated from socialism. This route eventually dismantled the Party and at the same time destroyed the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's manifestations of pursuing this erroneous line are also manifold. From the ideological field, a very important point is to vigorously engage in historical nihilism, in the name of "re-evaluating" history, distorting and negating the history of socialist revolution and construction under the leadership of the CPSU, and thus negating the socialist system in the Soviet Union, thus causing ideological confusion inside and outside the Party, and at the same time providing an opportunity for foreign hostile forces to westernize and divide the Soviet Union. This countercurrent of historical nihilism served as an irreplaceable catalyst for other factors in the collapse of the CPSU and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The first to be denied was the history of the Brezhnev period.
Historical nihilists describe the Brezhnev period simply as a "period of stagnation" with nothing to say. Of course, during the Brezhnev period, mainly in the later period of his reign, many problems did arise in the Soviet Party and the state, the most prominent of which were the abandonment of institutional reform halfway, the increasing rigidity of the political and economic system and ideology, the corruption and serious detachment of leading cadres from the masses, as well as foreign expansion and great power chauvinism. These issues should be carefully summarized. However, the course of Soviet history during this period was not a dark mess. The performance of brezhnev in the early years of the brezhnev administration should be said to be very good. After he came to power, he quickly made a series of adjustments to the hasty reforms of the Khrushchev period, including the abolition of the "Industrial Party" and the "Agrarian Party", the restoration of a unified Party organization, and the implementation of the "reform of the new economic system".
This is considered to be the most successful reform in the history of the Soviet Union, and the result was an average annual increase in GDP of 7.4% from 1966 to 1970, an increase of 50% in industrial production in five years, and the growth rate of the production of consumer goods finally caught up with the growth rate of the means of production. In general, during Brezhnev's 18 years in power, the pace of economic development, although declining year after year, has always maintained growth, with an average annual growth rate of 6.4% from 1971 to 1975, 4.2% from 1976 to 1980, and 3.6% until the early 1980s. Thus, the Brezhnev period became the period when the soviet union's comprehensive national strength was at its strongest, and it was during this period that the Soviet Union became one of the two superpowers of the world. In addition, the society was relatively stable during this period, and the cultural and material living standards of the people were the highest in the history of the Soviet Union. It should be said that the Brezhnev period was a period of crisis in development, not a simple "period of stagnation".
Of course, the historical nihilists are not primarily directed not against the Brezhnev period, but against the Stalin period. It was during this period that the Soviet Union built the basic socialist system, realized the industrialization of the country and the collectivization of agriculture, won a great victory in the Great Patriotic War, and the national economy recovered rapidly after the war. Therefore, to negate the great achievements of socialist construction in the USSR, and especially the socialist system of the USSR, it is necessary to negate Stalin and the historical process of the Stalin period.
The critique and total repudiation of Stalin began at the 20th Congress of the CPSU during the Khrushchev period. By the time of Gorbachev, both in scale and in the breadth of the problems involved, it greatly exceeded that of the Khrushchev period. During the Khrushchev period, the criticism consisted mainly of Stalin personally, as well as his various mistakes in his leadership work, and by the time of Gorbachev it had developed into the criticism and negation of the Soviet socialist system formed during the Stalin period.
Ever since Gorbachev put forward the policy of "democratization" and "openness," a large number of articles criticizing and negating Stalin, denying the industrialization of the country, the collectivization of agriculture, the arbitrary expansion of the "Great Purge" movement, and even the negation of the leading role of the Party in the Great Patriotic War have been published in large numbers. These articles, while criticizing Stalin, highlighted the attack on the socialist system of the SOVIET Union. They described the system established during the Stalin period as a variant of the tsarist system, "barracks-style socialism" or "feudal autocratic dictatorship", without democracy or freedom. Some argue that the socialist system did not exist in the Soviet Union at all, not even of "distorted" and "deformed" socialism. In the view of the historical nihilists, the main reason why Stalin committed all kinds of mistakes and "crimes" was the system; To prevent these phenomena, the system must be abandoned once and for all.
The above views are completely unfounded. During stalin's reign, there were indeed many major mistakes and mistakes in the theory and practice of socialist construction. But this was not the mainstream of the historical process at that time. The political and economic system of the Soviet Union formed during the Stalin period was socialist in nature. Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist. His outstanding contribution to the history of the Soviet Union cannot be denied. Even the enemies of socialism do not deny this. Churchill once said of Stalin in a speech: "When he took over Russia, Russia had only wooden plows, and when he died, Russia already had nuclear weapons."
With the development of Gorbachev's departure from the erroneous line of Marxism, the historical nihilists were no longer satisfied with the negation of Stalin, but further directly denigrated Lenin and the October Revolution, and negated the socialist road opened up by the October Revolution. It has been argued that the October Revolution "was a conspiracy of the Bolshevik Party to take advantage of the special international circumstances of the First World War and the incompetence of the Provisional Government"; The civil war caused by the October Revolution was a "cannibalism between compatriots", and the Bolshevik Party was the "cause" of this war and was responsible for the price paid by the masses of the people for it.
In the view of the historical nihilists, the October Revolution brought russia not progress, but regression. For "pre-revolutionary Russia was already developing towards Western-style capitalist democracy, which was then artificially prevented by the Bolsheviks coming to power, and the subsequent socialist experiments led it in the wrong direction." Thus, the October Revolution was inferior to the February Revolution, and the February Revolution was inferior to Stolypin's reforms. If the revolution had been suspended after the Overthrow of the Tsar in the February Revolution, Russia would have been able to establish a bourgeois system, develop capitalism, and thus might have been modernized long ago and kept pace with the advanced countries of the West. And without the February Revolution, Russia could also further develop capitalism under the tsarist rule, and Stolypin's reform was to form a kulak class in the countryside and to establish capitalist relations of production in the countryside. At this point, the true face of the historical nihilist is completely exposed.
This counter-current of historical nihilism that emerged in the Soviet Union on the eve of its dissolution has the following characteristics:
First, this was a top-down campaign by the leadership of the CPSU headed by Gorbachev to repudiate the revolutionary history of the CPSU and the USSR.
Its aim is to create public opinion for their pursuit of the "reform" line that deviates from Marxism by criticizing and denigrating the supreme leaders of the former Soviet Union, first and foremost the great Marxist Stalin, by denying the socialist system of the USSR, and by negating the path of the October Revolution and the October Revolution, and thus for "fundamentally transforming the entire social edifice, from the economic base to the superstructure".
Ever since Gorbachev proposed the policy of "democratization" and "openness" at the 27th Congress of the CPSU held in February 1986, especially after the call at the January Plenary Session of the CPSU Central Committee in 1987 for the implementation of "maximum openness" and "there should be no forbidden area in Soviet society without criticism", the trend of liberalization in society has quickly spread, and the phenomenon of negating the party and Soviet history has also developed rapidly. In a speech at a national conference of leaders of propaganda work in February 1987, Gorbachev more specifically stated that in the Soviet Union "there should be no forgotten names and blank spots in both history and literature." This speech became an open call for the leadership of the CPSU, represented by Gorbachev, to re-examine the history of the CPSU and the SOVIET Union.
According to Brzezinski in his book The Great Failure, in May 1987 Gorbachev said in a conversation with Kádal, the leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, that the soviet experience since 1929 was all wrong: in fact three-quarters of the Soviet experience was questionable and should be denied or corrected.
The nihilistic acts of Gorbachev and other CPSU leaders in denying the history of the Party and the state caused great differences inside and outside the Party. Some leaders of the CPSU, represented by Politburo member Yelgachev, opposed this, believing that it was necessary to affirm the glorious side of history and realistically analyze and sum up the mistakes that had been made. They warned that the agents of imperialism "are sponsoring writers to scandalize the history of the Soviet Union." On March 13, 1988, the Russian newspaper of the Soviets published a letter from Nina Andreyeva, a female teacher at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, entitled "We Cannot Abandon the Principle", in which she expressed different views on some articles published in the press at that time, arguing that the criticism of Stalin was too excessive and a smear on the socialist Soviet Union.
The letter also explicitly rejects "the use of openness to spread non-socialist pluralism." But Gorbachev remained obstinate. Pravda published an editorial office article entitled "The Principles of Reform: The Revolutionary Nature of Thought and Action", written by Yakovlev and revised by Gorbachev, on April 5, denouncing Andreyeva's letter as a "manifesto of the counter-reformers." Yakovlev called his essay "the programme of our Politburo." Since then, the vicious wave of criticizing Stalin and denigrating and denying the history of the CPSU and the SOVIET Union has risen further.
Second, this historical nihilism movement was spearheaded by a group of writers and political commentators, while some historians only gradually followed it later.
Since 1986, driven by Gorbachev's policy of "democratization", "openness" and "pluralism of public opinion", a large number of works of the Soviet Union that were previously banned and published in Western countries have been published successively. Much of these works depict the various dark sides of Soviet society during the Stalin era, including the tragic fate of the persecuted in the Great Purge and the collectivization of agriculture. Among the more influential were the novel "Children of Arbat Street" by writer A Rebakov and the film "Confession" directed by Tian Abradze. Some writers, literary critics, and political commentators took advantage of the advent of such works to publish articles one after another, vigorously attacking Stalin's "totalitarian rule" and slandering the Socialist system of the Soviet Union as a "military feudal dictatorship." They are the vanguard of this historical nihilistic movement.
However, the leaders of the CPSU knew in their hearts that literary and artistic works could only give people a perceptual impression, and that in order to raise the understanding of the masses to the level of rationality, they must rely on historical works, that is to say, they must "re-examine" and even rewrite all of history.
Historians acted after a period of silence. But until the end it did not seem to fully meet Gorbachev's requirements. The reasons for their silence are varied. But this shows, at least, that in the minds of some historians, Marxism and the historicist view of seeking truth from facts have not yet been completely extinguished. This is why a considerable number of historians today are reflecting on the countercurrent of historical nihilism that emerged at that time, especially on the one-sidedness of Stalin's evaluation.
Third, the news media and the publishing world have played a very bad role in this historical nihilistic movement.
The first thing Gorbachev's right-hand man, Yakovlev, did after he became the leader of the ideological work of the CPSU Central Committee was to replace the heads of the major media. He removed a number of responsible persons who adhered to Marxism and socialism, and at the same time placed a group of trusted liberals in leading positions. From then on, these newspapers, radios, and television stations became active advocates for the active criticism of the history of the CPSU and the socialist system of the USSR, and they did everything in their power to cooperate with Gorbachev's campaign of historical nihilism. Sometimes they are made out of nothing, and sometimes they take advantage of all kinds of shortcomings and problems that have arisen in history to distort and exaggerate them, and spread doubts about revolutionary history and socialism among readers and audiences, causing them to lose their trust in the party and the state and their faith in socialism and communism. These contents have attracted considerable attention because they address sensitive issues that used to be considered "off-limits", as well as their diversity of genres and their strong readability.
In addition to publishing a large number of articles criticizing Stalin and denying the history of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, some media also carried out various practical activities to promote the countercurrent of historical nihilism. For example, The Weekly Spark, known as the "mouthpiece of openness," ran the so-called "Conscience Week" in Moscow, which included holding lectures, screenings of banned films that distort history, and raising funds to build monuments to the victims of the Great Purge. Some newsrooms have also published a large amount of information collected on the victims of the Great Purge through contact with readers.
Many magazines have seen a significant increase in circulation due to the publication of various works released from the ban. With regard to the important role played by the press and the news media in the historical nihilism movement, the famous Russian writer Bundalev described it very vividly and profoundly in a speech made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "During the six years [of Gorbachev's administration], the press achieved what Europe's best-equipped army failed to achieve with fire and sword when it invaded our country in the 1940s," he said. Although that army had first-rate technical equipment, it lacked one thing, and that was tens of millions of bacteria-carrying publications. ”
Fourth, in the historical nihilism movement, there is both "nothingness" and "non-nothingness", and this is used to fill the so-called "historical blank spots".
To this end, some people began to recall more about Nicholas II, the last emperor of the Romanov dynasty, and demanded that the truth about the tsar's murder be made public. They published a number of previously banned works and a collection of memoirs about Nicholas II and the February Revolution. In April 1989, a Moscow writer named GeLyapov published in the fourth issue of the magazine "Fatherland" that Nicholas II's family had been executed by revolutionary fighters, saying that he had found the remains of the Tsar's family 10 years earlier. The news sparked a discussion about the authenticity of the remains. Obviously, this is not an ordinary archaeological activity, but to prove the cruelty and inhumanity of the October Revolution.
It can be seen from this that what the historical nihilists "nihilize" is the history of socialist revolution and construction under the leadership of the CPSU and the socialist system of the SOVIET Union, while what is "not nihilistic" is the representatives of the overthrown classes and the opposition of the revolutionary movement. Their aim is to re-examine the socialist road opened up by the October Revolution and to find an alternative law of history.
Historical nihilism has created serious ideological confusion inside and outside the party. Many people have shaken their faith and confidence in socialism, especially some intellectuals and party and government cadres, who have begun to yearn for capitalism. For example, the famous sociologist Ta Zaslavskaya initially advocated reform within the framework of socialism, but in 1990, when she saw that the socialist society of the past was so "decayed", she changed her mind. She stood in a pro-capitalist stand. It is believed that the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism does not exist, and that mature capitalism has "socialist characteristics".
These are the main manifestations of historical nihilism on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union and several of its characteristics and their serious consequences. It should be pointed out that for a long time, there has indeed been a relatively serious dogmatic tendency in the field of Soviet historiography, and there have been some "forbidden areas" or "blank spots" that should not exist. These are all worth studying and addressing. The key questions are what position to stand on, what viewpoints and methods to use to "fill in the gaps in history" and "break the forbidden zone". If we take the basic principles of Marxism and the viewpoint of historical materialism as the guide, put the relevant historical phenomena in the specific time and space conditions of the time to conduct a realistic investigation, and distinguish between the mainstream and the tributaries, then we will inevitably draw correct conclusions that are completely different from the historical nihilists.
Author: Chen Zhihua: Originally published in Theoretical Front of Colleges and Universities, No. 8, 2005