Official discourse of Soviet history in the contemporary era (1985 – to the present day)

Abstract

The article reveals the main milestones of the transformation in the official discourse of the Soviet past starting with 1985 until now. The work is written using the main set of published sources.

With the beginning of the restructuring processes, the concept of advanced socialism lost its political relevance. The new version of the third CPSU Program, adopted at the 27th Party Congress, proclaimed perfection of socialism on the basis of acceleration of the socio-economic development of the country. Embarking on a course of perestroika, the January (1987) Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU considered broadly the issues of personnel work of the party. At the end of 1987, the leadership of the country took care to convey to foreign audiences the main ideas of perestroika. At the same time, M.S. Gorbachev and his entourage continued efforts to give Soviet history the status of the most important political, ideological and academic tool for resolving the current challenges of the restructuring period.

In 1990–1991, the party criticism of the Soviet period of history acquired an uncompromising character, and the programmatic principles of the world social democracy became the ideal of the party leaders. The 1990s were marked by the fact that the history of the USSR was explored mainly from the liberal points of view, and such an approach was often too biased.

The era of the Special Military Operation has called for a whole set of issues, related to the historical and political circumstances of the formation of the Soviet Union and the place of Ukraine in that structure. Most of the answers to that set of issues and to other questions were given in the speeches and addresses of the President of the Russian Federation, V.V. Putin.