ABSTRACT

All Soviet citizens were born and bred in a political culture that revered Vladimir Lenin and all that he stood for, so it is not surprising that there has been some resistance to simply writing him off. Mikhail Gorbachev portrayed Lenin in an unequivocally positive light with near religious overtones: the works of Lenin and his ideal of socialism remained for an inexhaustiblesource of dialectical creative thought, theoretical wealth and political sagacity. Gorbachev, by pretending that new thinking flows directly from Lenin, may have been trying to accommodate major elements in Soviet society loyal to Lenin. In the 1988-1989 periods, despite the emergence of new thinking, some Leninist thinking persevered, seemingly oblivious to the revisions of new thinking. Military figures complained about the declining prestige of the military that followed from the new thinking analysis that criticizes nearly all postwar uses of Soviet military force and, in general, dismisses military force as declining in utilityand questionable inits legitimacy.