ABSTRACT
The cresting flood of denunciatory articles engulfing the mass media began to deform the historical retrospective. The past rose up from the pages of the right-wing radical press not as a diverse and contradictory combination of achievements and errors but in exclusively gloomy if not pitch-black tones. The witch hunt really was in the spirit of the cult years. The morning after the Politburo session, a Central Committee commission suddenly descended on the editorial offices of Sovetskaya Rossiya, set about studying the original of Nina Andreyeva's letter and the whole process of preparing it for print, and subjected the workers of the editorial offices to a thorough interrogation about it. One feels about Andreyeva's article, the principles of glasnost and pluralism proclaimed by perestroika required presentation of the whole palette of readers' opinions. Mikhail Gorbachev turned out to be right about the radio broadcasts.
