Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin
272
Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin
272eBook
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Overview
The Soviet project of creating a new culture and society entailed a plan
for the modeling of "new" persons who embodied and fulfilled the promise
of socialism, and this vision was expressed in the institutions of government. Using
archival sources, essays, and interviews with journalists, Thomas C. Wolfe provides
an account of the final four decades of Soviet history viewed through the lens of
journalism and media. Whereas most studies of the Soviet press approach its history
in terms of propaganda or ideology, Wolfe's focus is on the effort to imagine a
different kind of person and polity. Foucault's concept of governmentality
illuminates the relationship between the idea of the socialist person and everyday
journalistic representation, from the Khrushchev period to the 1990s and the
appearance of the tabloid press. This thought-provoking study provides insights into
the institutions of the Soviet press and the lives of journalists who experienced
important transformations of their work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253002532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/08/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Thomas C. Wolfe is Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology and in
the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Read an Excerpt
Governing Soviet Journalism
The Press and the Socialist Person After Stalin
By Thomas C. Wolfe
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Thomas C. WolfeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34589-9
CHAPTER 1
Journalism and the Person in the Soviet Sixties
The collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s brought a number of crises in its wake, the most glaring of which was perhaps the disappearance of the welfare state: for millions of Soviet citizens, daily life acquired a new dimension of struggle and demanded new strategies of coping, if not survival. But if the economic crisis lay on the surface of everyday life in all its tragic obviousness, there were other, more veiled difficulties that took shape, such as the dilemmas of self-invention and self-knowledge created by living across the gap created by the Soviet Union's end. This was not an issue that effected people in the same way; the sixteen-year-old had a harder time recognizing himself or herself as formed by the Soviet system than the sixty-year-old. The point is that the end of the Soviet Union raised for many people the question of how to anchor themselves in their own past.
For example, the dozens of elderly men and women who met next to the Lenin Museum by Red Square to converse and sell newspapers like Za Stalina! (For Stalin!) made a public display of anchoring themselves in the 1930s; their newspapers applied the visual and rhetorical styles of that time to the political scene of the 1990s. Articles in these papers denounced the capitalist sellout of Russia, identifying the key players as Jewish bankers who had succeeded in seducing the weak leadership of the Soviet Union. And at the other end of the spectrum of self-invention were those former Soviet citizens who felt their lives could begin again, now that there was no KGB, no party, no required rituals or empty rhetoric to contend with at work and school and in the media. These were people who had long since given up the notion that there was anything in the Soviet past worth anchoring themselves to.
The vast majority of Russian citizens, though, were not able to make such unequivocal claims. These were people for whom the Soviet past was simply too contradictory to allow such one-dimensional understandings. The Soviet past was the scene of one's childhood, one's marriage, one's family life; the system had supplied an education and a profession, and one had practiced that profession within the constraints of the system. The system had both enabled and disabled; it had opened doors and closed them. And most people, moreover, had mastered the system, in the sense that they had developed an acute sense of when to ignore it and when not to ignore it. The pragmatic solution was to simply accept that one was "Soviet," that one could identify many meaningful anchoring points in the Soviet past, moments that existed apart from any judgments about the "system."
One of the most important anchoring points for many Soviet intellectuals and professionals navigating the uncharted seas of post-communism was the Khrushchev period, the nine years between the Secret Speech of 1956 and Khrushchev's removal from power in 1964. It is commonly described with the terms "reform," "cultural thaw," "liberalization," terms that evoke the positive moral connotations this period had for a generation of intellectuals, artists, and writers, and this chapter describes how and why the Khrushchev period can be understood as a clear moment of definition for those journalists who worked in the late Soviet press, and particularly for those who spent some time at the paper widely considered the leading paper of the Khrushchev era, Izvestiia. I want to describe how journalists experienced this period as making possible the rebirth of journalists' identities as governors of Soviet society. This means looking closely at the transformation of journalism sponsored by Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, who made possible the renewal or reinvention of the professional practice of journalism.
The special significance of this moment comes into focus when viewed through the lens of governmentality. According to those who sought to reform Soviet society, the socialist project needed reassembly after its distortion by Stalinism, and journalists represented a reserve army of specialists poised to restore the coherence of socialism's ideal. They were ready not only to go back to the 1920s and to Lenin's prescription of an activist, interventionist press, but also — and in direct opposition to what Sheila Fitzpatrick identified as the Stalinist operation of effacing the present — they were ready to claim the present as that arena where the power and truth of socialism could be found. The Khrushchev era was a moment when a kind of collective governmental reinvention was not only permitted but demanded by the party. This involved journalists positing new forms of subjectivity and using new discourses and styles of representation, so that the society might re-experience the cultural project of socialism.
In the context of conversations with journalists during the early years of post-communism, the aspect of this press that was referred to over and over again was that journalists had experienced a kind of effectiveness. They had intervened in people's lives in the most concrete way by redressing wrongs, by defending, as Shliapov said, the "little man." They dug into everyday events to discover where Soviet institutions had responded to problems or complaints in too callous and bureaucratic a fashion; journalists described and denounced instances where Soviet officials had overstepped their power. They described this in terms of the press's attention to the "person," a term that was one of the core symbols and figures of Soviet culture. And yet this effectiveness was not understood in political terms as directed at the system's subversion, but it was understood, rather, in terms of its ability to enable readers to rise above the system to communicate on a purely "human" level. In fact, E. Rakov, a journalist who had worked during these years at the Tiumenskii komsomolets, the paper for the youth league of the Siberian city of Tiumen', told me:
I would have to say that the best characteristic of the journalism of those years was its humanity. Not in the sense of among colleagues, but humanity in general, in relation to one's readers, to the people. Yes, there was humanity in the press. A person turned to the press as the last instance. There, where already no one else could help, not a judge, secretary, or some kind of chairman, a person turned to the newspaper, and very often the newspaper helped, very often it helped. We helped, even such a small newspaper as ours helped people. We even helped people look for the truth. I can't give you concrete examples because these weren't some kind of global cataclysms; they were tragedies of one little person. Someone got cheated out of an apartment, someone was fired from his job unjustly, that is, we helped the person in his micro-life; it was here that the newspaper helped, since on the large scale the newspaper was helpless during those years. But it did have the ability to help the life of the little man.
This relative helplessness on the macro-scale made it possible for journalists to turn their attention to the person from the point of view of the transcendent moral categories of "truth" and "humanity."
It turned out, however, that this very distance from anything political turned out to have great political significance, for these moral values supplied the foundation from which many Soviet citizens criticized the system in the 1970s and 1980s. This journalism maintained a zone of authentic critical thought outside the party's ideological supervision. The local problems of the person became the means by which journalists produced forms of and attitudes toward thought, which, they believed, played a vital role in enabling perestroika in the late 1980s. E. Alexandrov, a former Izvestiia correspondent, put it concisely: this journalism had done tremendous work "in the reorientation of this society" by dispersing "the cloud of ideology."
Just what did these journalists mean when they referred, either explicitly or implicitly, both to the "person" and to the "thoughtful" nature of Soviet journalism? I begin with an introduction to the cultural ethos of the press under Khrushchev and to the career of the journalist most associated with this ethos, Aleksei Adzhubei. The everyday embodiment of this ethos in Izvestiia, the paper Adzhubei edited between 1959 and 1964, is presented by working from a 1961 article that exemplifies the genre remembered so proudly by journalists, that of the "defense of the little man." Then I turn to an enormous volume entitled Den' mira (A Day in the World), which I read as both a practical manual for Soviet journalists and as an idealization of the newspaper form. This 800-page "newspaper" covers not a village, a city, or even a country, but the entire globe. It contains in a single massive volume a kind of panoramic envisioning of the world, constructed through the work of hundreds of journalists and photographers from every country in the world.
While it is crucial to analyze these topics in some detail in order to be able to view them as a kind of window on to the redefinition of the governmental purpose of journalism in the Soviet Union, it may be useful to begin by contextualizing them in broader accounts of Soviet culture after Stalin. The phenomenon that both this chapter and the next treat is the Soviet sixties, that short decade which Vail' and Genis date from the 22nd Party Congress in July 1961 and extending to 1968 when Warsaw pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. For them, the sixties were so compelling because it was the only time in their lives when they experienced what seemed an authentic belief in Soviet socialism, a belief that sprang from the broad dissemination of new discourses on self, identity, and history. These discourses were marked above all by their affective register; public media became sites for the expression and exploration of the authentic private sphere of emotion, sentiment, and feeling. "Sincerity," they write, was "the key word of the epoch," one that pervaded public discourse and private conversations.
The "sources" of the sixties have been described in a variety of scholarly and intellectual registers. For example, historians have long recognized the personal significance of Khrushchev as a leader whose desire to overcome Stalinism produced a string of "reforms," beginning in 1953 with his opening up vast areas of Kazakhstan to cereal cultivation and concluding with the projected reform of the party's administrative structure in the fall of 1962. Most famously, his desire to renew the party led him to deliver the four-hour "secret" speech at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 that exposed Stalin as a sadistic and incompetent leader. This then helped introduce a wider "thaw" in the cultural sphere, in which writers were permitted to publish on previously forbidden themes such as life in the camps or the terror.
At the same time, however, historians who stress the role of Khrushchev in enabling the significant improvements of the period — the general increase in living standards, including incomes, the construction of apartment buildings, and the production of food — also emphasize the way his own personality undermined his good intentions. Service's judgment is representative: Khrushchev was "at once a Stalinist and an anti-Stalinist, a communist believer and a cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and a domineering bore, a statesman and a politicker who was out his intellectual depth."
Stephen Hanson, however, suggests that a better approach to the 1960s can be gained if the focus is placed not on Khrushchev's personality but on the way his uncoordinated, impulsive, and chaotic reforms were expressions of the only policy "choice" he had as a socialist thinker. Hanson argues that the overarching task that confronted Khrushchev after his victory over the more economically conservative "anti-party" group in June 1957 was to pursue the "charismatic" approach to economic development, which relied on the communication of a vision of revolutionary transformation and transcendence. Instead of cautiously reforming the planning system or introducing systems of incentives, as his opponents had suggested, "Khrushchev set out to mobilize the entire population of the USSR — within the context of the Stalinist planning system — to engage in the "full-scale construction of communism." Khrushchev believed "the entire population was ready for disciplined revolutionary action." The charismatic approach paid little attention to obvious constraints; like all visions of charismatic change, it would be based on working at the boundaries of the real and the rational. In Hanson's words, "Khrushchev hated to see Soviet reality get fixed into frozen, time-bound forms." Khrushchev devoted much time and energy to the promotion of everyday miracles of production; his most ambitious statement of time transcendence, and one that was repeatedly held up to ridicule him once he was removed from power, was his statement in 1959 that Soviet citizens would experience communism in their lifetime. What would create a state of abundance, leisure, health, and happiness in a society with a sizable percentage of its population still with barely enough food to eat and living in communal apartments or on collective farms that had not been improved since the 1930s was every citizen's commitment to the "permanent revolution." Hanson helps us make sense of the important rephrasings contained in the party program of 1961: it was no longer a matter of the party leading the people; the people would lead themselves. Stability, continuity, and routine were not viewed as rational techniques in improving production, but rather as brakes on communism's fulfillment. And yet even as reforms followed reforms, and reality repeatedly changed, there was no consistent increase in production, no sign that the world of abundance was at hand. For those who replaced Khrushchev in 1964, the lack of progress was itself a product of trying too much too fast.
The Soviet sixties can be thought of, then, as a charismatic era because the party under Khrushchev had taken a charismatic approach to time. And likewise, the disappearance of the party's support for the cultural forms of the sixties involved the end of that projection of enthusiasm, as the new leaders approached governing not as the organization of a permanent revolution but as the establishment of a stable orthodoxy. But what neither Hanson nor any other historian of Soviet society explores is the degree to which the charisma that seemed programmed into the socialist worldview was actually the textual product of journalists.
ADZHUBEI'S LAST TEXT
I began to call Adzhubei in December 1992, when a friend at Izvestiia suggested that as someone interested in the history of the Soviet press, I should just go to the "source." He helped me get the phone number at the office of the small weekly paper that Adzhubei was editing, and yet on the numerous occasions when I called, it turned out I always just missed him. His assistant always apologized and insisted that I call back, assuring me that he enjoyed talking to scholars and researchers. I tried once again on March 19, 1993, only to be told in a quavering voice that Aleksei Ivanovich had died the previous day.
Although the obituary that appeared in Izvestiia acknowledged that few young Russians would probably know his name, Aleksei Adzhubei had been a well-known member of the Soviet establishment. He was born in 1924, fought in the war as a teenager, and met Rada Khrushchev at Moscow State University; they married in 1949. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism and went on to work at several of the leading Soviet papers. He was first the editor of Komsomol'skaia pravda and eventually became editor-in-chief of Izvestiia at age thirty-five. Adzhubei was a member of that first post-Stalin generation of the Soviet elite who were interested in the wider world and who traveled; his memoir of the Khrushchev era, published during perestroika and entitled Te deciat'let (Those Ten Years), is filled with dozens of photos, most of which show Khrushchev, but there are also a number of photos that portray Adzhubei at various famous locales or with famous persons: on the observation deck of the Empire State Building; at a barbecue in the backyard of President Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger; with Pablo Neruda in Chile; with President Kennedy in the Oval Office and with John Steinbeck gazing out over Moscow from the roof of the Izvestiia building. In October 1964, when Brezhnev and his allies removed Khrushchev from power, they removed Adzhubei as well, and he worked for the next twenty years at the relatively obscure journal Sovetskii soiuz (Soviet Union). During perestroika he returned to the public's attention with his memoir and with the publication, starting in 1991, of a new weekly newspaper called Tret'ee soslovie (The Third Estate).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsNote on SourcesPrologueIntroduction1. Journalism and the
Person in the Soviet Sixties2. Agranovskii's Essays3. Journalism against Socialism,
Socialism against Journalism4. Perestroika and the End of Government by Journalism5.
Teaching TabloidsAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
"One of the author's purposes is to reveal that the Soviet press was more than propaganda. Consequently, he emphasizes its educational function. Wolfe (Univ. of Minnesota) approaches the Soviet press from a Foucaultist premise and is on the right track, pointing out that the function of the press, regardless of the ideological system, is to service the state. This is not to say that since the governments are different, that the presses in many particulars would not also be different. For example, the Soviets did not have a secondary press that was free of corporate influences. Regretfully, Wolfe has limited his study to the late Soviet press from the time of Brezhnev to Gorbachev's perestroika, when the Soviet state paradigm began to peter out. The work is well footnoted and contains an extensivebibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. College and research libraries.—A. Ezergailis, Ithaca College December 2006"