Note on Abbreviations and References

This book employs the following abbreviations in archival references:

HIA

Hoover Institution Archives

GARF

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii

RGANI

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii

RGASPI

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Dokumenty Komsomola i molodezhnykh organizatsii)

TsGAM

Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy

This book uses the conventional Russian archival subdivisions:

f.Fond (Collection)

op.Opis’ (Inventory)

d.Delo (File)

l. (pl. ll.)List (pl. listy) (Page/s)

References to Komsomol’skaia pravda Editorial Meetings and Articles

Where possible, archival references contain a description of the source, the date of creation, details of the archive and a reference:

Example: Kraminov to TsK KPSS, 26 Oct. 1954, RGANI, f.5, op.16, d.671, ll.34–35

The sole exception is for references to Komsomol’skaia pravda editorial meetings (letuchki) which, for reasons of space, refer only to the date of the meeting, the delo and the list. As the paper’s letuchki are all preserved in RGASPI, f.98, op.1, this information is omitted from the reference.

Example: 13 Oct. 1954, d.131, ll.38–39

Similarly, when newspaper articles from Komsomol’skaia pravda are cited, the name of the publication is omitted:

Example: V. Efimov, ‘Sovetskoe sotsialistichskoe gosudarstvo’, 1 Feb. 1950, 3.

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists: The Paradoxes of Post-war Soviet Journalism

On 25 February 1956, in the early hours of the morning, Dmitry Goriunov, editor-in-chief of the youth newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, reached for his heart medication.¹ For the last four hours, delegates in the Kremlin hall at the Twentieth Party Congress had listened with horror as Nikita Khrushchev attacked his predecessor’s ‘grave abuse of power’, revealing Stalin’s role in the terror and lamenting his deviations from a Leninist course.² A week later, in an internal editorial meeting, Goriunov’s colleagues were no less shaken. They knew the Congress demanded radical changes in their working practices, but were unsure how to proceed. For long periods, they sat in silence. Journalists’ confusion was understandable: for a quarter of a century the Soviet press had been a vital cogwheel in Stalin’s ruling apparatus; now journalists and editors were being asked to overturn their ways of thinking and working. In the years that followed, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda reimagined the newspaper as a site upon which Khrushchev’s, and later Brezhnev’s, priorities could be promoted and enacted. To perform their role as propagandists journalists needed a new mode of address which would offer space for readers to think about their place in the socialist experiment and their relations with their fellow citizens. But as they considered the future, journalists were forced to confront their complicity in the crimes of the Soviet past. How could they regain readers’ trust after years of varnishing the truth?

This book begins in the rubble of post-war reconstruction and ends in the messy aftermath of the Prague Spring: twenty-five years in which Soviet journalism was transformed. Newspapers had always been recognised as a vital component of Party rule: ‘a weapon’, to use Stalin’s words, that allowed the Party to speak ‘every day, every hour, with the working class in its own language’.³ As the country began its long road to reconstruction in May 1945, the content of Soviet newspapers mocked these rousing words. Newspapers were full of sober resolutions and formulaic editorials; ritual praise for the country’s leader often drowned out more readable stories. In early 1952, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Party Organisation admitted: ‘Much of what we print on the pages of our paper does not satisfy our readers…The pages of our paper are often filled with boring, grey material.’⁴ It was a different story by the end of the 1960s when newspapers were speaking a language very different to the dry scholasticism of late Stalinism. Enticing layouts, reader-friendly features on technology, travel and nature, coupled with discussions of morals and ethics, transformed the post-war newspaper, and helped overcome a crisis of Party propaganda that had long afflicted journalists’ lives.⁵

The media, alongside the arts, had been at the heart of the Stalin cult; after his death it emerged as a privileged space for rethinking socialism’s meanings. But despite its centrality, the press appears as an afterthought in recent media histories. While radio, television and cinema have been revealed as dynamic spaces for reimagining post-war communism, newspapers have so far played second fiddle. As the bright young things of broadcasting experimented with new technologies and new formats, the press has taken on the appearance of grandpa in his favourite chair, telling stories that people had long since tired of hearing. This book is not an act of advocacy for the Thaw press, and it details many episodes in which the press failed to live up to its lofty goals, but it does argue that newspapers, just like radio, television and cinema, were a site upon which burning questions of Thaw socialism and Soviet modernity could be discussed. Who was the socialist person: what did they believe, what should they believe and how should they behave? Were there new ways for humans to relate to each other, new paths to the future? And, even if the fundamental tenets of the system could not be debated, could it be improved through new ways of organising industry, different forms of education, and by exposing the lawlessness that bedevilled everyday life?

News From Moscow is about the difficult process of de-Stalinising the press, and shows how journalists at the country’s leading youth newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda, imagined and reimagined the newspaper’s social and political role during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I argue that journalists occupied an ambiguous position in the cultural politics of the Thaw: they embraced their role as Party propagandists and derived much prestige from disseminating its messages, while also envisaging a central role for themselves as agents of social change.⁶ As propagandists, journalists recast tired Stalinist codes, seeking out new ways of turning dry resolutions into articles that could genuinely inspire. As activists, they tried to promote more long-lasting change by supporting and implementing new initiatives which, so they hoped, would wipe away the vestiges of Stalinism. These two orientations need not have conflicted; in practice, however, they often did, as journalists’ plans for building communism clashed with the Party’s own ideas. Journalists were able to advocate for change—and were often quite daring in their attempts to enact it—but such initiatives could only succeed if their plans received the approval of a group of officials who were not always receptive. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of intellectuals, journalists were the ‘dominated fraction of the dominating class’.⁷ Their ability to set the terms of debate and disseminate their ideas to millions gave them considerable cultural capital. What they lacked was the political power to put these reformist ideas into practice.

We know from countless memoirs and interviews that the Thaw generation’s plans never came to fruition: that era of hope ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Those accounts often lend a retrospective coherence to a somewhat unclear set of ideas—the limits of post-war reform were also the limits of journalists’ own outlook. If we try to untangle the threads we see that many Thaw journalists held out hope for a better future: a path to communism fuelled by the heady brew of human kindness, modern technology and Marxism-Leninism. However, what emerges from these memoirs seems oddly decaffeinated, with journalist’s role as Party propagandists replaced with a vaguely oppositional stance as defenders of the humanistic values. Such versions of the past are not fabrications—this book provides ample evidence of those values in action—but they often omit the fact that journalists saw themselves as servants of the Party. For all the creativity journalists displayed in rooting out corruption, creating forums for dialogue and devising schemes to drive the country forward, journalists were committed to communist rule and saw the trumpeting of Soviet achievements as an extension, not a contradiction, of reform. But as Thaw newspapers ventured more and more often into an ideological grey zone, journalists soon found that their twin roles as propagandists and reformers were not always compatible.

Overcoming the Past

Komsomol’skaia pravda was not in favour of The Thaw, the novella that would give the post-Stalin decade its name. The paper’s review, published in June 1954, argued that its distinguished author, Ilya Ehrenburg, was too concerned with the ‘dark sides of life’ and that the book’s characters were ‘spiritually empty, broken people’.⁸ The real task of literature, its author pronounced confidently, was to create ‘life-affirming’ art which would ‘nurture a cheerful, brave youth…ready to perform any feat in the name of the Fatherland and its people’.⁹ In private, journalists at the paper were no less critical, and claimed that Ehrenburg’s story had been successful only because it ‘tugged on a person’s darkest heartstrings’.¹⁰ They attacked his central metaphor of a thawing winter, and rejected his reading of the past. ‘The chronology is wrong’, one journalist told colleagues: ‘In our country the thaw started in October 1917.’¹¹

Journalists’ harsh views on one of the iconic texts of the Khrushchev era shows that they benefited from the Soviet intelligentsia’s battles for freedom but, when push came to shove, they stood on other side of the barricades.¹² Politically, Soviet journalists stood somewhere between the artistic intelligentsia, committed to a far-reaching programme of de-Stalinisation, and a technical intelligentsia which was happy to trade political quiescence for scientific freedom.¹³ Journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda were certainly conscious of the need for deep and meaningful change, but their priorities were tightly interwoven with those of the political elite.

The contested reaction to Ehrenburg’s story, which offered readers a hopeful metaphor for a country emerging from the bitter chill of Stalinism, is also a reminder that term’s meaning has long been disputed. After the Soviet Union’s fall, the period’s protagonists weaved an optimistic narrative, focusing nostalgically on liberals’ dashed hopes for a better future—hopes blown asunder by the icy gusts of the Brezhnev era.¹⁴ Today, scholars are more critical of this idealised story. While many historians have emphasised the positive changes of the period, such as Khrushchev’s house-building programme and widespread improvements in living standards, others have pointed to the period’s illiberal core, particular in terms of attitudes to crime.¹⁵

There is much to be said for the Thaw metaphor, however. Not only does it capture the provisional nature of these changes, with the tantalising prospect of spring counterbalanced by the threat of winter’s return, the term at least registers the fact that a fundamental change occurred.¹⁶ Put simply, the Soviet Union after the Thaw was not the same as the country that entered that process.¹⁷ While there were still prohibitions, people spoke and lived their lives more freely; though crime became a public obsession, mass terror became a thing of the past; and in the midst of a Cold War, the country opened itself to the world. The term is particularly apposite for the cultural sphere, where exciting new possibilities for self-expression were counterbalanced by the ever-present possibility of being silenced—sometimes, as was the case for Ehrenberg, by journalists who did not share their values.¹⁸ In this monograph, ‘the Thaw’ stands for a process of rapid change—uneven, unsettling and radical—that challenged and recast the certainties of the Stalin era. Journalists’ daily task was to smooth over those doubts and present readers with an authoritative view of the world and of readers’ place in it. The newspapers discussed in this book were, to recast Trotsky’s statement about art, both mirror and hammer: they reflected wider political developments and societal discussions even as they sought to sculpt them into a revolutionary shape.¹⁹

The Thaw’s significance can only be understood with reference to the country’s tumultuous early decades. In May 1945, weeks after the population celebrated the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda were celebrating their paper’s twentieth anniversary. With a circulation of less than 10,000 in 1925, the newspaper’s reach was initially much more limited than the nearly 8 million copies printed at the end of the 1960s.²⁰ Nevertheless, the paper rapidly established itself as a mainstay of the country’s media. It had emerged at a time when Soviet newspapers were undergoing a sudden shift: early Soviet newspapers had been unable to speak the language of the masses, with readers frequently confused by their mixture of new terminology and bureaucratic language. During NEP, however, a strict regime of ‘cost-accounting’ [khozraschet] meant that newspapers now had to break even rather than relying on government subsidies.²¹

To do so meant selling more newspapers; that, in turn, meant journalists needed to better appeal to readers. Who, the paper’s journalists asked, was Komsomol’skaia pravda for? The masthead gave one answer: it was the ‘Organ of the Central and Moscow Committee of the VLKSM’—in other words, a branch newspaper for the ‘All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League’ at both Union and Moscow level. The League, which was more commonly known as the ‘Komsomol’, had been set up in 1918 as a means of raising a new generation of communists and became a powerful means for inculcating Soviet values in adolescents (entry was at the age of 14 or 15).²² The organisation oversaw a large stable of youth newspapers and journals, including the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia [Young Guard], and the children’s newspaper Pionerskaia pravda, but Komsomol’skaia pravda would become its flagship. The resolution that gave the green light to the new title stated that ’Komsomol’skaia pravda should be a leading and at the same time a mass newspaper.’²³ Not an impossible combination, but in practice it made the paper’s content uneven, with resolutions, announcements and reports of Komsomol meetings for activists all vying for space with material catering to a broader readership. Conversations about the nature of the paper’s audience—activists or the mass reader—consumed a great deal of journalists’ energy during the paper’s early years.²⁴

The ‘Great Break’, the term given to the transformative period of breakneck industrialisation that began in 1928 and transformed the Soviet Union, was no less an upheaval for its propaganda apparatus. Komsomol’skaia pravda became the spearhead of a new form of exhortatory ‘mass journalism’ which sought to drive the masses to ever-greater labour feats.²⁵ Journalists like Iurii Zhukov found fame through their participation in the mass works of the first Five-Year Plan as Komsomol’skaia pravda journalists staffed mobile editorial units to report from the country’s biggest construction projects.²⁶ Some scholars argue that during this period the press’s ‘mass enlightenment’ project of the 1920s was abandoned in favour of an activist readership that was fed the information necessary for their daily political work.²⁷ The discursive standardisation of the press, which became increasingly apparent as the 1930s progressed, certainly suggests that newspapers were reorienting towards cadres. Through editorials and other propaganda articles, the officialese of speeches, resolutions and official announcements worked its dismal magic on public gatherings across the country. However, the language and style of reporting from the country’s new construction projects suggests that journalists and editors sometimes had in mind a wider audience. The presence of readers’ letters (or even, in the case of Komsomol’skaia pravda, their diaries and poems) also suggests that newspapers had more than just activists in their sights. By the late 1930s, the press printed articles debating questions of ethics, morality, love and friendship as part of a turn away from class politics towards the individual.²⁸ Even the Stalin cult, which rose in prominence as the decade progressed, and continued into the post-war period, cannot be pigeonholed as a ritual staged for the eyes and ears of activists. All of which suggests that the ‘mass journalism’ of the 1930s was aimed at a mass as well as an activist readership, and was considerably more diverse—both in terms of form and function—than some accounts allow.

Catering for the press’s two audiences became a headache for post-war journalists, with the dry language of speeches and resolutions limiting the paper’s appeal to the wider readership. As the press’s activist focus waned, journalists had to find new ways of reaching an audience that was understood as more diverse and more demanding than ever before. Thaw journalism, its ethics and aesthetics, constituted a conscious reaction to a constellation of ideas and practices that took shape under Stalin. Their response was not always negative: the paper’s ‘mass journalism’ about the construction of factories, dams, canals and metro stations proved to be an inspiration for their successors two decades later and dispatches from the front lines during World War II contained echoes of the more individual-focused forms of journalism that would become popular under Khrushchev.²⁹ But as the dust settled on the Secret Speech, there was a palpable sense that the Stalinist newspaper’s pursuit of the activist reader needed to end.

More fundamentally, Thaw journalists were driven by the desire to end the violence that Khrushchev’s speech had so shockingly revealed. During the 1930s, newspapers like Komsomol’skaia pravda stoked outrage against perceived ‘enemies of the people’ and lauded reprisals against ‘fascist terrorists and traitors to the motherland’ but soon found themselves to be targets.³⁰ At the height of the terror, 42 members of the paper’s 187 editorial staff were earmarked for dismissal by a Komsomol commission.³¹ Of the paper’s first six editors, spanning a period from 1925 to 1937, five were repressed by the Soviet authorities, with the other dying of natural causes. These included long-standing editor Vladimir Bubenkin, who arrived at work on 7 July 1937 and never returned home.³² He, like his deputy Anton Vysotskii, was arrested as a member of a ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation’ and shot in October 1937.³³ Journalists and editors at other titles suffered similar fates.³⁴ Two decades later, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda rarely discussed Stalinist violence in print, preferring to focus on more positive exemplars from the period. Nevertheless, in their search for a more humane and more ethical form of journalism, it is impossible not to see the afterimages of this traumatic period of mass violence.

Journalism and Thaw Media

The post-Stalin period was Soviet media’s ‘prime time’: an era when Soviet authorities conceived of the press—alongside radio, cinema and television—as part of a single propaganda arsenal.³⁵ Resolutions on media priorities were backed by material resources—capital, cables, infrastructures—which enabled images and texts to cross the country faster, and to a larger audience, than ever before. Newspapers constituted an important part of this apparatus: they were, to use the popular metaphor, a ‘mighty weapon of communist construction’, which brought the experience of the masses in industry and agriculture, as well as the sage words of the Communist Party, to the masses.³⁶ Moreover, newspapers continued to hold a sacred position in Soviet mythology, given the importance of the underground press in sustaining the communist movement, and Lenin’s frequent contributions to Iskra and Pravda.

But after Stalin’s death (and, sotto voce, before it) journalists were conscious of the difficulties of turning this high-flown rhetoric into a product audiences wanted to read. In the editorial letuchki and Party meetings that constitute this book’s central source, we eavesdrop on discussions of journalistic style and hear frequent debates about how readers would perceive the paper’s dispatches. Thaw journalists were involved in a political project to revitalise and reform Soviet socialism, but they realised that forming a new relationship with readers was the key to success. Far from inaugurating a normalisation of Soviet language, then, Stalin’s death revealed new possibilities for would-be authors of authoritative discourse.³⁷ Newspapers became more eye-catching, more readable and more intimate in tone as part of a wider shift in media’s relationship with its audience. Just as broadcast journalists grasped that tub-thumping speeches didn’t work well on air, print journalists soon realised that officialese was also a turn-off for readers.³⁸ Across Thaw media, there was a shift towards a more personalised form of address in which journalists encouraged audiences to participate, play, discuss or construct—in short, to make their own meanings.³⁹

As the country’s third largest newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda was both atypical and typical of Thaw journalism. No doubt the profession seemed very different to a low-paid correspondent at a district-level newspaper looking to Moscow to understand how they should write: examples of lower-level journalists ‘borrowing’ the ideas of their more prestigious colleagues were legion. But the paper’s place as an exemplar is precisely what makes Komsomol’skaia pravda worth examining: it gives us a sense of what was possible in the Thaw press as well as the limits of experimentation. It also offers an insight into the relationship between Party and youth during a particularly fraught period. The post-Stalin period was ostensibly a period of renewal and youthfulness: many iconic images of the era involve young people, from the idealistic activists making their way to the Virgin Lands in 1954 to the vibrant chaos of Moscow’s World Festival of Youth in 1957.⁴⁰ But in a Cold War climate, journalists and officials feared that Soviet youth’s ideological fervour was wilting in the face of an onslaught from the west.⁴¹ Such fears were not limited to the Soviet Union, but in a country that staked its reputation on its superior culture, the spectre of jazz lovers tuning into the Voice of America and fashion-conscious stiliagi on the streets of Moscow sparked fears about an erosion of values. Moreover, in a time of rapid change—epitomised most of all by the sudden collapse of Stalin’s reputation—journalists often expressed anxiety about Soviet youth’s ideological disorientation. For both these reasons, youth journalists were keen to find a new path to their readers as they sought to redirect young people’s energies away from the Cold War enemy and regain their trust.

It was apt that the task of addressing Soviet youth fell to one of the country’s more youthful editorial staffs. A place on the staff of Komsomol’skaia pravda was one of the most prestigious postings for a young journalist: a position there was a stepping-stone to а job at Pravda or Izvestiia, the country’s two leading newspapers, or with the news agency TASS. The 1950s witnessed a rapid turnover of staff, with senior members of the editorial board like correspondents Aleksandr Pliushch (b. 1905) and Semyon Garbuzov (b. 1908) moving elsewhere, to be replaced with a new and younger cohort. It is striking how many of the leading figures of Thaw journalism were born within a few years of each other: Komsomol’skaia pravda’s editors Iurii Voronov (b. 1929) and Boris Pankin (b. 1931), as well as the paper’s award-winning Vasilii Peskov (b. 1930), journalist-sociologist Boris Grushin (b. 1929) and innovative pedagogue Simon Soloveichik (b. 1930) were all part of this group. A generational identity—in itself, and later for itself—was forged through common experiences: a war they were too young to fight in, university study in the final years of Stalinism, and the shock of the Secret Speech—all experienced at roughly the same age. As the novelist Vasilii Aksenov (b. 1932) observed, his cohort, which by the early 1960s was in its thirties, should be termed the generation of the fifties [piatidesiatniki], a group apart from the shestidesiatniki.⁴² This grouping is not as celebrated as their sixties successors, but for the journalists discussed in this book, their coming-of-age was timely: it was they who reached positions of influence at the time of the Secret Speech and could use that auspicious moment to reshape the Thaw newspaper and, so they hoped, Thaw society.⁴³

The journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda were mostly young; they were also predominantly male. A survey of 1957 found that less than 40 percent of Komsomoml’skaia pravda’s staff were women, the majority occupying lower-level positions as staff writers, literary correspondents or sorting mail in the Department of Letters. At middle and upper levels (departmental heads and members of the editorial board), there were only eight women out of twenty-five.⁴⁴ Though figures like Izvestiia’s Tat’iana Tess and Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Inna Rudenko are remembered as Soviet journalism’s ‘golden pens’, the almost total omission of women from an anthology of twentieth-century Russian journalism suggests that women’s contribution to Thaw journalism has too often been forgotten.⁴⁵ Simple sexism might be part of the explanation—a problem not unique to the Soviet Union, but real enough that the plot of a 1958 film, Our Correspondent, could hang on a group of male journalists who refuse to believe that a female colleague could have written an anonymous exposé.⁴⁶ But Komsomol’skaia pravda, at least from the memoirs we have available, seems to have been largely free from such prejudices, which demands another explanation. In a job where working hours were irregular, with shifts often extending from one morning until the early hours of the next, motherhood proved a high barrier to advancement. Because of these long hours, it was unusual for women to take on major roles as correspondents, especially when one factors in the need for leading journalists to spend time away from Moscow on assignment. Famed ‘Komsomolka’ journalist Ol’ga Kuchkina recalled making a conscious decision to prioritise her career, leaving her young children with her husband, grandparents or a nanny: ‘Women were expected to be a mother first, but I worked in a male profession, and had a male lifestyle, and I made a male choice.’⁴⁷ Given such constraints, it is little surprise that many women opted for the security and predictability of work in the paper’s Department of Letters or Department of Corrections to the irregular hours and pressures of life as a top-level journalist.

It will not escape the reader that the ‘News from Moscow’ analysed in this book looks very different from the Anglo-American conception of news. It isn’t that stories about current events were absent from Soviet newspapers, nor that journalists were uninterested in current affairs; rather that the Party’s reluctance to relinquish control over information offered journalists little option other than to express their dissatisfaction in private.⁴⁸ Throughout the period discussed in this book, domestic news remained the least prestigious form of writing available to journalists—aside from the dispatches of a few famed foreign correspondents, who generally worked for bigger newspapers. Most rank-and-file journalists were more inclined to the aesthetic possibilities of other kinds of stories, from the analytical sketch [ocherk] to the satirical feuilleton [fel’eton], each genre with its own rich history.⁴⁹ The stories that resulted, whether an essay on heroism or a humorous skewering of an official taking backhanders, should also be considered as ‘news’. Such stories reveal that Soviet newspapers, despite appearing daily, were based on different aesthetic principles and a different temporality to Anglo-American newspapers: Soviet journalists’ attention was more often focused on the far horizon of communism than the messy realities of daily events.

The story told in this book is, in part, a story of changing aesthetic norms as journalists updated their writing to keep pace with the perceived needs of their audience. Hand-in-hand with that shift came a change in ethical norms. If Anglo-American journalism was characterised by a quest for objective truth, conveyed through a commitment to balance, Thaw journalists, who disdained ‘bourgeois objectivity’ and happily called themselves propagandists, constructed their moral code on a wider set of principles.⁵⁰ The ideal Soviet journalist was characterised not just by their mastery of Marxist-Leninist principles, but by a striving for exemplary conduct in their personal life, a responsibility to readers, commitment to the public good and a striving for the truth.⁵¹ While these moral injunctions were sometimes contradicted in practice, professional discussions convey a clear sense that the Thaw journalist was bound by a code of ethics and was responsible for upholding the lofty ideals of the Soviet order.⁵²

This book considers ‘Thaw journalism’ not only as an aesthetic and ethical imperative but also as practice, with the clash between ideas and practices lying at the heart of this book’s narrative. Despite journalists’ best intentions, much could go wrong between the Party and Komsomol’s lofty pronouncements and the printed page. Even under Stalin, where the leader sometimes vetted the texts of his cult of personality and made edits to articles,⁵³ journalists voiced—and sometimes enacted—their own ideas about the best way to fulfil the Party’s goals. After his death, the renunciation of terror, coupled with expansion of journalism education in universities and an intensification of debate in professional unions and workplaces, created new possibilities for conversation and camaraderie. Journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda often speak of the ‘spirit of the sixth floor’, referring to the location of their offices in the Pravda building: a spirit characterised by shared values and mutual solidarity.⁵⁴ Journalists at the paper worked together, drank together and closed ranks when attacked.⁵⁵ Though the Soviet editorial team [redaktsiia] could be analysed as a disciplinary organism, with editorial meetings a means of enforcing collective judgement on recalcitrant individuals, a sense of shared values also insulated members of the collective from the authorities’ assaults.⁵⁶ It was this ability, enabled by the collective, to assert one’s own creativity in the face of attacks that made the practice of journalism more than a mere recitation of Party slogans.

The authorities saw the situation rather differently. Though journalists enjoyed more freedom than at any time in the previous thirty years, Khrushchev still regarded journalists as the Party’s ‘assistants’, whose job it was to bring Party ideology to the people. As he argued in a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Journalists in 1959, journalists were a ‘faithful transmission belt’, who would ‘take the Party’s decisions and bring them to the very heart of our people’.⁵⁷ The image is not especially flattering, since it suggests that journalists were a conduit for the Party’s ideas rather than creative workers. And indeed, journalists’ everyday work quite often resembled a mechanical process of placing TASS’s news stories and Party resolutions onto the printed page. But although officials still exerted tight control over newspapers, from phone calls on the vertushka to ‘conversations’ (read: dressings down) to discuss controversial articles, their influence was less total in a post-terror era. Instructions became less prescriptive, discipline less strict, so journalists could discharge their responsibilities with more freedom.⁵⁸ Even if they slipped up, those unwelcome conversations generally led to a reprimand rather than dismissal. In this changing atmosphere, journalists began to develop their own notions of professional excellence—a value that could be conferred not just by the Party, but also, increasingly, by the perceptions of one’s peers. Nevertheless, it is clear that officials did not always share the values of the journalists under their supervision, and frequently took action to curb initiatives they considered ideologically dangerous or—especially in the colder climate of the Brezhnev era—to take action against the journalists who supported them.

The question remains how scholars of the Soviet press should understand and evaluate journalists’ work. One of the most stimulating attempts, by Thomas C. Wolfe, argues that the Thaw press became a privileged site for thinking about socialism and disseminating its ideology. In Wolfe’s account, journalists were ‘governors’, who would ‘supply the texts and images that would make the Soviet readers aware of and a part of the processes through which their society was realizing socialism’.⁵⁹ In this Foucauldian reading, the Soviet press’s work was essentially pedagogical: it involved a vast flow of messages from a centre ‘composed of those thinkers who understood what socialism was to be’ to a periphery occupied by Soviet reader-citizens.⁶⁰ But, as I suggest in this book, messages flowed from readers to journalists as well as the other way round, and journalism wasn’t simply concerned with images and representations. Wolfe’s discussion of the Thaw largely focuses on what journalists called the ‘moral and ethical theme’: discussions of individual conduct in which gazetchiki involved themselves in the forms of government he describes. But there were other, less subtle, ways for journalists to govern, from hectoring editorials to denunciations of the latest US outrage. Even though journalists often carried out those duties with creativity, it is unclear in such instances whether journalists should be seen as governors or a ‘transmission belt’. Wolfe’s governing hub is a centre of ideas and images and this book, too, shows how Thaw journalists tried to make Party strictures meaningful for readers, and were actively involved in thinking how the socialist person should be. Yet there were other, far less discursive, ways for power to be exercised: in tandem with the Party elite, the courts, the police. Thaw journalism was sometimes less heroic than Wolfe sometimes makes out: governing was certainly about words but it was also about actions that went beyond the printed page and into the world outside. This book shows how Thaw journalists used their words to remake the press—and by extension the post-war Soviet Union—and the many obstacles they faced along the way.

Book Structure

To explore the world of the Soviet journalist in the post-war period, I draw on a range of archival and printed sources. Komsomol’skaia pravda’s internal archive, which scholars were once able to draw on for their work, perished in a fire at the paper’s offices in 2006. However, a wide range of documents from the paper are preserved in state archives, including transcripts and protocols of editorial letuchki and Party meetings, correspondence with the Party and Komsomol, staffing lists and other internal reports. These documents offer a vivid picture of life within the paper’s redaktsiia, and its relationship with officials and other organisations. Reader response is a different matter. Letters can be illuminating for media researchers, but only a few scattered missives have been preserved in the archives or in journalists’ personal collections.⁶¹ For that reason, this book sheds more light on journalists’ understanding of readers than the other way round. Nevertheless, the extant corpus of documents, and especially the editorial letuchki and newspapers which are at the core of this study, offer a glimpse of the professional values of Thaw journalists and allow us to analyse their attempts to create a new, more humane, Soviet socialism out of the rubble of war.

News from Moscow is structured in three overlapping parts and six chapters that tell a roughly chronological story. Although changes in leadership—and especially the death of Stalin—helped define the shape of the Soviet press, I have avoided structuring these three parts around leaders because many of the tendencies discussed in this book cross those boundaries. The first section of the book, entitled ‘Ritual Socialism’, explores the transition from Stalinist journalism to Thaw journalism. Chapter 1 focuses on the rituals of Stalinist journalism. It not only shows the stifling formality of the pre-1953 press but also identifies tendencies that anticipate the humanist principles of the Thaw. The practice of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ is the subject of Chapter 2, which analyses a failed attempt to reorient the paper in the aftermath of the Secret Speech. The book’s second section, ‘Romantic Socialism’, shows how journalists grappled with changing ideas of socialism during the Thaw. Chapter 3 shows how journalists struggled to rearticulate the meanings of heroism in an era of rising materialism and technocratic rationality, while Chapter 4 focuses on the paper’s attempt to inculcate new values via a grass-roots pedagogical approach known as the ‘Communard Method’. Section 3, ‘Reforming Socialism’, analyses the Party’s shift towards technocracy in the 1960s. The creation of an ‘Institute of Public Opinion’ within the paper’s Department of Propaganda is one of the paper’s most striking initiatives of the Thaw period. Chapter 5 asks how the Institute was created, and shows how demands of sociology eventually came into conflict with the needs of propaganda. Chapter 6 analyses the paper’s technocratic shift in the early Brezhnev years and shows how it changed journalists’ understanding of their social role. For the liberal intelligentsia, journalists included, the hopes of the post-Stalin period crumbled after the crackdown on the intelligentsia and invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the epilogue, I trace the fate of ‘Thaw journalism’ into the 1970s and beyond, and ask how the practice of journalism has fared in the intervening half century.

News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform. Simon Huxtable, Oxford University Press. © Simon Huxtable 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.003.0001

¹ William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 273.

² Ibid., 271.

³ Quoted in D. Dubrovskii, V. Dukel’skii, ‘Znaete li svoego chiatatel’ia?’, 5 May 1932, 2.

⁴ ‘Otchetnyi doklad partbiuro redaktsii Komsomol’skaia pravda’, 10 Mar. 1952, TsGAM, f.1968, op.1, d.27, l.24.

⁵ On this crisis see David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror Under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

⁶ The term ‘propagandist’ may appear pejorative, but it is the way journalists referred to themselves. I use it in this book as a non-evaluative term to describe journalists’ work to further the Party’s priorities.

⁷ Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 196.

⁸ ‘V zhizneutverzhdenii—sila nashei literatury’, 6 Jun. 1954, 2.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, l.131.

¹¹ 27 Sep. 1954, d.131, l.112.

¹² It should be borne in mind that the paper had been burned by its earlier support for Vladimir Pomerantsev’s essay on sincerity, which resulted in censure from the Central Committee. Original article: S. Bocharov, V. Zaitsev et al. ‘Zamalchivaia ostrye voprosy: Pis’mo k redaktsii’, 17 Mar. 1954, 3; Central Committee response: ‘O publikatsii v gazete Komsomol’skaia pravda pis’ma v zashchitu stat’i V.M. Pomerantseva ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, 24 Mar. 1954 in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957. Dokumenty, ed. by V. Iu. Afiani (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 211. On the paper’s reaction to this criticism see 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, ll.128–42.

¹³ On the liberal intelligentsia see Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory on Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009). On the technical intelligentsia see Maria Rogacheva, The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

¹⁴ Bittner, Many Lives, 5–7; Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd, ‘The Thaw as Event’, in The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, ed. by Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 24.

¹⁵ Stephen Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Susan E. Reid, ‘Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 47.1–2 (2006), 227–68; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Brian Lapierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

¹⁶ This sense of impermanence was Ehrenburg’s intention: ‘short-term ambiguity amid a long-term process’ as Bittner puts it (Many Lives, 3, see also 1–13 for useful background). For a detailed discussion of the metaphor see Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 18–23.

¹⁷ Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 27.

¹⁸ Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Dina Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982).

¹⁹ Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957 [1924]), Ch. 4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch04.htm [Accessed: 1 Aug. 2021].

²⁰ ‘Tsifry pobed’, 5 May 1931, 1; Letopis’ periodicheskikh izdanii SSSR, 1966–1970 (Moscow: Kniga, 1975).

²¹ Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 46–69.

²² On the early Komsomol see Mathias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2011).

²³ Stanislav Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 1925–2005 gg. Ocherki istorii (Irkutsk: Irkutskaia oblastnaia tipografiia, 2008), 36.

²⁴ Ibid., 26–40; Lenoe, Closer, 70–100.

²⁵ Lenoe, Closer, 103–244.

²⁶ Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 103–20; Iurii Zhukov, Liudi 30-x godov (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1966).

²⁷ Lenoe, Closer, 145–81; Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15–18.

²⁸ Anna Krylova, ‘Soviet Modernity in Life and Fiction: The Generation of the “New Soviet Person” in the 1930s’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2000.

²⁹ On wartime journalism see Brooks, Thank You, 159–94; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); G. Zhirkov, Zhurnalistika stalinskoi epokhi (Moscow: FLINTA, 2016), 418–48. On the idea of a movement towards individualisation see Anna Krylova, ‘Imagining Socialism in the Twentieth Century’, Social History, 42.3 (2017), 315–41.

³⁰ ‘Prokliat’e banditam!’, 1 Feb. 1937, 2. On enemies see Lenoe, Closer, 78–100; Brooks, Thank You, 126–58.

³¹ A full list is provided in Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 138–44.

³² Vysotsky’s arrest is discussed on the ‘Open List’ of victims of the terror: https://ru.openlist.wiki/Высоцкий_Антон_Антонович_(1905) [Accessed: 11 Jul. 2020].

³³ V. Krivoruchenko, ‘K probleme repressii v molodezhnoi srede v 30-e gody XX stoletiia’, Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 2 (2011), http://zpu-journal.ru/e-zpu/2011/2/Krivoruchenko_Repressions [Accessed: 5 May 2020].

³⁴ Zhirkov, Zhurnalistika, 35–46.

³⁵ Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

³⁶ ‘Den’ pechati’, Pravda, 5 May 1955, 1.

³⁷ Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 36–76.

³⁸ Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 192–6; Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168–78.

³⁹ Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 14–17, 71–130; Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Alexei Golubev, ‘Making Selves through Making Things: Soviet Do-It-Yourself Culture and Practices of Late Soviet Subjectivition’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 54.3–4 (2013), 517–41.

⁴⁰ On youth and Sovietness, see Kristin Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2003, 51–9.

⁴¹ Mark Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 50.1 (2002), 37–61; Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167–99 and passim; Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, 46–98; Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 54–100.

⁴² Vasilii Aksenov, ‘Tri shineli v nos’, in Negativ polozhitel’nogo geroia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006), 24.

⁴³ For a notable exception see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, which focuses on the post-war generation.

⁴⁴ ‘Svedeniia o komsomol’skikh gazetakh’, undated 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.847, l.62.

⁴⁵ Zhurnalisty XX veka: liudi i sud’by (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003).

⁴⁶ Nash korrespondent (d. Anatolii Granik, 1958).

⁴⁷ Melanie Ilic, Life Stories of Soviet Women: The Interwar Generation (London: Routledge, 2013), 119.

⁴⁸ On the development of post-war news, see Simon Huxtable, ‘Making News Soviet: Rethinking Journalistic Professionalism After Stalin, 1953–1970’, Contemporary European History, 27.1 (2018), 59–84.

⁴⁹ Komsomol’skaia pravda, for example, only possessed a handful of foreign correspondents, almost all posted in the ‘fraternal states’ of Eastern and Central Europe. On foreign correspondents in the post-war period see Dina Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

⁵⁰ Ibid., 3–9.

⁵¹ For one of many articles on this theme see F. Krutov, V. Sitov, ‘Ob avtoritete i dostoinstve zhurnalista’, Soveskaia pechat’, 6 (1957), 12–14.

⁵² On professional ethics see Natalia Roudakova, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 51–97; Mary-Catherine French, ‘Reporting Socialism: Soviet Journalism and the Journalists’ Union, 1955–1966’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014.

⁵³ For a well-researched example, see Malcolm Spencer, Stalinism and the Soviet-Finnish War, 1939–40: Crisis Management, Censorship and Control (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

⁵⁴ E.g. Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Informirovannyi istochnik’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 19 Apr. 2011, https://rg.ru/2011/04/19/ignatenlo.html [Accessed: 24 Aug. 2021].

⁵⁵ See the interviews collected in Bol’she, chem gazeta, ed. by Liudmila Semina (Moscow: PoRog, 2006); Aleksei Adzhubei v koridorakh chetvertoi vlasti, ed. by Dmitrii Mamleev (Moscow: Izvestiia, 2003).

⁵⁶ Kharkhordin, Collective and Individual, 279–328.

⁵⁷ Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd zhurnalistov. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960), 11–12.

⁵⁸ A characteristic of Thaw culture more broadly: see Karl Aimermakher [Eimermacher], ‘Partiinoe upravlenie kul’turoi i formy ee samoorganizatsii (1953–1964/67)’, in Ideologicheskie Komissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964. Dokumenty, ed. by Aimermakher et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 7.

⁵⁹ Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 18.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Tamara Gromova, Pis’ma v ‘Komsomol’skuiu pravdu’ 60-e gody XX stoletiia (Saint Petersburg: Levsha, 2012).