ABSTRACT
Glasnost at first inspired literati, journalists, and artists to move into forbidden zones of Soviet history. They moved ahead of professional historians, who until 1987-1988 showed little interest in restructuring. The new interpretation of history thus belongs to the confidence-building measures intended to convince people at home and abroad that this time—unlike Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization —Stalinism is being attacked at the roots. Khrushchev had already recognized that a thorough de-Stalinization would lack credibility without the rehabilitation of Stalin's victims, the prominent ones and the millions of nameless ones. Great Britain and France had betrayed collective security at Munich in 1938, but it was Stalin who with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939 broke away from the "traditional European configuration of forces". The continuing existence of two systems however must compel the Soviet side "to see the western world with other eyes and once and for all to free itself from the stereotypes which demonize capitalism".
