Reading through the thick tomes of bound issues of Moskovskie novosti twenty years later, it is hard to see what the fuss was about. Why would anyone want to get up at dawn on a cold December morning to queue for a newspaper that did not tell you much in the way of news but wrote about Anna Akhmatova? But at the time every issue of Moskovskie novosti was a political event. What Moskovskie novosti wrote about was not new – it had long been the subject of private discussions around kitchen tables. ‘New’ was the fact that the same things could now be printed in a newspaper under someone’s byline, that some of the things that had been banished into the world of samizdat were now published material. The very existence of such a paper was the biggest news of all.
A joke started circulating in Moscow:
One friend telephones another:
‘Have you read the latest issue of Moskovskie novosti?’
‘No, what’s in there?’
‘It is not something we can talk about on the phone.’
In the early Perestroika years Alexander Yakovlev warned television and radio bosses that the jamming of foreign radio stations was to be stopped and that they would have to compete for the young audience which normally shunned drab Soviet news programmes and instead tuned in to the Russian service of the BBC or the Voice of America. One of the first ‘competing’ projects was a television programme called Vzglyad (Viewpoint) which was broadcast on Friday nights to coincide with a popular music show on the Russian service of the BBC.
To make it appealing, its presenters had to look and sound like the audience they were trying to capture. They had to be slightly cynical, well-informed, knowledgeable about Western popular culture. Yet they also had to be trustworthy. There was only one place within the Soviet television-and-radio empire that could provide such cadres: the foreign-language service of Radio Moscow – which broadcast Soviet views in dozens of languages around the world and was staffed by young linguists who wasted their time anonymously broadcasting Soviet propaganda.
It was effectively one of the branches of the KGB and many of the journalists who worked there were affiliated with it. One of Vzglyad’s main presenters was Alexander Lyubimov, the son of a legendary KGB spy in London, who had worked with Kim Philby and was expelled from the UK in the 1960s. Lyubimov Jr was born in London and had studied at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, a prestigious school for future diplomats and intelligence officers. He was the ultimate golden youth, one of the elite.
Unlike Soviet dissidents who listened to ‘enemy’ radio stations in the privacy of their homes and in secret, with the risk of being informed on, people like Lyubimov did so openly as part of their duty. They knew more about – and lusted more for – the openness of the West than those who worked in Soviet television. They had access to the Western media, they knew foreign languages, read foreign newspapers. As part of the Soviet counter-propaganda, they had to know what they were supposed to counter; they were supposed to misinform others, but they were very well informed themselves.
‘We had Solzhenitsyn’s writings at home. I knew well who Sakharov was. They do say that a gendarme is the freest man in Russia,’ Lyubimov said.12 When Perestroika started in earnest, he and his peers were best equipped to shape the new Soviet television. They also stood to gain most from it. Vzglyad became the incubator for some of the most influential TV figures in the following two decades. They knew how to use the system to maximum effect.
The first Vzglyad progammes were anything but controversiaclass="underline" a young man from an orphanage reading his own poetry, one of the presenters instructing the audience how to distinguish real Levis from fakes, advice on how to open a small private business – a total novelty in a country where making a profit was a crime. The subjects were divided from each other by musical numbers. But every programme tested and pushed the limits, discussing things that allegedly did not exist in the USSR: homosexuality, drugs, AIDS, corruption.
Vzglyad talked about removing Lenin from the Mausoleum and carried an interview with a captain whose submarine had sunk in the Arctic Sea and said that Soviet submarines were death traps. It was the first programme to interview Sakharov when he was released from his exile at the end of 1987. Its dimly lit studio was set up like a Moscow kitchen where friends sat around the table talking about youth culture, music and politics, listening to the latest rock bands, watching video clips. In the late Soviet days the accumulation of wealth meant that people owned more than one television set, and in the 1980s one of these often lived in a kitchen. So kitchens became the settings for television programmes, albeit their format was more akin to a magazine than a TV show.
Past Present
The opening-up of the Russian media began not with a discussion about the country’s present condition, but with the past.
Three quarters of all publications in the years of Perestroika were dedicated to the past. As Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, two Russian sociologists, wrote, Soviet society resembled a man who was walking backwards into the future, fixated on his past. History dominated the discourse of Perestroika, one of the most transformative periods of Soviet history. It was not just a small group of intellectuals – the whole country seemed obsessed with history. In 1988, when the Soviet economy was in its death throes and bloody conflicts began to erupt on the periphery, street demonstrations were held in Moscow for unlimited subscriptions to the multi-volume edition of A History of Russia by Vasily Klyuchevsky, and an even more academic historic magnum opus by Sergei Solovyov. (Like everything else in the Soviet Union, the amount of paper and number of copies of each publication were regulated by the state.)
As historian Andrei Zorin has said, behind this was the notion that the state constantly concealed the truth about the past; once a true knowledge of history was obtained, the country could break out of the vicious circle of repeating past mistakes. Yet the actual study of history was often the last thing on the minds of participants in the historic debates of the 1980s. What communist reformers took from the past was the dominance of ideology over all other spheres of life, including the economy and history itself.
Thus the main ideological battles of the 1980s unfolded over history. Latsis wrote:
Facts from the lives of our grandparents, episodes which took place fifty or seventy years ago, were discussed with such fervour as though the question of whether Bukharin should be executed or acquitted was being decided now and not half a century ago… Had it not been for the stupidity of the Soviet bureaucracy [over the previous twenty years], debates about Stalinism would have been concluded in the late 1950s and would not have become a fact of current politics thirty years later.13
The liberals and their hard-line opponents fought over the past with the same ferocity as though they were fighting for natural resources. In many ways they were, for whoever controlled the past also controlled the present. The very word ‘memory’ became the reason for a fight. One of the country’s first openly anti-Semitic and right-wing organizations, patronized by the KGB, was called Pamyat (Memory) – a name it ‘stole’ from dissident historians who published a samizdat journal under that title. A human rights group launched by former dissidents with the support of Andrei Sakharov, which originally focused on rehabilitating the victims of Stalinist repressions, was called Memorial.