Soviet Presswatch/Free at Last
Young, Cathy
SOVIET PRESSWATCH FREE AT LAST by Cathy Young A man in Moscow comes into a café and says, "Wallet; bring me coffee a rolt and today's copy of Pravda. " "I'm sorry" the waiter says, "but I can't...
...If, at last year's "democratic" rallies, a lot of things were said about M. S. Gorbachev that I don't even care to repeat, this time there were mostly slogans like, "Bring back Gorbachev...
...Pavel Gusev, editor-in-chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets and a frequent target of the Pravda crowd, warned against "draconian measures": pended newspapers could reopen with new owners...
...Oh, waiter, you forgot my copy of Pravda " The waiter gets angry...
...And it did, publishing a column by Sovetskaya Rossiya author Eduard Limonov —an eccentric emigre in Paris whose writings alternate between bisexual pornography and political diatribes of equal but different obscenity—on September 5.) On the same page was an appeal from a number of other independent anti-Communist journalists: We strongly doubt, of course, that Communist periodicals will be able to survive without unlawful patronage, but we believe that to deprive them of this small chance .. . would be unworthy and unlawful, and would liken us to these same Communists...
...Said Larisa Teselkina of Leninskoye Znamya, or "Leninist Banner": We had gotten too accustomed to instructions from the top, and were not ready for resistance in the days of the coup...
...We do not yet have a constitutional state or rule of law...
...He even added that being suspended was a shock Pravda needed...
...Curiously, not even they were able to keep up the pretense that everyone except for a few misfits was solidly behind the Committee...
...Moscow News, August 24...
...The sailors of the merchant fleet are striking in Murmansk...
...A group of persons in plainclothes attempts to start a scuffle near the main [White House] entrance The incident is quickly put down by the efforts of the crowd and self-defense volunteers...
...On August 31, Pravda came out of its seven-day coma with a new look...
...Opposition had to be acknowledged—perhaps no less striking an illustration of the extent of the past few years' changes than the resistance of the free press...
...The typesetting and layout were done at the offices of Kommersant, the printing in unsubjugated Leningrad...
...Next month: post-coup euphoria and the morning after...
...Most readers today will find that Socialism has more immediate application to contemporary events than it had when it first appeared...
...Profiles in Cowardice And what of the media sanctioned by the Committee for the State of Emergency...
...There were many quiet heroes and heroines in Moscow in those days, on the barricades and elsewhere...
...He added that the nationalization of party-owned printshops was only a prelude to their privatization (scheduled to be completed, according to the September 2 Kommersant, by the end of 1992, after which the Ministry of Print Media will disband...
...As political commentator Simon Soloveichik noted in the post-coup Novoye Vremya, it really wasn't nice of the junta not to let people know how long they were planning to last: think of all the careers wrecked by incautious pro-coup statements...
...Ifirst heard this joke about fifteen years ago in Moscow...
...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Index to works cited, index to subjects and names, biographical note...
...On Vremya on August 20, TV correspondent Vladimir Stefanov delivered a remarkable monologue, starting thus: Good evening, esteemed TV viewers...
...The same rude awakening had the same salutary effect on a number of other CPSU publications...
...Stefanov then explained how rude it was to call Yanayev, Pavlov, Pugo and Co...
...572 + xxiv pages...
...Also, the staff of the monthly journal Kommunist has decided to publish a monthly journal called Svobodnaya Mysl, or "Free Thought...
...But such a shock has forced us to take a new look at a lot of things, starting with the newspaper's title: we want to change it to Muscovy...
...When attempts to get the issue printed proved futile, staff members made hundreds of Xerox copies of the mechanicals and posted them in metro stations and pedestrian underpasses—where they attracted long queues of readers—and even on the sides of tanks and APCs...
...One sketched scenes of normal life in the capital—normal, at least, for Muscovites...
...Izvestia, August 27] I don't think there's a need to close them for long...
...There was one of Russia's favorite comics, Gennady Khazanov, who appeared at the "White House" rally on August 19 and actually made people laugh by doing an impression of Gorbachev ("Dear brothers and sisters...
...There were the staffers of Radio Moscow Echo, who refused to stop broadcasting "voluntarily" when a group of rather polite chaps from the KGB showed up at the studio on the morning of August 19 (the talk-show host who was on the air took the visitors for the deputies he was expecting as guests on the show, and got up to shake hands with one of them...
...292 pages...
...Hayek This is a newly annotated edition of the classic first published in German in 1922...
...their signal was cut off, but they managed to get back on the air the next day using a small transmitter...
...The people lining up for cheese in a midtown foodstore "talk about food, how and where to get it...
...And I'll also say this: one cannot make clean politics with filthy, trembling hands...
...A collector's-item-to-be, no doubt...
...All the while protesting his innocence, Stefanov offered to resign, according to the September 1 Moscow News, but Vremya TITLES FROM LIBERTY FUND SOCIALISM By Ludwig von Mises Translated from German by J. Kahane Foreword by F.A...
...have known that it would come true in our lifetime...
...They also have the intelligence to figure out for themselves exactly what a subscription to Pravda is worth...
...However, along with protestations of innocence and victimization, the historic issue of Pravda also carried some editorials in a properly penitent spirit...
...His work has spawned a methodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think about government and governmental activity...
...He had no idea how soon Russia's independent press would be subjected to the test of which he spoke...
...The front-page appeal for contributions to help keep Pravda afloat somehow didn't square with the assertion nearby that all rumors of party subsidies to Pravda were lies because the paper had always been highly profitable...
...If the ban on their publication is not lifted, the Independent will have to provide a forum for at least some of their journalists...
...F.A...
...Even after the Law on the Press was passed by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in August 1990, allowing independent newspapers to beofficially registered, Podrabinek refused, as a matter of principle, to play by the rules and register his...
...The resistance was so scrupulous about emphasizing the lawfulness of their cause that the publication was officially registered on the spot by the Russian Federation's minister of the media, Mikhail Poltoranin...
...If the democratic Russian media, print and broadcast, acquitted themselves honorably during the coup, their post-coup behavior was equally impeccable...
...It provides relatively easy access to a wide range of work by a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice, a moral and legal philosopher, a welfare economist who has consistently defended the primacy of the contractarian ethic, and a public finance theorist...
...And the man says, "Say it again—pleas4 say it again...
...Most agreed with Izvestia columnist V. Nadein, who wrote on August 25: Freedom taken from some inevitably turns into freedom taken from all...
...It is up to readers, not presidents, to judge newspapers...
...By James M. Buchanan Preface by H. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D. Tollison This volume is a collection of sixteen essays on the nature and methods of economists...
...Yes, a lot of people had legitimate questions about what happened, but why not let the Supreme Soviet sort them out calmly...
...they probably had other things on their minds, waking up to find their paper banned and barred from printshops...
...The axe also fell on Moscow News, the Independent Gazelle, and everything else but the handful of CPSU publications on which Yeltsin's axe was to fall days later...
...Izgarshev parries with eye-popping audacity, "We are always given this kind of explanation for any action: the interest of the people...
...Poltoranin made some not terribly democratic remarks to the effect that if a journalist had taken the side of a conspiracy against the people, he "has no moral right to work...
...The back page of the same issue featured an article on private bodyguards titled "Signal Right Turn Then Go Left"--which, using Soviet definitions of right and left, is an apt description of what happened to the country between August 19 and August 23...
...I don't know if, on August 19, any Komsomolskaya Pravda staffers were struck by the prophetic irony of their recent headlines...
...Paperback $ 6.50 Subtotal P Please allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...
...Kommersant, Moscow News, the Independent Gazette, Argumenty i Fakty, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and a few other papers banded together to publish the first and only edition of Obshchaya Gazeta—i'Common Newspaper...
...Name Address City State/Zip Mail to: LIBERTY FUND, INC...
...The Independent Gazette's managing editor Igor Zakharov dissented, telling Izvestia that "under current circumstances, these newspapers can and should be shut down...
...I'm sorry" the waiter says, "but I can't bring you today's Pravda...
...About ten minutes later...
...However, the "of-ficial" free press passed the test far better than Podrabinek had predicted...
...nasty names like coup plotters, criminals, and so on: after all, they had been in government long before August 19...
...the Soviet regime has been deposed and Pravda doesn't come out anymote...
...Otherwise, all that name-calling could lead to bloodshed...
...Gone was the self-identification as "Organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU...
...Soon, he was explaining that he honestly did think so: Who could have known it would all be over so quickly...
...There were people like Olga Abakumova, profiled on Radio Russia on August 24, who picked up that station's weak signal all through the coup, typed up its dispatches on her office typewriter, and, with a number of helpers, distributed them to the public...
...Gone was the slogan "Proletarians of the World, Unite...
...dollars...
...Two female staffers of the latter were arrested while posting leaflets in an underpass...
...To many people still smarting from the coup, it seemed a clear case of fighting words...
...But I just told you, citizen," says the waiter...
...For a week, the waiter in the joke would have had to say exactly that (the question is whether he could have come up with the coffee and roll), after Pravda and other newspapers run by the late, unlamented Communist party of the Soviet Union were suspended on orders from Boris Yeltsin pending an investigation of their role in the coup...
...If you want to talk about the unwittingly prophetic, though, the first prize goes to the August 17 issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda...
...It's business as usual at McDonald's, but "Matryoshka doll vendors on the Old Arbat have cut their prices in half" in anticipation of going out of business...
...I will take the liberty to share my thoughts with you as someone who has entered your living rooms more than once...
...the same man beckons to the waiter...
...But let us backtrack...
...you don't hear much about politics...
...Listen, I just told you twim the Soviet regime has been deposed and Pravda doesn't come out anymore...
...Still, closing down the paper—that was too much...
...12:10 a.m...
...On August 26, Russian minister of the media Poltoranin appeared on Russian TV asserting that the closing of the CPSU newspapers was a perfectly lawful measure directed against monopolization of the media (the CPSU, at that point, still owned about 70 percent of the media nationwide), and that all susMeanwhile, Anatoly Yurkov, editor-inchief of the party newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna ("Workers' Tribune"), announced that his newspaper would henceforth be called Namdnaya Tribuna or "People's Tribune," owned by its employees but still dedicated to "advocacy of social protections for working people...
...On August 15 in New York, I interviewed visiting Moscow journalist Aleksandr Podrabinek, ex-political prisoner and publisher of the independent news weekly Express Chronicle, founded in 1987—truly a trailblazer, since all of the Soviet press at the time was still owned by party-state structures, and most of it was quite docile...
...One columnist noted that during the suspension, Pravda journalists were given a forum by Radio Russia, and acknowledged that the old Pravda would not have extended the same courtesy to an ideological adversary...
...Preface, index...
...T he front page of the August 21 I Pravda carried, in addition to the junta's last gasps, two curious items on the situation in Moscow...
...The Independent Gazette and Moscow News did the same...
...And photographs: demonstrators, tanks, grinning soldiers lounging by a wall...
...Yeltsin's order suspending the publication of Pravda and other party newspapers was roundly condemned, with few exceptions...
...The ideals of civilization are, of course, wonderful, but not always applicable...
...The Soviet regime has been deposed and Pravda doesn't come out anymore...
...On August 20, in a page-three article by V. Izgarshev, "Tanks in the City: Why Troops Were Brought In," a nameless Ministry of Defense official is quoted as saying that "the military units are called upon to act solely in the interest of the people, or at least of its great majority...
...12:55 a.m...
...Those to whom I am not a welcome guest can shut the TV off for a while...
...Shooting has been heard on the Arbat...
...Hardcover $14.00 0-913966-64-9 Paperback $ 6.50 0-913966-65-7 LibertyPress, 1979 0-913966-62-2 0-913966-63-0 LibertyClassics, 1981 Please send me: Quantity Ordered Title Edition Price Amount Socialism Hardcover $30.00 Paperback $10.00 What Should Hardcover $14.00 Economists Do...
...Which do you think is the proper analogy: 1917 or [the removal of Khrushchev in] 1964...
...The distinction of being the lowest of the low, and on one's own initiative, goes to Sovetskaya Rossiya, that BolshevikSlavophile haven, which not only served up quotes from collective-farm chairmen and factory managers enthusiastically supporting the coup but, on August 20, gleefully kicked its seemingly crushed enemy, the democratic press...
...Maybe a day or two, to examine their calls for overthrow of the constitutional system and allow the staff to change leadership...
...In an August 27 page-one editorial, the Independent Gazette's Viktor Tretyakov wrote, "Certainly, the publication of Communist newspapers must resume...
...That interview was to be the centerpiece of this month's column, but fate, disguised as eight ugly apparatchiks, intervened...
...When the waiter brings the coffee and the rol4 the man says, "Oh, and waiter—don't forget my copy of Pravda...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...Please send me a copy of your current catalogue...
...Pravda Is Dead—Long Live Pravda...
...Hardcover $30.00 Paperback $10.00 WHAT SHOULD ECONOMISTS DO...
...The uncanny part is that, asked what the difference was at that point between the absolutely independent Express Chronicle and the independent-but-officially-registered Independent Gazette, Podrabinek replied: "The difference is, in my opinion, that if there should be a change —a worsening—in political conditions, these newspapers will quit, realizing that to continue publishing as they are would be dangerous...
...I want to let you know that I'm feeling just fine...
...It was replaced with the more neutral "Founded May 5, 1912 at the initiative of V. I. Lenin...
...at the precinct, the police captain to whom they were brought sent away his subordinates, looked over the women's wares, and asked in a whisper, "Got anything else...
...There are reports that armored vehicles have broken through the first line of barricades by the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station...
...3) but, in all fairness, also showed an occasional flicker of glasnost...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991...
...Gone was the portrait of Lenin, and the traditional blurb, "Founded May 5, 1912 by V. I. LENIN...
...IF YOU CAN, MAKE COPIES" printed across the bottom...
...Pravda carried, of course, the decrees and resolutions of the junta (which never got beyond Resolution No...
...It was not a sensational early warning of the events of August 19 but merely a sarcastic retort to an article in Moscow Pravda, the organ of the Moscow Committee of the CPSU, proclaiming that by abolishing the powers of Communist-controlled "executive committees," the capital's democratic vice mayor Yuri Luzhkov was guilty of a "coup d'etat...
...Our people had the courage to rise against the junta...
...In this definitive refutation of nearly every brand of socialism that has ever been devised, Mises presents a wide-ranging analysis of society, comparing the results of socialist planning with those of free-market capitalism in all areas of life...
...If they are doomed, let them die their own death...
...The staff of the weekly Rossiya, organ of the Presidium of the Russian Parliament, spent the days and nights of the coup huddled in the Parliament 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 building (also known as the White House) turning out an "extra edition" of their paper, with the words "READ THIS AND PASS IT ON...
...The issue included an appeal from the editors, a special address by Yeltsin, and brief profiles of the coup leaders with relevant quotes (Yazov, addressing a meeting of Soviet Army officers: "We hate private property, and this is what unites us all...
...Such analogies are dangerous, replied Yanayev, fast on his way to becoming a national (and international) joke...
...however, he seems to have meant that such journalists should be ostracized by colleagues, not suppressed by the state...
...The weekly Novoye Vremya ("New Time"), once an undistinguished mouthpiece of the Moscow branch of the CPSU but lately- in the avant-garde of democratic radicalism, prepared its regular issue for Tuesday, August 20, with this lead: "They Have Made a Coup, But Their Hands Are Shaking" (Gennady Yanayev's trembling hands at the infamous August 20 press conference became a recurring image in the writing of coup resisters...
...Yes, the official admits, "it has happened in the past: public interest was used as a smokescreen for deeds directed against the people"—but the real threat to the people comes from economic chaos, the collapse of authority, and so on...
...There was the Independent Gazettes reporter Tatiana Malkina, who, at the August 20 press conference, asked the tremulous Yanayev, "Tell me, please, do you realize that last night you carried out a coup d'etat...
...but samizdat would continue to publish even under the worst circumstances...
...This edition includes Mises' well-known epilogue, Planned Chaos...
...Who could Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...over the banner...
...The following day, Sovetskaya Rossiya would find itself in even bigger trouble than the rest of the party press: in July, it had published a "Word to the People" co-signed by at least one of the "putschists" (industry boss Aleksandr Tizyakov) and sounding, in retrospect, like a manifesto for the Gang of Eight...
...There were far fewer anti-CPSU slogans...
...Vending stalls are crammed with stacks of the Independent, Kuranty, Kommersant, and other pseudo-democratic demagoguery which, apparently, is no longer in demand today...
...but his opinion was the exception...
...Department B119 7440 North Shadeland Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 33 editor-in-chief Olmar Kakuchaya kept him on, saying that "decency is a complicated matter...
...Hayek, in his new Foreword And it is fitting that Robert Heilbroner, one of socialism's leading academic defenders, wrote on the feasibility of centrally planned socialism: "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right...
...There, on the front page, was an item titled, "Are We Having a Coup...
...Most of it is a suspenseful chronicle of the siege of the "White House" and of reports from around the country: Police in Moscow are stopping and turning back people walking in the direction of the White House...
...The other item, at thebottom of the page, was a strangely ambiguous report on the anti junta rally near the "White House": neutral references to speeches and instructions about a general strike were followed by a remark that this protest was somehow different from many other spectacles I had seen before...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
