Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134960224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have brought tumultuous change to political, social and economic life in the Soviet Union. But how have these changes affected Soviet press and television reporting? Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media examines the changing role of Soviet journalism from its theoretical origins in the writings of Marx and Lenin to the new freedoms of the Gorbachev era. The book includes detailed analysis of contemporary Soviet media output, as well as interviews with Soviet journalists.

1

Introduction

The Soviets refer to their news media as ‘the means of mass information and propaganda’. The term distinguishes press and broadcasting from those elements of the cultural apparatus which depend on interpersonal communication for the transmission of messages – the oral propaganda network, the education system, and the ‘knowledge’ societies.¹ It also alerts us to the Party’s insistence that the Soviet media should function as engines of ideological production; machinery of social knowledge, to be harnessed and consciously directed to solving the tasks of socialist construction.

The straightforward instrumentalism of this approach contrasts with that prevailing in liberal democracies such as Britain and the United States of America, where the independent, impartial, ‘watchdog’ role of journalism is held to be paramount. In these countries critical theorists have long questioned the independence of the media and debated the extent to which news and journalism should be considered as part of the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’.² In the USSR, as any Soviet journalist will readily concede, ‘we make no bones about it’.³The Party, speaking in the name of the people, openly proclaims the fact that since 1917 it has used the Soviet news media as a means of social control and engineering, rather than of communicating useful information for its own sake. As one Soviet source puts it, ‘mass media under socialism not only express public opinion, they are the most important means of its formation’ (Korobeinikov, ed., 1986, p.52). Acting on this belief, the Bolsheviks after 1917 built a media apparatus unequalled in size and complexity anywhere in the world. Moreover, the Party took upon itself the role of supervision and control of this apparatus. By gradually outlawing the great majority of non-Bolshevik media organs the Party effectively monopolised the flow of mass information in Soviet society for nearly seventy years. With the exception of those few who had access to alternative sources – principally foreign radio stations run by western broadcasting and intelligence services, and underground ‘samizdat’ publications⁴ – the Soviet citizen was throughout this period almost completely dependent on official media for information.

The practical implications of this dependence were rather bluntly demonstrated to me in April 1986 when, while I was living and studying in Moscow doing the research for this book, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, showering radioactive debris over a large part of Europe.

As a resident of Moscow the Soviet news media were my main source of information about events taking place in the USSR and beyond its borders, as well as being the subject of my academic work. Being a westerner I had access to alternative news sources such as the British Embassy library, which contained back issues of British newspapers and periodicals. I had some contact with western journalists in the city, and occasional mail from family and friends at home. Consequently, the quantity and variety of information at my disposal were substantially greater than those available to the average Soviet citizen. Nevertheless, the vulnerability of my position as a consumer of Soviet media was illustrated by the fact that, like the great majority of people living in the USSR, I first heard the name ‘Chernobyl’ on the night of Monday, April 28th, nearly three full days after the explosion occurred.

I had returned from visiting friends in the city to the hostel in Moscow University which the foreigners shared with Soviet students. I called into a British neighbour’s room before going to bed, to find four or five people gathered together in earnest conversation. ‘Have you heard?’ one of them asked as I joined the company. ? Soviet nuclear reactor’s on fire’, said another. ‘It was on the BBC.’ Lacking a suitable radio, I hadn’t heard the BBC’s account. The main Soviet television news programme Vremya had apparently reported that something was wrong in a short item on that evening’s bulletin, but I had missed that too.

Thus began, for me and for millions of others, a period of ten anxious days (until May 6th, when information began to flow more freely) during which the Soviet government, through the media, kept its own citizens, foreign guests, and the international community as a whole in virtual ignorance about a nuclear catastrophe of unprecedented seriousness. From my viewpoint, in this case, ignorance was most definitely not bliss. While western tabloids spoke of thousands dead (figures circulated on the network of rumour and speculation which inevitably filled the vacuum created by the official silence), and the Soviet media announced business as usual, one had little choice but to stock up with plentiful supplies of champagne, get therapeutically drunk, and hope for the best.

The feared meltdown of the reactor core at Chernobyl was averted, mercifully, and the worst did not come to pass (a fact of little comfort to those in Ukraine who absorbed the most radiation). For Soviet journalists, those ten days of enforced silence turned out with hindsight to be the final, desperate gesture of a Party hierarchy whose rigid control of the mass communications system was by early 1986 already breaking down.

Until the 1980s the Party’s near-monopoly of mass information was sustained with remarkably little public protest or dissent. Through lack of choice, knowledge, or interest in the few existing alternatives, the Soviet population consumed the official media in their hundreds of millions daily.⁵ By the time of the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, however, the Soviet media were experiencing a growing crisis of legitimation as economic necessity, technological innovation, and international political developments combined to undermine the Party’s traditional approach to journalism and information policy as a whole. The ‘authority’ of the Soviet media was declining (ibid., p. 193).

Chernobyl accelerated that decline. The domestic dissatisfaction and international outrage provoked by the Soviet media’s response to the disaster delivered a fatal blow to ‘Brezhnevian’ journalism, boosting the process of radical reform and restructuring of information policy which had begun one year earlier with the election of Mikhail Sergeyivich Gorbachov as General Secretary of the CPSU. Those developments, known throughout the world by the terms ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, and their impact on the content and organisation of Soviet journalism, are the subject of this book.

Chapter 2 traces the theoretical roots of Soviet journalism in the materialism of Marx and Lenin. Chapter 3 shows how the experience of Stalinism affected the development of the system up to the demise of Brezhnev. Chapters 4 and 5 then assess the effects of the Gorbachov era reforms on the Soviet media, while chapter 6 summarises the measures adopted by Soviet journalists and politicians to facilitate further change and consolidate those which have already taken place: in particular, the new Press Law. Part II contains a series of case studies, examining key features of the contemporary Soviet media in such categories of coverage as foreign news and images of women.

Two aspects of the Soviet media are not dealt with in any detail in this book. The first is the question of effects. Although the Soviet example is ideally suited to a study of the effects of mass communications on audiences (since the USSR provides conditions which do not exist in any of the advanced capitalist societies: a state-controlled apparatus, targeted on the fulfilment of clearly-stated social goals), work in this area has been severely limited by the dependence of researchers, Soviet and non-Soviet, on sparse and methodologically suspect official statistics, or on anecdotal evidence from emigrés. The quantity and quality of official data on media effects and audience attitudes in the USSR have begun to improve as a consequence of official recognition of popular discontent with media output, and a sizeable academic industry has taken shape which is devoted to the measurement of public opinion, but the field remains largely undeveloped. The interested reader may refer to a number of projects designed to gauge the effectiveness of the propaganda apparatus in minute detail, which have been reported in the Soviet literature and are available to western researchers.⁶ The main finding of these studies, most of which pre-date the glasnost campaign has, as already noted, been one of increasing dissatisfaction amongst the Soviet population at certain features of the official news media. How Soviet journalism has responded to that dissatisfaction is discussed at length in this book, but no attempt is made to assess the ‘effectiveness’ of Soviet ‘mass information and propaganda’ post-1985.

The book also lacks a detailed account of the samizdat or underground press which has existed in the USSR since the 1960s. Samizdat publications, though routinely attracting widespread publicity and interest in the west, have never posed a serious threat to the Party’s control of information flows in Soviet society. Their circulation was largely restricted to small groups of political or religious dissidents in hand-typed editions. While they performed an important information function for these groups the Soviet population as a whole was largely unaware of or uninterested in the existence of samizdat. We note, however, that the reforms of the Soviet media discussed below include the removal of many of the restrictions on unofficial publishing which in the past made samizdat necessary.⁷ As a result of the Press Law the right to own and publish independently of the Party and state is now legally guaranteed.

A Note on the Sample

A substantial proportion of this book consists of descriptions and analyses of the content of Soviet press and television news, drawn primarily from two samples of Soviet media. First, the output of Pravda – the official newspaper of the CPSU Central Committee and thus the most authoritative media organ in the country – was monitored for the twelve-month period beginning on March 1st, 1987 and ending on February 29th, 1988.

Secondly, the content of eight media organs was monitored over the shorter period of one month in March 1988. The organs selected included Pravda, and five other central newspapers: Trud, the organ of the central trades union organisation; Izvestia, published by the Supreme Soviet; Komsomolskaya Pravda, central organ of the Leninist youth movement, or Komsomol; Krasnaya Zvezda, published by the Defence Ministry; and Sovetskaya Rossiya, organ of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation. To allow consideration of the regional press the sample included one of the main republican newspapers, Zarya Vostoka, the organ of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party.

With the aid of a satellite dish and a reliable video recorder the main Soviet daily television news bulletin, Programme Vremya, was recorded throughout March.

Of necessity, this sample contains only a small number of the approximately 8,000 media organs in the USSR, but it is representative of the different types and was carefully selected to include the most popular as measured by viewing and circulation figures. To provide the data base for a comparison of Soviet with western media the sample also incorporated the main British television news bulletins broadcast in March 1988. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Nine O’Clock News, shown nightly on BBC1, and Independent Television News’ News at Ten, broadcast on ITV, were both recorded daily.

The total sample, collected over a period of thirteen months, thus comprised some 600 editions of Soviet newspapers and fifty hours of television news. More than 30,000 news items were logged and categorised.

British and Soviet television news coverage of the Reykjavik and Moscow summits was also recorded, and forms the basis of the discussion of ‘protocol news’ in chapter 8 below.

At points in the discussion of Soviet foreign news coverage it was necessary, for reasons of time and space, to focus on one country. The United Kingdom has therefore been chosen as a case study in, for example, the examination of structures of access to foreign sources in chapter 5, and in chapter 9, which looks at Soviet images of capitalism. This selection was based on three factors. First, the United Kingdom, as a major actor on the world stage, features prominently in Soviet news. Secondly, its political, economic and social structures can be considered as representative of the advanced capitalist societies. Lastly, but by no means least, it is the country with which the author is most familiar.

A Note on Referencing

The dates and origins of quotations drawn from the sample periods for the purposes of content analysis are indicated in the body of the text. Other articles are referenced in endnotes, as are secondary translations of Soviet sources. Elsewhere, the accuracy of translations is the sole responsibility of the author.

The figures in brackets accompanying extracts from British television news bulletins (e.g., 1 2100 5.3.88) refer to the channel, time, and date (day. month. year) of the broadcast from which the extract is taken.

Part I

The Apparatus

2

Marxism, Leninism and the Media

It seems appropriate to begin a book about the Soviet news media by noting that the two men whose names are most commonly associated with the USSR today were themselves journalists. Both Karl Marx, the founder of historical materialism, and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), who led the movement which applied Marx’s theory to the overthrow of tsarism in Russia, spent a substantial proportion of their adult lives working and writing for newspapers and journals, an activity which helped them not only to expound and propagate their ideas but to pay their bills. From 1852, for a period of ten years, Karl Marx contributed regularly to the New York Tribune, at that time the largest circulation newspaper in the world. It is not without irony that this work, for a decidedly bourgeois newspaper, provided Marx with his main source of income while writing his epochal critique of the capitalist mode of production, Capital, in London.¹

Lenin’s journalistic activities were confined to the Russian socialist press. Like Marx, however, this work provided him with much-needed income and, even when he had become the leader of Soviet Russia in 1921, Lenin’s membership card for the Moscow Soviet described his profession as that of ‘journalist’.²

It is not, of course, as journalists that Marx and Lenin are chiefly remembered today, but as theorists and practitioners of the revolutionary politics which in 1917 established in Russia the world’s first socialist state. This chapter examines how their ideas have influenced the subsequent development of the news media of that state.³

Marx on the Media

Marx’s contributi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The apparatus
• Part II Some cases
• Notes
• Bibliography of works in English
• Bibliography of works in Russian
• Index