30 Years Later, the Fall of the USSR Still Haunts Xi Jinping’s China.
A documentary, looking like a reminder for the CCP, lists 5 lessons to be learned from the fall of the USSR.
Nobody will be able to say if it was a coincidence of the calendar or not, but two days before the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian troops, the Chinese Communist Party discreetly posted online, on February 22, 2022, a long documentary of 101 minutes on the reasons of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Entitled “Historical nihilism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union”, this film had been shown for several months during training sessions for the party's cadres, all over China, before being put online. While the West tries to avoid the constitution of a Moscow-Beijing axis on Ukraine, this documentary confirms, on the contrary, the ideological proximity between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, as well as the obsessive vision of the Chinese elites, who never stop protecting themselves against external dangers.
According to this film, the misfortunes of the USSR go back a long way. In 1956 exactly, with the publication, in June, by the New York Times, of the secret report that Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU, from 1953 to 1964), had revealed on February 25th, during the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and in which he criticized the crimes of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin.
In doing so, “Khrushchev lit the fire of nihilism”, that is to say, fueled the questioning of the official history, explains the documentary. This report, “90% false”, according to a Russian historian speaking in the film, is, in fact, bread and butter for the CIA. Certainly, according to the film, Stalin made mistakes, but it is a “slander” to say that he started the Second World War with Hitler. Khrushchev himself has a lot of Russian blood on his hands, but since he destroyed the archives concerning his crimes, they are not known.
Nevertheless, the publication of this report introduces the worm in the fruit and provokes a crisis inside the CPSU from which this one will never completely recover.
A real ideological battle
Especially since the West spends a lot and does not lack relays to discredit the USSR. One example among others, according to Beijing: the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Boris Pasternak, in 1958, for Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in the USSR until 1985. Decades later, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “distorted reality” by denouncing the Soviet prison system “under the direction of Western forces”. However, the economy is not bad, says the film. Between 1950 and 1982, Russian industry developed even faster than in Western countries.
But the American president Eisenhower (1953-1961) exerts strong pressure on the USSR. In 1956, he invited 10,000 young Soviets to study in the United States, all expenses paid. “Apart from their nuclear weapons, the most important weapon of the United States is the ideological fight”, explains a Russian researcher quoted in the documentary. One of these students was Alexander Yakovlev, who spent a year at Columbia University in New York in 1958. Thirty years later, the West will see in this eminence grise of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) the true father of the liberal reforms carried out in the 1980s.
For Xi Jinping's China, he is, on the contrary, the “godfather of nihilism”. The one who destroyed the USSR from within by liberalizing the media and questioning Stalin's policies. “The most important mistake was to lose control of the media”, says the documentary made by China.
By putting an end, in 1987, to the jamming of the airwaves emitted by the West, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed “the United States to change the USSR peacefully”, the film laments. Moreover, the last president of the USSR would have been corrupt. He would have, continuing the documentary, received millions of dollars on a private account, and his wife, Raissa, received 3 million dollars to publish his autobiography, written by a journalist, which has not been commercially successful.
Fighting nihilism is an absolute necessity for the Chinese Communist Party
Passing quickly over the Yeltsin years (1991-1999), the documentary instead highlights the role of Vladimir Putin, who is celebrated by young people wearing teeshirts bearing his image or presiding over a military parade on Red Square in Moscow, in front of ecstatic veterans. As early as 2002, Putin indicated that those who demonized Stalin were enemies of Russia. Finding “heartbreaking” what was destroyed during the previous decade, Putin does not want to rewrite history, as the Westerners say, but “to fight against nihilism”, a long-term fight that passes by the resumption of the Russian culture and history “deformed by foreign forces”.
The authors of the film draw five lessons from the demise of the USSR:
It is necessary to always be on guard and counter the “nihilism” that intends to negate and disrupt the party leadership.
It is necessary to respond seriously to the Western soft power and smart power.
The CCP must always pay attention to the ideological struggle.
It is necessary to keep the ideological leadership and remain faithful to Marxism.
Finally, it is necessary to learn in-depth the history of the Chinese Communist Party, which, for its part, must always remain in the vanguard and remain faithful to its convictions.
All these conclusions prove, if need be, that this film is as much about China as about Russia. But if at the beginning of the 1990s, the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, judged that the end of the USSR was mainly due to the economic failure of Moscow (hence the policy of reform and opening led by Deng Xiaoping), Xi Jinping attributes this to the weakness of its elites and their corruption by the West. In the first case, China could only get closer to the West. In the second case, it is in its interest to move away from it.