Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other mass graves in the Minsk area and the Ukraine are occurring now. The exhumation constitutes a precise visual image of the Soviet Union's efforts to confront the horrors of its past. With Mikhail Gorbachev's approval, Soviet historians, scholars and journalists are metaphorically digging up evidence of Stalin's crimes and exposing those crimes in all their ghastliness to the light...
Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past...
...Stalin's ghost is the most formidable opponent of almost every change that Gorbachev is trying to effect. It was Stalin who established the system of collective farms and the stifling central control of industry that Gorbachev is attempting to break up. And it was Stalin who punished independent thinking with such savagery as to smother the creativity of whole generations...
Thus the discrediting of Stalin and his policies is virtually a precondition for any sort of reform. Vladimir Lakshin, deputy editor of the monthly Znamya, explains, "History concerns what is going on today and not just the past. We are not simply talking about Stalin but of a form of Stalinism that is so much a part of the flesh and blood that people are incapable of thinking in any but a Stalinist way. We have to get that out of our system...
...Soviet tradition of unity among all leaders still forbids any direct criticism of Gorbachev's policies. Such debate as does occur is carried on in Aesopian language, and history is currently the favored supplier of code words. Thus when Yegor Ligachev and other conservatives cry that denunciations of Stalin are shaking people's faith in the Soviet system, they are really saying that perestroika and glasnost are going too far. Gorbachev's partisans get the point, and respond with redoubled attacks on Stalin and his admirers today...