[5] Andreyeva's essay I Cannot Forsake My Principles (Не могу поступаться принципами; 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.

[8] 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In the originally unpublished portions, Andreyeva commented that Stalin's critics wrote "in the language of Goebbels" and referred to "nations of little importance, like the Crimean Tartars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.

Ligachev told the official news agency TASS to send the Andreyeva letter to local newspapers throughout the Soviet Union to publish it.

[10][11] 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.

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.

[16] By July 1990, she was heading an organization called Yedinstvo (Unity) which aimed to return the country to the Bolshevik principles of Lenin and was planning to leave the CPSU.