Perestroika

Perestroika appears here as a reform process whose most far-reaching effect was not the one its initiators intended: people gained room to tell the history of the Soviet Union in their own terms. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, public discussion and publication exposed what official memory had erased. The opening spread from history books into political life, but the story does not treat the later upheavals as a simple or inevitable fulfilment of reform. It traces instead how an unprecedented release of memory and speech met economic dislocation, new concentrations of power, and fresh restrictions on opposition.

Reform and the opening of history

Six years after Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, neither the party nor the Soviet Union itself seemed likely to disappear. He had wanted to resume, in a more controlled form, the reform path associated with Nikita Khrushchev. The narrator sets that limited intention against the scale of what followed: people were able to write their history as they saw fit, and this freedom swept beyond the bounds of a manageable concession.

The need for that opening becomes clear in the account of state-managed forgetting. After Lavrentiy Beria’s execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were told to cut out the article praising him and replace it with one about the Bering Strait. The alphabetical sequence could be preserved while Beria was made to seem never to have existed. A similar effort followed Khrushchev’s fall, when copies of New World had to be altered to remove One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The state’s assault on the past had not been only censorship of new work; it could reach backward, revising the record already on the shelf.

That imposed silence extended into private and family life. Children who saw their fathers taken away learned that speaking about it was dangerous and that it was safer to behave as if the arrest had never happened. Public history followed the official Short Course, while personal knowledge survived without a legitimate language in which to be shared. Perestroika’s decisive break, in this account, was the possibility of bringing those experiences back into public memory.

Glasnost and the return of suppressed voices

Gorbachev announced glasnost at a gathering marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The address included leaders such as Erich Honecker, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Fidel Castro, and Nicolae Ceaușescu. Gorbachev spoke of filling in the blank pages of history and acknowledged hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism; the narrator emphasizes that the true totals ran into the tens of millions. The discrepancy did not undo the importance of the gesture. A public acknowledgement had given permission for a much larger reckoning, opening what the narrative describes as Pandora’s box.

From 1988, books that had circulated only among intellectuals, as samizdat, or in smuggled foreign editions became available to the broader public. The change took material form in enormous print runs, kiosks, and queues that began at dawn. Readers carried books onto the subway and buses and read while walking. For a week, Moscow was absorbed by Doctor Zhivago; then readers turned to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, George Orwell’s 1984, and Robert Conquest’s histories of collectivization and the purges. The sequence conveys more than a list of newly accessible titles: it shows a public rushing to read accounts that had long been excluded from its permitted understanding of the past.

Under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, dissidents founded the Memorial Society to identify victims who had not only been killed but erased from memory. Its work answered Anna Akhmatova’s wish to call the dead by name. Memorial initially hesitated to speak of millions, but once it did, the number seemed to articulate something people had been waiting to say. Comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin entered ordinary debate, and Stalin’s so-called 5 percent theory became a familiar way to describe the arbitrary logic of repression. Glasnost thus altered both what could be read and what could be said aloud about the scale and nature of state violence.

Publication, audiences, and the return of exiles

The opening also changed the channels through which writing reached readers. During perestroika, Yulian Semyonov created the weekly Sovershenno sekretno, a successful true-crime tabloid, and established a publishing house that issued commercial fiction as well as the complete works of George Orwell. In this setting, Eduard Limonov’s account of his childhood, Ours Was a Great Epoch, appeared in the Soviet Union in a print run of 300,000. He was invited to Moscow with Fedorova and Tokarev, part of a return that joined literary publication to public spectacle.

At an event organized by Semyonov at the cultural center in Izmailovo Park, Limonov encountered an audience drawn partly by its appetite for anything Western and partly by Semyonov’s publicity. Semyonov presented the visitors as dynamic figures ready to help rebuild the country. His newspaper had promoted Fedorova and Tokarev as major Western stars, and Limonov understood that his own celebrity was also being manufactured: he was described as a literary rock star despite the audience’s limited knowledge of his work. He played along with the image, emphasizing his past as a bum and as the butler of an American multimillionaire, while choosing which details of his former life to disclose. The scene makes the new openness look neither pure nor disinterested: publication created a public for returning writers, but that public could be shaped by commercial promotion and by the stories that promoters chose to tell.

The same period produced a more openly political reconsideration of Limonov and his followers. The narrator recalls discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices and shouting for Vladimir Putin to leave. She described them as courageous and principled, a source of hope for the country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise supported the party’s members, despite reservations about the associations its name carried. These endorsements unsettled the narrator’s earlier view of Limonov as simply a fascist leader of skinheads. The shift was not necessarily a conversion in Limonov himself, the narrator suggests, but a change in the political position he occupied.

The unfinished political opening

The political field that emerged from the Soviet collapse did not settle into a stable democratic order. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar introduced shock therapy in a country without a comparable market system. Prices were liberalized, producing inflation of 2,600 percent. Vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to Russian citizens over one year old as shares in national wealth, but inflation had made them nearly worthless by the time they arrived; a voucher could buy, at most, a bottle of vodka. People sold them cheaply, and Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and others accumulated fortunes in a setting described as having no effective rules, laws, banking system, or taxation. The account distinguishes these market reforms from perestroika itself, while showing how the post-Soviet transition generated new inequalities and new political actors.

Those new fortunes could be converted into political influence. As Yeltsin’s second term neared its end, the oligarchs feared that Gennady Zyuganov and the Communists might win power and revise the loans-for-shares arrangement, under which banks had lent money to the state in exchange for shares in major assets such as natural gas and petroleum. At the 1995 Davos World Economic Forum, Berezovsky became alarmed by the attention Zyuganov was receiving. He contacted six other powerful oligarchs, and the seven joined forces to support Yeltsin’s reelection. Their newspapers, radio stations, and television channels pressed the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, while broadcasts about the Gulag, the famine in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre warned against a return to communism. The episode shows political power shifting from the state’s former monopoly toward private fortunes and media control, without making the new order a straightforward realization of the democratic hopes associated with glasnost.

From political opportunity to restriction

Limonov’s later party convention illustrates how the opening of public life could enable new forms of organization. Several hundred delegates came from across Russia, although the National Bolshevik Party had about 7,000 members in all. Finding a venue was difficult: places that initially agreed to host the meeting withdrew, and delegates feared a bomb scare, police harassment, or an outright ban. The convention nevertheless opened. Limonov addressed provincial young people whom the narrative describes as poor and socially marginal, and who had found in the party a shared style and purpose. He told them that the moment to take power had not arrived, but proposed campaigning among Russians in former Soviet republics, including Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. A call for volunteers to travel through Central Asia drew a hundred raised hands. The scene records political mobilization, but also the nationalist and separatist ambitions that shaped this particular movement; it should not be mistaken for a general program of perestroika.

The limits of the opening became still clearer under Vladimir Putin. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passed a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define those terms. Limonov met the minister in a suit and tie to argue that his party should be registered. Three months later, the party was denied authorization. Limonov returned to the minister and pointed out that many registered parties had no real members, whereas his had 7,000 adherents. He warned that forcing the organization underground could push politically engaged young people toward extremism and terrorism. The account presents the exchange as a narrowing of legal political space: a party that had been able to convene and recruit was now denied the right to exist openly.

The later opposition movement The Other Russia, formed under Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov, also failed to secure a lasting political opening. By the time the movement had collapsed after its failure in the presidential elections, Limonov had created Strategy 31, drawing its name from Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. Demonstrators gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on months with thirty-one days; there were generally around a hundred protesters and five times as many police officers, who arrested several dozen. Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. In the narrative’s longer arc, this recurring street action stands in sharp contrast to the earlier reading crowds and the initial promise that suppressed truths could be brought into public view: the right to speak and assemble had opened possibilities, but its exercise could again bring detention and exclusion.