This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Rediscovery of Politics, given by Geoffrey Hosking, was originally broadcast in 1988.

In the last year or two, one of the most intriguing sections of any Soviet newspaper has been the Reader's Letters column.

Take the following cry of indignation published this summer

in Pravda. I cannot be silent. Look at what is going on around us. In Leningrad, the cradle of

the revolution, well-fed, insolent thugs parade on the streets with swastika armbands. At an

Estonian song contest, a half-naked singer cavorts about with a cross round his neck,

and this on television.

In Armenia there are strikes, people skiving without any reason.

Where is the law? Why is it silent?

And why are those responsible for law enforcement inactive?

The writer signs himself,

member of the Communist Party since 1945, Svardlovsk,

very roughly the Soviet equivalent of outraged Tumberidge Wells.

Life has been very unkind to such staunch party members recently. They've seen their own leadership sponsor changes which affront their most cherished beliefs.

Their hero Stalin is pilloried in the press as a mass murderer.

State ownership of the means of production is undermined with impunity, as they see it, by speculators and private marketeers, rock music and

Western clothing are corrupting the youth, and the party itself no longer seems to know

where it's going, why it's even permitted a self-styled opposition to come into existence.

While his Tumbridge-Wells' counterpart works himself up over trivia, outraged Svdlovsk has a real point.

However blinkered his own approach to it, what he is witnessing is a real crisis.

He may blame Mr Gorbachev for it, but actually it's rooted in the very nature of the Soviet system,

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