It seriously flaws an otherwise admirable attempt by someone who lacks any empathy for the Trotskyist world view. This total absence of empathy is not uniquely Medvedev's, of course. Ideas of world revolution appear profoundly chimerical to virtually everyone in the Soviet Union today. Thus I would agree with Tariq Ali 20 that resistance to greater historical honesty flows not from fear of the power of Trotskyist ideas but in the threat to party legitimacy such real debate has already posed. Still such real debate has begun.
Some Soviet historians are quite open now about their earlier erroneous views.
And Korablev's change of view is visible to anyone who compares his presentation with not only writing of some years ago, or last February, but even with, for example, his contribution in a book put together last summer. This definite change is something of a weathervane. Vasetskii continues to maintain the presently popular stereotype of Stalin and Trotsky as twins, but his writing has also evolved, even from his January full page article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, which appropriately opened the new year by putting Trotsky on centre stage. This article has been wrongly portrayed in some of the Western press as more sympathetic to Trotsky than it actually is. In place of a conclusion This survey has focused exclusively on maps the top of the iceberg.