One of the propaganda department’s greatest recent battles in the history wars–how to manage the cataclysmic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the late eighties and early nineties–is still being fought out today. As late as 2006, an eight-episode DVD series about the lessons from the Soviet Union’s demise, classified as ‘secret’, was distributed to central, provincial and city-level party bodies as compulsory viewing.
