“Loss of Control Over Public Opinion: A Catalyst for the Breakdown of the Soviet Union”

China Media Project translates a piece from Seeking Truth which appears to be a response to recent calls for freedom of expression:

In the eyes of the West, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a victory. But for Russians whose welfare was directly concerned, this was an unprecedented disaster. The reasons for disintegration and change in the Soviet Union are numerous, but among these “news reform” and the loss of control over public opinion played a very important role.

News reform was an integral part of Michael Gorbachev’s “democratization” and “openness,” or glasnost. Most regrettable was that this news reform took the evil turn of denying the Marxist View of Journalism (马克思主义新闻观) and departed from the principles of socialist news work, leading ultimately to loss of control over public opinion.

And from CMP’s analysis of the article:

True to the spirit of ideological sledgehammers of its kind, the article is built on simplistic summaries and foggy references to authority like “scholars have said.” It concludes its review of political change and “disintegration” in the Soviet Union with an imposed “model” that is supposed to illustrate how the failure to impose Party controls on public opinion leads to a landslide of weakness.

In a veiled reference to the recent decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), the summary of Soviet chaos is concluded with the statement: “And Gorbachev, this man who personally engineered the Soviet Union’s collapse, was awarded by the West with the Nobel Peace Prize.”

The Seeking Truth article is a prize example of leftist CCP demagoguery.

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