Nina Andreeva’s “I Cannot Forsake My Principles”

On 13 March 1988, the daily newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia published a lengthy open letter by Leningrad chemistry lecturer Nina Andreeva (1938-2020). The text received an unusual amount of space, covering the entirety of the paper’s third page. Typically, published letters were excerpted, amounting to a few lines or, at the limit, up to a quarter of a single column on a page. Further signaling the importance they attributed to her opinion, editors included an annotation of the letter, along with a photo of Andreeva surrounded by her students, on the front page. Titled “I Cannot Forsake my Principles [Ne mogu postupat’sia printsypami],” Adnreeva’s letter argued for the preservation of Stalin’s image, legacy, and values in Soviet society, a deeply conservative opinion that resonated primarily with the old guard in the Communist Party. Other readers, both inside and outside the USSR, were scandalized, questioning whether it was possible to reform Soviet socialism at all.

The publication of “I Cannot Forsake My Principles” cast the inner workings of Soviet print media into sharp relief. True, the letter was authentically written by Andreeva, who stood by her words until her death in 2020, but it was clear that it had not appeared in a premier Soviet news outlet by accident. Andreeva’s text could only have been published with permission from powerful Soviet authorities, including Chairman of the Central Committee Yegor Ligachev (1920-2021) and Sovetskaia Rossiia’s editor-in-chief, Valentin Chikin (1932-). These connections underscore the proximity of politics to print media during perestroika, popularly known as a period of “hands-off” treatment by the government—even before the ratification of the Press Law of 1990 legally severed those connections.

Andreeva’s letter also spotlighted the feedback loops among media channels, showing how an article could go “viral” in the 1980s. In part because of the enormous amount of space Sovetskaia Rossiia had devoted to the letter, other outlets across the USSR took up discussion of Andreeva’s views and emphasized the broad support these supposedly enjoyed. Television programs featured special episodes dedicated to the letter, and 932 newspapers across the USSR syndicated its publication within a few weeks. It is difficult to determine whether editors and producers spent time on Andreeva because they felt pressure to do so, or because her letter presented a convenient opportunity for conservative critics of Gorbachev’s reform to speak their minds.

Despite the limits on Soviet free speech even during glasnost, the publication of Andreeva’s letter and the intense discussion it engendered demonstrated how much Soviet readers continued to see the press as a venue for publicizing their views and holding public discussion. Soon after Andreeva’s text appeared, readers began penning responses, both critical and supportive, and sending them to newspapers on the local, regional, and national levels; to various Party organs, including the Central Committee and even Gorbachev himself; and to Andreeva, at home and at work. This massive response, with letters numbering in the tens of thousands, showed that—quite against the grain of the sentiments Andreeva expressed—a freer public sphere was beginning to form in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s.