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With perestroika—and especially Gorbachev’s admission in 1989 that the secret protocols had been part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact，the old Soviet version of the events of 1939 and 1940 could no longer serve as an official account. It had to be revised，a process that had already begun in the final years of Soviet power. For example，in a 1989 high school history textbook（one that still took the USSR as its object of study），Korablëv，Fedosov，and Borisov（1989） wrote：
The territorial composition of the country changed. Its borders were extended to the west. In 1939 the land and populations of Ukraine and Belorussia underwent reunification. In 1940 Romania returned to the composition of the USSR Bessarabia，which had been torn away in 1918. This led to the formation of the Moldovian SSR instead of an autonomous republic. As a result of complex processes of international and internal development Soviet power was established anew in Latvia，Lithuania，and Estonia，which entered the composition of the USSR in 1940.
However，in the new regions entering the USSR，breaches of the law characteristic for those years of the abuse of power were tolerated along with democratic revolutionary transformations.
All of this made the situation more complicated in these regions. It had a negative effect on people’s psychological state and at the same time on the military preparedness of the USSR.（p.348）
The first and perhaps most striking feature that distinguishes this from previous Soviet accounts is that the absorption of Latvia，Lithuania，and Estonia into the USSR was no longer formulated in Marxist-Leninist terms. There is no mention of “reactionary rulers” and so forth. Indeed，there is a great deal that is critical— at least implicitly—of Soviet power. Mention of “breaches of the law characteristic for those years of the abuse of power” is something that was simply unimaginable in official Soviet accounts. Instead of focusing on the glories of the Soviet Union through the desired vision of the party，this account allows that mistakes were made.
Another striking feature of this account is its awkwardness and ambiguity. It contains formulations that are so clumsy as to make the evasions obvious，if not laughable. In particular，the extensive use of the passive voice made it possible to avoid specifying as to who was responsible for the actions. By refusing to assign agency，the authors created an account in which things just seemed to happen on their own.
For people of the Baltic countries，expressions like “as a result of complex processes of international and internal development Soviet power was established” or “the territorial composition of the country changed” amount to evasion and attempts to avoid telling the truth. From this perspective，statements such as “all of this made the situation more complicated in these regions” are certainly true，but the prevarication involved is so great that the comments raise more questions than they answer.
The obvious awkwardness in this passage derives from a fundamental contradiction in the official Soviet account of the late 1980s in the USSR. On one hand，there was a need to acknowledge that events，the existence of which had previously been denied，had in fact occurred. It was no longer possible，for example，to deny the existence of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. On the other hand，there was no agreement on what the larger story was now supposed to be. How would the basic “narrative truth”（Mink，1978） of an official Soviet account change now that it could no longer be built around the claim that the party was always right in leading the march to a glorious future for international socialism？ Would newly released archival evidence force Russia to create a new narrative that would cast the USSR as an imperialist power not unlike pre-revolutionary Russia？
Answers to such questions were still very unclear in 1989，and officials were apparently nervous at that time about making statements that could come back to haunt them. As a result，they seem to have arrived at an unsatisfactory compromise：they would include newly acknowledged information in official Soviet accounts of history but would not rewrite the basic narrative. The result was that new information appeared in a way that was inconsistent with the general flow of the text. It was as if this new information concerning the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had appeared out of nowhere in the official account and that the authors had no idea how to weave it into the text. The fact that the meaning of events is largely shaped by the narrative in which they are enmeshed（Mink，1978），however，made this compromise unlikely to be satisfactory or stable，and this was indeed the case.