The Thinking Reed

Perestroika has changed the situation radically. The circulations of newspapers and magazines have started to rise despite the paper shortage. Since interesting material can now be found everywhere, subscribers have started forming consumers’ cooperatives, through which a number of families divide the cost of subscriptions and then share the periodicals. Otherwise the attempt to ‘keep pace with glasnost'’ would be a very heavy drain on the average Russian family’s budget.

A.N. Yakovlev, who in 1985 was head of the propaganda section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made energetic efforts to enliven public life. The editors of many magazines and newspapers were replaced, censorship was relaxed. As commercial success began to be valued at least as much as ideological steadfastness, relatively sharp competiton broke out among publications which strove to attract readers’ attention with sensational material. Some newspapers and magazines which had previously eked out a pretty miserable existence suddenly achieved mass popularity. The most famous of these is Moskovskie Novosti [Moscow News]. This weekly newspaper, published in five languages, was for several years a symbol of inefficient propaganda. Its readers were predominantly students who aimed to extend their vocabulary from English, French or Spanish newspapers, but were not allowed to study real Western publications for that purpose. Very few people even knew that a Russian-language edition of the paper existed.

Within a few months of Yegor Yakovlev’s editorship, the paper became the flagship of glasnost'. The circulation of the Russian edition is still limited, in part because of the paper shortage and various bureaucratic obstacles, and perhaps in part because of political considerations. Nevertheless, long queues form in front of the state newspaper kiosk on the day the paper comes out, and by nine o’clock in the morning no copy of the paper can be bought anywhere in Moscow. Readers pass round some issues as they once did samizdat.

Yegor Yakovlev’s paper is far from being the only one to experience a heady upsurge in vitality. After Vitaly Korotich was made editor-in-chief of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok [Light], what had once been the mouthpiece of extreme Stalinists rapidly became popular among an intellectual readership when it published a series of pieces devoted to the victims of Stalinist terror. The literary sections of the magazine also improved noticeably. The bulletin of the Soviet committee for the defence of peace, Vek XX i mir [The Twentieth Century and Peace], which had never managed to achieve the slightest popularity among readers, suddenly became fashionable. A significant role in this change of fortunes was played by Gleb Pavlovsky, who had once been among the founders of the left-wing samizdat journal Poiski [Searches], and who had returned to Moscow from internal exile. Thanks to Pavlovsky, Vek XX i mir, which, like Moscow News, appears in several languages, has become an important source of information on the activities of left-wing ‘unofficial groups’. The magazine has also run interviews with the independent Marxists, Pinsky and Gefter, who until recently were considered dissidents. The readers’ letters section has become especially interesting, since it is an indication of how people react to the new political opportunities, and evidence that they are gradually becoming used to sharp political discussion. Moskovskii Komsomolets [Moscow Young Communist] publishes reports on concerts by popular rock groups. Izvestiya organizes discussions which consider the shortcomings of economic policy, not only in the past but also in the present, with startling frankness. Sometimes provincial newspapers publish material which has seemed too daring to Muscovite editorial boards. As new facts and new ideas are aired in the press, they naturally attract the interest not only of the intelligentsia but also of wider social strata. Readers are becoming better informed, and more demanding towards the press in general.