Andreyeva's essay
I Cannot Forsake My Principles (''
; variously translated in English commentary) was published in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya'' on March 13, 1988, at a time when
Gorbachev and
Alexander Yakovlev were either about to start on overseas visit or already abroad, and was initiated and approved by the secretary of the Communist Party's
Central Committee,
Yegor Ligachev. She was contemptuous of
Perestroika and defended the Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin. Of the
Great Purges, "they are being blown out of proportion" she wrote.
Giulietto Chiesa, then Moscow correspondent of the Italian Communist newspaper ''
L'Unità,'' found Andreyeva's original letter and discovered that it had been rewritten, only 5 pages of her 18-page typescript were published, much of the rest being thought too extreme. In the originally unpublished portions, Andreyeva commented that Stalin's critics wrote "in the language of Goebbels" and referred to "nations of little importance, like the Crimean Tartars and Zionist Jews." It was much reprinted in the Soviet Union and East Germany, but it received no critical response in the media. The Leningrad party issued a television documentary apparently showing mass support in the city for the Andreyeva letter. Not until after Gorbachev had returned from abroad, and following a two-day meeting of the
politburo on March 24–25 to discuss the Andreyeva letter, did a response appear in
Pravda on 5 April 1988. The
Pravda article described the letter as containing "nostalgia, backward-looking patriotism," the work of "blind, die-hard, undoubting dogmatists." Gorbachev described it as a direct attack "against perestroika." Under the reforms, she told
David Remnick of
The Washington Post in 1989 that under Stalin "the country built socialism for 30 years" and stated: "Our media are lying about Stalin now. They are blackening our history." On then current conditions, she told him: "The political structure of an anti-socialist movement is taking place in the form of democratic unions and popular fronts." ==Subsequent career==