Andreyeva, Nina Alexandrovna

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ANDREYEVA, NINA ALEXANDROVNA

(b. 1938), teacher, author, political activist, and social critic.

Born on October 12, 1938, in Leningrad, Nina Alexandrovna Andreyeva joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1966, and became a teacher of chemistry at the Leningrad Technical Institute in 1973. A self styled Stalinist and devotee of political order, she wrote an essay that defended many aspects of the Stalinist system, assailed reformists' efforts to provide a more accurate picture of the history of the USSR, and implied that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his closest supporters were not real communists. Her essay "I Cannot Forsake My Principles" was published in the orthodox newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiya at a time when Gorbachev and Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev were abroad, and cited (without attribution) an orthodox report by the secretary of the Party's Central Committee, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev, in February 1988. Officials in the ideological department of the Central Committee evidently edited her original letter, and Ligachev reportedly ordered its dissemination throughout the party. Ligachev repeatedly denied responsibility for its publication.

Orthodox party officials applauded the essay, whereas members of the liberal intelligentsia feared that it represented a major defeat for the intellectual freedom supported by the general secretary. Gorbachev subsequently revealed that many members of the Politburo seemed to share Andreyeva's views, and that he had to browbeat them into approving the publication of an official rejoinder. The published response appeared in Pravda on April 5, 1988, and was not nearly as forceful as its authors have claimed. In the aftermath of this discussion, the General Secretary at least temporarily tightened his own control over the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The entire episode may have contributed to his decision to reform the Secretariat in the fall of 1988.

Andreyeva subsequently played a leadership role in the formation of orthodox communist organizations. She headed the organizing committee of the Bolshevik Platform of the CPSU that "expelled" Gorbachev from the party in September 1991. In November 1991, she became the general secretary of the small but militant All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. In October 1993, the party was temporarily suspended along with fifteen other organizations after President Yeltsin's repression of the attempted coup against his regime. In May 1995 she was stripped of her post as the head of the St. Petersburg Central Committee of the party for "lack of revolutionary activity."

See also: central committee; communist party of the soviet union; gorbachev, mikhail sergeyevich; ligachev, yegor kuzmich