Exciting Times
Young, Cathy
SOVIET PRESSWATCH EXCITING TIMES by Cathy Young W hen growing up in the Soviet Union, I hardly ever read the papers. With their front-page photos of beaming workers and headlines like "Building a...
...Censorship, like sex, just isn't the same when you strip it of all mystery...
...Wait until he gets a load of Dr...
...Censorship Demystified Censorship in the USSR may no longer exist in love matters, but in war, it's alive and well...
...Comments the Komsomolskaya Pravda editor: "There still remain people who sincerely believe in the tottering ideas...
...Lockshin reveals that his family uses rationing coupons for sugar just like other Soviets, that his children are doing well in school but wife Lauren hasn't found a job, and that they subscribe to several Soviet periodicals but have little time to read...
...It says certain circles in the West have gone so far as to slanderously claim that our military expenditures reach 15 percent ofour GNP...
...What he does read leaves him none too happy: "I find it disturbing that in the Soviet press these days, the word 'imperialism' is gradually disappearing and too muchof a gloss is put on the Western way of life...
...Ann Richards, eat your heart out...
...Would-be tourists, take note...
...Mainstream Soviet publications are not far behind...
...Miss Morozova is a new breed of Leninist: she admits to having read ("by happenstance") a Paris edition of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Arrhipelago, and says she admired the writer's colossal work in exposing Stalinism but was much saddened by his misquoting of Lenin...
...As Lenin would undoubtedly concur, you just can't make an omelette without breaking a few hearts...
...We are alarmed by the growing influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements in this country, including profiteers, bureaucrats and those who keep silent about imperialist dominance and the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions in other countries...
...Meanwhile, "any lie about Lenin is eagerly snapped up by the bamboozled public...
...Yakovlev went to see the censor, who explained, "At the Congress session, Gorbachev said the military budget was 77.3 billion rubles, or nine percent of the GNP...
...And, scandalously, institutions like the Central Committee and its Institute of Marxism-Leninism are looking the other way...
...In the old times, Yakovlev adds in an aside, censors were mysterious and inaccessible: only one special person communicated with them on the phone behind a locked door...
...Can it be that the people in the Central Committee are able to silently bear the slanders against him...
...Our soldier should know what it is he's defending," explained one of the contest judges, an astronaut...
...The article was already typeset when, right after the first session for the Congress of People's Deputies in May 1989, the trouble began...
...And where, pray, did the 15 percent come from...
...Eastern Europe is opening its doors to large-scale capital investments by the imperialist powers . . . Of course one must welcome key steps toward the establishment of peaceful international relations...
...The obvious purpose of these reprints was to legitimize the Soviet position, and to show that Western support for the Lithuanian cause was lukewarm at best...
...At first, Izvestia ran terse TASS dispatches, and printed an appeal to the Lithuanian people from the pro-Moscow section of the republic's Communist party—a hard-line document that spoke of the need to reject firmly all attempts at capitalist restoration (this, in a newspaper that now regularly advocates private property...
...In the March 4, 1990, Rabochaya Tribuna ("Workers' Tribune"), a new publication of the Central Committee of the Communist party, one Natalia Morozova lamented that "quite openly now, a campaign to destroy Lenin is being carried out through lies, slander, and falsification...
...cused Sajudis, Lithuania's national liberation front, of intolerance toward rival points of view, just like, well, the CPSU...
...Yakovlev points out that a discerning reader could still easily arrive at the forbidden numbers: the authors advocate cutting the military budget in half, and later add that the proposed cuts would save the country at least 60 billion rubles a year...
...In a profile of the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, the magazine reports that when the nonpartisan All-Russian Committee to Help the Hungry was shut down by the Bolsheviks in 1921, "the most humane of men" (as Lenin was titled by Soviet hagiographers) issued this order: "They are to be mercilessly ridiculed and abused at least once a week over the next two months...
...Esperanto, Mr...
...Further misquotation, perhaps, of Miss Morozova's idol...
...Yet, she complains, The Gulag was recently published in Novy Mir magazine with no scholarly introduction to set the record straight—and the moment it appeared, "all of rally-going Moscow started to castigate Lenin in Solzhenitsyn's words...
...What about human relations...
...The two came to blows, emerging from the "brief but heated" scuffle with bleeding noses, bruised lips, and so on...
...In later days, it features editorials and commentary from the Western press which, while not uncritical of Gorbachev, also chided the Lithuanian legislators for their stubborn and unrealistic pursuit of instant independence...
...Ovanesyan tells the frightened reader, is a brainchild of "the Warsaw doctor and polyglot Ludwik Zamenhoff, whose name was given to one of the main streets of Tel Aviv...
...The new openness was subjected to a new test by the Baltic crisis, and the Soviet press has responded with more sophistication than honesty...
...In its editorial, it strove to be "evenhandedly anti-independence...
...She finally referred Yakovlev to one of the higher-ups, who countered all arguments about the calculations of Soviet scholars with the line: "Are you saying that Mikhail Sergeyevich lied...
...The radical Moscow News was the only official Soviet newspaper to provide a platform to advocates of self-determination...
...A March piece on the forced dissolution of Russia's Constituent Assembly in 1918 speaks frankly of Lenin's contempt for democracy...
...Actually, it's Diesengoff Boulevard, but why nitpick...
...An interview with Lockshin appears in the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda (January 28, 1990) in response to readers' queries...
...Any slander against Lenin, with whom I am so much in love, wounds me to the heart," she cries...
...In another survey, one-third of female ninth-graders said they would like to be "hard-currency prostitutes" servicing a Western clientele...
...Meanwhile, in Literaturnaya Gazeta, writer and high school teacher N. Loginova writes that in a recent survey, 92 percent of Soviet high schoolers said that they believed promiscuity was "normal...
...Alas, Russian morals have been less sturdy in other areas, succumbing 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 first to rock music and lately to beauty contests, nudity on stage and in film, and sexology...
...We cannot allow anything else...
...Sex, Esperanto, and Rock 'n' Roll What does the artificial language Esperanto have in common with the sexual revolution...
...Miss Loginova adds that her own informal survey shows an even greater interest in such a career...
...An American in Moscow On April 22, Lenin's birthday, comrade Morozova repeated her laments at a Moscow rally "in defense of Lenin" attended, Pravda said, by a few thousand people...
...To give credit where credit's due, says the subtle Mr...
...The bulldozer of rock 'n' roll," laments Mr...
...Let's hope he still subscribes to the Nation...
...We learn here that Soviet sexologists are out to undermine the Russian male's confidence in his virility by insidiously suggesting that some women fake orgasms...
...Today, "any editor can go and talk to them, just like that...
...Is it true...
...In the nationalist/Communist stalwart Molodaya Gvairliya ("The Young Guard"), writer Yevgeny Ovanesyan intimates that both are part of a Jewish plot to corrupt Mother Russia ("The 'Sexual Revolution' in the Years of Perestroika," February 1990...
...Call it Soviet propaganda with a human face...
...Even the magazine Sovetsky Voin ("Soviet Warrior") has tainted its "hitherto ascetic" pages with color photos of scantily clad beauty contestants...
...But imperialism is not interested in democracy or human rights...
...What is going to happen to these people, the reporter inquired solicitously, should Lithuania separate from the USSR...
...On April 9, the morning TV program "120 Minutes" carried an intriguing report about a Lithuanian village across the border from Russia, where many of the Lithuanians have jobs...
...At the chief censorship office, the 20 percent figure was changed to nine percent and the 35 percent to 15...
...With their front-page photos of beaming workers and headlines like "Building a Better World" in the domestic section and "Another Foul Anti-Soviet Provocation" on the international page, Soviet newspapers were about as exciting as Soviet elections...
...Columnist Yuri Bandura tried to distribute the blame equally to both sides and acCathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...Two recent articles in the pathbreaking weekly Ogonyok are especially remarkable...
...Among her fellow speakers was Arnold Lockshin, the Arizona scientist who "defected" to the Soviet Union with his wife and three children in 1986, to escape FBI persecution for his Communist beliefs and to find a better life in a just society...
...Sample: "I've heard that the Lockshin family, unable to bear our 'wonderful' life, has returned to America...
...I can't bring myself to believe that...
...after ordering the Kadet party banned and their deputies arrested, he described the move as "our response to the peasants who didn't know who they were voting for...
...The 120th anniversary of Lenin's birth came and very much went in April...
...We also learn that these sexologists had "intrepid" predecessors in the 1920s...
...What about those who are entitled to pensions in the Russian republic...
...Yakovlev and one of the authors had to scrap the figures altogether and do their best to salvage the piece, which ran in the July 1989 issue of Rodina...
...In the March 5 issue of the weekly Atmoda ("Awakening"), uncensored because it is published in Latvia with a Russian-language edition freely sold elsewhere in the USSR, Sergei Yakovlev, an editor of the monthly Rodina ("Motherland"), tells his tale of woe...
...Imperialism is interested in profits and power—the more the better—and in removing its rivals, above all the entire socialist system . . . The Soviet people do not need a Lech Walesa of their own who would offer cheap Soviet manpower to foreign exploiters...
...Ruth...
...The extent to which both have changed can be gauged by this item plucked from Izvestia (March 23, 1990): in Gorky, the night before the election, a candidate for the city council caught his opponent posting leaflets that can be mildly characterized as negative campaigning...
...Tivo Soviet scholars submitted an article on ways to solve the Soviet economic crisis, in which they calculated the size of Soviet military spending at 20 percent of GNP, and mentioned that some Western estimates ran as high as 35 percent...
...We learn more about the Lockshins' peeves from this written statement handed to the reporter: We are grateful to the Soviet people for an opportunity to start a new life and for understanding of the motives that brought us here...
...Ovanesyan, the least we can do is list these trailblazers' books: Sex Education by A. B. Zalkind, The Sexual Life of Modern Youth by P. Gelman, How to Prevent Pregnancy by A. L. Rabinowitz...
...Thanks to the spiritual power of the Russian tongue, says the writer, the country has resisted the Esperanto invasion...
...Great Lenin's Ghost...
...Ovanesyan, "is being replaced by the phallic battering ram of eroticism...
...Look at yesterday's Pravda," said the censor...
...No charges were filed, but the city electoral commission is looking into the matter...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
