Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Nina Andreyeva, the woman who stood against Gorbachev's Perestroika, dies at 81

© Ivan Kurtov,Sergey Smolsky/TASS
Nina Alexandrovna Andreyeva, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, passed away on July 24th in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). She was 81 years old. 

Born on October 1938 to a working class family in Leningrad, Nina Andreeva lost her father during the Second World War

She graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Technology and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1966. 

A firm anti-revisionist, Andreyeva stood firm against the counterrevolutionary process of “Perestroika” during the 1980s. In 1988, she wrote an essay titled “I Cannot Forsake my Principles” in which she defended the Soviet system against Mikhail Gorbachev’s reactionary reforms. 

Andreeva’s essay was published in Sovetskaya Rossiya newspaper on March 13, 1988 and raised wide public debate throughout the Soviet Union. Τhe official party newspaper Pravda called the essay "The Manifesto of Anti-Perestroika Forces".

In the following years, she headed the organizing committee of the CPSU’s Bolshevik Platform that expelled Gorbachev from the Party on September 1991. In the peak of the counterrevolutionary events, in November 1991, Nina Andreyeva founded the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks (VKPb) which aimed to become the successor of the CPSU. 

In 1993, the party was temporarily suspended along with fifteen other political organisations by the bourgeois regime of Boris Yeltsin.