What can and cannot be said: Between the Stalinist past and new Soviet future

During successive waves of de-Stalinization, Nikita Khrushchev trumpeted the principle of glasnost' as the key to Communist Party reform. At the same time, his revelations of past wrongdoing were always carefully tailored and chronically incomplete. Throughout his reign, Kremlin-generated stories of the Stalin era shifted significantly over time, as did the extent of their allowed discussion; these shifts testified to the fact that post-Stalin professions of openness had failed to supplant more traditional Party practices of censorship and concealment. By looking at such changes, and at the way Party members in the regions of Ekaterinburg and Samara responded to them, this article argues that the rhetoric of glasnost' triggered enormous conflict within the Party about openness in practice and drew new, or at least newly vocal, attention to continuities in the top-down manipulation of truth.