Soviet Presswatch/Taking Care of Business

...tures...

...Gorbachev moves to silence the pesky press...

...Some years ago, we may recall, John Lennon claimed that the Beatles would soon be more important than Jesus...

...Among other things: according to Molotov, when the Presidium of the Council of Ministers discussed the massive discontent among East Germans, Beria "started talking about how we had no business building socialism in East Germany, and it would be all right if East and West Germany were united into a peaceful bourgeois state...

...However, Nikolai Mikhailov's two-part Izvestia article, "In July 1953 . . . : Unknown Details of the Beria Case," reveals that, while some of the charges leveled at Beria at the fateful plenary session had to do with "unjustified repressions" and the accumulation of excessive police powers (as well as more titillating accusations of debauchery), the main charges involved excessive liberalism...

...A related Kommersant editorial notes that "market-style relations are penetrating into the Soviet way of life after all, albeit in somewhat exotic forms," and gibes that clients might be assessed "a special surcharge for dangerous work conditions if, while obtaining the data in question, the KGB agent was expelled from the country where he was stationed, or otherwise mistreated...

...provocative TV shows are canceled and Baltic TV stations liberated (deja vu all over again) by Soviet tanks...

...Scouring the Soviet press of the past few weeks for foreshadowings of these grim events, one comes upon a Moscow News piece (December 23) on the ominous re-emergence of TV "journalist" Mikhail Leshchinsky, who used to do "upbeat reports from Afghanistan," which Soviet soldiers dubbed "Fairy-Tale Hour...

...Beria the Dead Even as Gorbachev is quickly losing his image as the leader of reform, a most unexpected proponent thereof emerges from the murky recesses...

...Forty-four percent expected the Soviet Union to disintegrate, while 34 percent said no...

...A November poll published in theby Cathy Young December 9 issue of Moscow News sought to fathom Soviets' feelings about the coming winter...

...Once the winds changed, Leshchinsky tried to carve out a new niche for himself covering the plight of disabled veterans, but the veterans didn't like it...

...The year-old weekly Kommersant ("The Tradesman") reports in its December 3, 1990, issue that the KGB is offering economic espionage data to "Soviet organizations doing business on the international market...

...of Soviet history...

...Nine percent felt that nothing at all could improve the situation...

...Three percent felt confident and 15 percent "hopeful...

...Well, in a poll taken in October 1990 and published in the November 18 issue of Moscow News, Soviets in twenty-one cities were asked, "What steps would be most likely to improve the situation in the Soviet Union today...

...It is true that there were some excesses in the cult of personality, and comrade Stalin himself chided us for it, but that does not mean that we should now bend over backwards and silence such leaders as Stalin...

...Thirty-eight percent picked "developing countries" and 20 percent "the least developed countries of Asia and Africa...

...Finally, the respondents were cruelly asked whose living standards the Soviet Union (or its erstwhile components) would match in the year 2000...

...He disappeared for a while—only to surface late last year as Viemya's correspondent in Riga, talking "in a familiar breathless tone .. . about the persecution of Communists and of his beloved Army men...

...In other words, we have 25 percent for "an iron hand" against 48 percent for an anti-imperial and/or democratic solution...

...Beria has since become THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 29 one of the most sinister and hated figures in Soviet history, and few people were concerned that he was shot not for his real crimes but on ludicrous trumped-up charges...

...In an exclusive interview, Oligov told Kommersant that this new KGB venture comes from the recommendations of KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, and that "cooperation" between Soviet firms and a friendly KGB was already taking place...

...While the KGB makes its comeback, optimists may point to proof that it is a new, capitalist-minded KGB...

...Fifty-six percent named Jesus...

...921-0762...

...In memoranda on the work of the secret police in Lithuania and the Ukraine in 1953, he had condemned forced Russification andthe persecution of the ethnic intelligentsia...

...And all this under the pretense that now we have to live in a new way...

...One percent bravely chose "the most developed capitalist countries," while 15 percent more humbly selected "capitalist countries of mid-level development...

...In principle," this broad-minded new KGB "can cooperate with any enterprises, including privately owned ones...

...Furthermore, Beria had not only released the accused in the infamous "Doctors' Plot" (which the other members of Stalin's court conceded was the right thing to do) but also issued a special communique proclaiming the case a concoction, which "caused considerable harm to the interests of our state" as well as mental anguish to the Soviet people...

...Fifty-eight percent believed that "a wave of strikes" would begin...

...Hedrick Smith, in The New Russians, is only the latest to endorse this view (though he providently laced his tome with enough disclaimers about the rise of democratic forces more radical than Gorbachev to be able to assert, in a letter to the New York Times Book Review, that the book is not in the least "Gorbocentric...

...Khrushchev complained that, when asked by Hungarian Communist chief Matyes Rakosi about the proper division of functions between the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Party, Beria told him, "Let the Council of Ministers handle everything, and the Central Committee should be in charge of cadres and propaganda'!—thus disparaging the party's leading role...

...Finally, according to Molotov: He insulted [the dead] Stalin in the most unpleasant, offensive language...

...He wouldn't identify recipients of KGB espionage data, except to say that they included government firms and cooperatives affiliated with such, as well as joint venCathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...At which point, according to the transcript, there was a shout from the audience: "Right...

...Nine percent answered "further strengthening of presidential power," while 16 percent chose "the establishment of a government willing to restore order with a firm hand...

...on November 24...

...fear" was felt by 16 percent, but "anxiety" was the big winner with 61 percent Questioned about their expectations for the next six months, 17 percent predicted "economic stabilization," while 27 percent expected "mass famine...

...Businessmen wondering whether the KGB would be willing to work on their behalf to check out whether a Soviet firm might be an unreliable business partner can contact them at: KGB, Dzerzhinsky St., 2, Moscow (tel...

...This was first disclosed by the deputy chief of the Moscow KGB press service, Major Andrei Oligov, on the TV program, "Good Evening, Moscow...

...15 percent mentioned "the implementation of the Shatalin/Yavlinsky economic program," 8 percent spoke of "the establishment of a new central government that has the public's confidence," and 25 percent—the largest single group of respondents—opted for "the governments of the republics taking full power...

...Those surveyed were asked to select from a list of names the ones that they thought "would have great significance for the peoples of the USSR in the year 2000...

...Oligov also wouldn't say whether the KGB was charging a fee for its services—which include "confidential evaluation of the commercial viability and performance records of foreign partners"—but, a New Capitalist Soviet Man to the end, he "expressed the opinion that, in the long term, it should charge such fees...

...The Moscow News writer asks, "Are we, perhaps, being readied for a new adventure in which the friendship of nations will be cemented by tanks...

...Russians and Polls Gorby fans like to say that one reason their pin-up boy doesn't always live up to Western expectations is that he has to deal with all those backward Russians thirsting for the old iron hand...

...Sakharov got 48 percent, Lenin 36 percent, and Gorbachev 26 percent...

...hard to say, because the Beatles were not on the list...

...On January 3 and 4, Izvestia published an account, with excerpts from recently declassified transcripts, of the July 1953 plenary session of the Central Committee of the CPSU—the one at which Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's dreaded minister of internal affairs, was proclaimed an enemy of the people and expelled from the party (soon to be shot as "an agent of international imperialism...

...only 20 percent said that it would not...