OPINION AND EVIDENCE

Website UPDATE (two)

[See added Postscript, 31 March 2025]

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“So many fantastic lies have been created about Gorbachov and his ‘reforms’,” wrote Bukovsky in the opening words of Chapter 12, “that we can trust only the documents.”

Can we?

The documents tell a different story, of that we can be sure. Whether it is the complete and final version of events and fully explains the motivation behind Politburo policies is open to doubt.

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“Are these documents the ‘Holy Grail’ of Sovietology?” I asked in 2018 (“The Status of these Archives“: 2.5). “Do they, finally, explain everything?”

“They had a very restricted readership among the decision-makers at the top of the Soviet political system,” my note continues. Yet, as Bukovsky himself concluded, the 15-20 members of the Politburo or the Central Committee Secretariat were often still deceiving themselves and each other (Chapter 5, introduction):

“It is impossible, therefore, to say what the members of the Politburo ‘actually’ thought. There was no way out of the enchanted circle of socialist realism. … These men were the supreme creators and administrators of the world of socialist realism, and for them “reality” was what the Party said it was’.“

The contents of this archive, in other words, must be approached with the same care and scepticism required by any documentary source. Where necessary, annotations have been added to clarify, and in some cases correct, the content.

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It was, in part, frustration with the distorted and mendacious official style of the documents so extensively cited by Bukovsky in Judgement in Moscow that led me to create, with the support and encouragement of the late Peter Reddaway, the English-language website of the “Chronicle of Current Events“.

John Crowfoot

9 January 2025

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POSTSCRIPT

In Chapter Six “The Coming of Gorbachov”, Bukovsky offers an unforgettable portrait of the USSR’s last Communist leader [1]:

“A provincial Party official, Gorbachov was capable at best of a petty swindle, no more.

“With a professional eye for character, the theatre director Yury Lyubimov (who signed ‘the Letter of the Ten’ [2]) noted the amazing similarity between the new General Secretary and the portrait in Gogol’s Dead Souls of Russia’s most famous confidence trickster:

‘He’s the spitting image of Tchitchikoff! A gentleman pleasant in all respects.

‘Just re-read, for amusement’s sake, Gogol’s description of his immortal hero: “In the carriage sat a gentleman, not handsome but not of an unpleasant appearance; not too fat and not too thin; you could not say he was old nor that he was too young”.’

“Gorbachov indeed: everything but the birthmark on his forehead.

“The leadership made him General Secretary for his rounded, pleasant features, as the man most suitable to carry out the grandiose ‘KGB operation’ conceived and developed at the end of Brezhnev’s rule by Yury Andropov, the master of such schemes.”

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NOTES

  1. See “Chichikov Reappears” (April 2025).
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  2. “Is Glasnost a Game of Mirrors?” (New York Times, 1987).
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