Yegor Yakovlev set the fashion in a new magazine called Zhurnalist (Journalist). Its cutting-edge design, its illustrations and photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock caught the attention of the urban intelligentsia that lived by the idea of the West, dreamt of the West, idealized it and longed for it, and tried to steal any glimpse of Western life from films and journals. A lucky few who travelled to the West on business brought back stories and pictures: friends and family were invited for an annotated show of slides. Zhurnalist aimed to satisfy that longing.
Before Yegor’s time, Zhurnalist had been called Sovetskaia pechat’ (Soviet Press). Yegor borrowed the title Zhurnalist from a magazine that had existed in the 1920s. He wished Zhurnalist to express what people of his own circle ‘talked about in their Moscow kitchens’. This suggested a new way of organizing the mind: not vertically, where the party through print dictated what its readers were to think, but horizontally, where a network of like-minded individuals shared views put forward in print.
Zhurnalist reflected all the strengths and weakness of the shestidesiatniki. Idle conversations around a kitchen table among the liberal intelligentsia all too often were a substitute for real action or work; it gave them relief, but yielded few results. It created a comfortable cocoon, but also increased the intelligentsia’s isolation from the rest of the country. The ‘cocoon’ itself, however, was growing larger in size. By the time Yegor was fired less than two years later, its circulation exceeded a quarter of a million copies.
Zhurnalist tried to break down geographical and intellectual barriers, moving freely between the village and the city, between Russia and the West. One of its authors was Yury Chernichenko, an agricultural economist and essayist who grew up in a Russian village that was devastated by Stalin’s collectivization and subjected to famine and cannibalism (his parents would not leave him at home alone, fearing that he would be stolen and eaten). Soviet bureaucracy not only spoilt the land by draining the rivers and destroying forests, it also drained the human and moral resources of the nation. Chernichenko, who turned to the Russia village in search of a positive, hard-working, entrepreneurial national type, was one of its finest examples.
Chernichenko’s essays about rural Russia happily coexisted on the pages of the Zhurnalist with themes and articles that constituted the world of Russian Westernizers. In one of the issues, Yegor published his interview with a prototype of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – a Soviet spy who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. (The novel itself was only available in samizdat – the clandestine copying and distribution of material banned by the state.) Hemingway was an icon of the shestidesiatniki: his photograph in a black-and-white roll-neck was displayed on glass-fronted bookshelves as a sign of belonging.
In the same issue, only a few pages apart, in a section called ‘If You Happen to Be in…’, Yegor published an illustrated essay about the ancient Russian town of Suzdal’, written and drawn by the artist Tatyana Mavrina. Ornamented wooden houses and white churches were accompanied by similarly ornate texts that conjured up the world of the Russian fairy tale with its fire-birds, magic horses, lively fairs and its pagan gods. The onion domes of Suzdal’ and the smoky bars of Valencia were equally exotic.
While the official Soviet press was cultivating the image of the Soviet Union as a besieged fortress, Zhurnalist took its readers to an American television studio and around Fleet Street, inside The Economist tower in St James’s and the Chicago mansion of Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, with a revolving round bed and pictures of Marilyn Monroe as the first ‘Girl of the Month’. These articles were not the usual rife propaganda about the bourgeois press, but surprisingly accurate and respectful descriptions of how the Western media operated. To be sure, the article about Playboy was written by a French journalist and accompanied by a commentary by a Soviet media guru who lamented the ‘depravity and degradation’ of Western readers. Positioned on the side of the main text in white letters on black ink, the commentary was quite literally marginal.
Inevitably, such articles prompted comparisons and planted ideas in the heads of those who were supposed to ‘propagate, agitate and organize’. Yegor’s generation tried to square the circle: how did one reconcile socialism, which rejected private ownership, with individual initiative, and the idea of a ‘party-minded’ media with the free flow of information? This was not a philosophical question, but a highly practical one. These people had an allegiance to the Bolshevik ideas of social justice and equality, but they wanted a good life for themselves and for their children, a life no worse than the lives of their counterparts in the ‘decaying’ West.
For a moment, it seemed that the answer was found in the Prague Spring of 1967–8 when the government of Alexander Dubček tried to reform the Czech economy by freeing it from state control and introducing competition. ‘There is no thick wall between economy and ethics: under socialism the rouble rewards honest and pure creative work,’ Zhurnalist enthused, displaying as evidence the experience of the socialist Czechoslovakia and backing it with a quote from the Czech ministry of the interior: ‘Our first problem is how to teach a cobbler, a vendor or a barber not to be afraid to earn a lot of money.’ It was a hymn to private initiative and to common sense.39
Dubček’s idea of socialism with ‘a human face’ was a Eureka moment for the reformists in Moscow. The Czech reforms that offered more democracy, economic liberalization and constraints on the all-powerful security agencies filled Russian liberals with hope and enthusiasm.
The events in Prague inspired Andrei Sakharov to write an article which he titled ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’. The article warned of the threat of a thermonuclear Armageddon and called for an economic, social and ideological convergence with the West. It was circulated in samizdat and 18 million copies of it were printed around the world, more than any Agatha Christie novel. Yet, as far as Brezhnev’s Kremlin was concerned, the danger posed to the survival of the Soviet system by Sakharov’s proposed ‘convergence’ was greater than the threat of a nuclear war. The link between the Prague Spring and the advances of liberal thought in Russia was apparent.
In June 1967 Zhurnalist reprinted the new Czech media law which guaranteed freedom of speech, without giving up state ownership of the media. A group of intellectuals, including Sakharov, proposed a similar law at home. ‘It proclaims, in effect, the right of any citizen, to print any material, to stage any performance and to show any films,’ the KGB reported to the Central Committee in horror. The KGB added that ‘it was undertaking measures to prevent the further activity of those who have organized this document’.40
In April 1968 Yegor was fired ostensibly for publishing a poetic and subtly erotic black-and-white photograph and a reproduction of a Soviet painting depicting a female nude in a bath-house. Yet the deeper reasons had to do with the publication of the Czech media law. There was talk in the Kremlin that if Zhurnalist was not closed down, the Soviet leadership would soon face the same situation as the one in Czechoslovakia.