2
‘There is such a thing as criticism, and there is also libel directed at honourable men.’ ‘Perfectly true,’ Lopatkin answered. He could not refrain from smiling at her stern look. ‘But who is to decide for us what is libel and what isn’t?’1
(Vladimir Dudintsev, Not By Bread Alone, 1956)
The literary sensation of 1956 was a work of fiction written by a former Komsomol’skaia pravda correspondent. Not By Bread Alone, the first novel by Vladimir Dudintsev, erstwhile member of the Department of Komsomol Life, tells the story of a physicist, Dimitri Lopatkin, whose new invention is blocked by a bureaucracy which sees innovation as a threat.2 Sent to a camp on a trumped-up charge, Lopatkin is freed after his case is reviewed; the bureaucrats who conspired to send him there are disciplined. But while Lopatkin’s invention goes into mass production, the book concludes on an ominous note with corrupt officials still in post. Rather than a socialist-realist happy ending where good triumphs over bad, Not By Bread Alone suggested there was still work to do in battle between invention and corruption.
Dudintsev’s novel, controversial though it was, fit comfortably within existing Bolshevik norms. An entry in the Second Edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1953, stated that ‘principled criticism and self-criticism strengthens the proletarian party, raises the vigilance of party members, protects the party from bourgeois influences, and helps cleanse it of enemies in its ranks, and also from opportunistic and unstable elements’.3 It was safeguarded the revolution from harmful forces while ensuring that it maintained its dynamism. But the Party’s panicked reaction to Dudintsev’s novel illustrates the paradoxical status of public criticism in the post-war Soviet Union. While early reviews of the novel were cautiously positive, by the year’s end both politicians and critics expressed unease at the strident responses the novel had prompted.4 Before long, Dudintsev would be forced to denounce the student militancy he had helped inspire.
1956 was a year of criticism: of Stalin, of bureaucratic overreach and, finally, of the critics themselves. This chapter examines a less well-known instance of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ [kritika i samokritika], this time taking place within the press. Tracing the development of newspaper criticism from the end of World War II until the end of 1956, the chapter shows how attacks on bureaucracy and injustice were both encouraged and suppressed by Soviet officials. Even in the tensest periods of the late Stalin era, journalists upheld the importance of criticism as a means for stamping out social ills, and eliminating obstacles on the road to communism. It could come in the form of a journalist’s exposé, a critical essay, a response to a reader’s letter, or a satirical feuilleton. These interventions were guided by a shared belief that journalists could transform the society in which they lived by exposing the negative.
Yet under Stalin and Khrushchev alike, the tension between transformation and stabilisation complicated journalists’ lives. Party rhetoric held that criticism and self-criticism, by exposing negative practices to the light of publicity, offered the surest path towards communism. That transformational goal appeared especially prominent in 1956. The revelations of the Secret Speech rewrote the rulebook and, in the absence of clear political guidance, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s journalists pursued their own editorial line for several months. Drawing on the humanistic implications of the Congress, journalists proclaimed that their primary concern was for the ‘Soviet person’ and aimed at the restoration of ‘socialist legality’. Officials remained fearful, however, that excessive advertising of Soviet faults might be damaging to the cause. During the tensest periods of late Stalinism, journalists asked whether criticism was needed at all, given that Soviet reality was merely a battle between the ‘good and the better’. Now they wondered whether negative articles could tarnish the country’s image at home and abroad as well as providing publicity for the sorts of behaviours the Party wanted to eliminate. With discontent bubbling over in Eastern Europe and ‘demagogy’ seemingly rife among students, these fears erupted in the autumn, delivering a crushing blow to intellectuals’ hopes for reform after the Twentieth Party Congress.
Criticism and Self-Criticism in the Late Stalin Period
In late December 1949, among the fawning tributes to Comrade Stalin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, journalists received an important snippet of information to guide their future practice. In a panegyric to the country’s leader entitled ‘Comrade Stalin—Leader of Progressive Humanity’, Georgii Malenkov, Politburo member and potential successor to Stalin, offered his views on the tasks facing the country.5 Drawing on Stalin’s past words, as was the custom, Malenkov insisted that the country’s development required ‘criticism and self-criticism’, and that its absence had ‘generated a bureaucratic attitude to tasks, arrogance, high-handedness, and swaggering’. This attitude was especially prevalent amongst heads of local Party organs and enterprises who, dizzy with the ‘successful development of socialist construction’, had started to act with ‘over-confidence, bragging, and a scornful attitude to the criticisms of rank-and-file communists’.6
If I note that Malenkov’s words bear comparison to the press’s attacks on bureaucracy after the Secret Speech, it is not to suggest that the country’s second-in-command was an iconoclast. Rather, it is to point out that, behind journalists’ fighting talk in 1956 stood a long history of theory and practice that seemed to legitimate their combative tone. Criticism and self-criticism had been central to inter-party democracy since the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927, though discussion of the need for ruthless honesty about errors appear in the writings of Marx and Lenin too.7 Only through ruthless self-criticism of defects in meetings and in the press, went the theory, would the country move towards communism. Criticism contained the potential for disorder, however, as had been recognised ever since the 1920s. In 1928, Komsomol’skaia pravda was one of the most radical adepts of the Party’s new self-criticism campaign, but the vehemence of its attacks led to fears that the paper was threatening Party authority.8 By the end of 1929, the Party rowed back from self-criticism, though it would remain an important—and, during the Terror, destructive—Party ritual.9
Malenkov’s words, while aimed at society more broadly, were a salvo in a long-standing debate over journalists’ right to depict the negative aspects of Soviet life. Leading editors understood them as a green-light, telling their staff to heed the country’s second-in-command and make criticism more prominent.10 The paper’s sharp editorial discussions, in which even senior figures were subject to attacks from lower-ranking colleagues, are testament to the continued importance of self-criticism as a commonplace Soviet practice. Even in the 1940s, a time of widespread inertia in the press, the penning of critical articles remained an essential component of journalistic practice in spite of officials’ anxiety about its potentially destructive possibilities.11
Criticism occupied an important place in the Soviet journalistic imaginary: since newspapers ostensibly belonged to the people, the practice of penning exposés of social and political problems connected the press with its readers. Newspapers received tens of thousands of letters every year, and staff were expected to log, catalogue, and respond to each one—a task which dwarfed the paper’s capabilities, even though exactly 10 percent of the entire staff worked in the letters department by 1957.12 An internal survey in 1951 suggested that almost a quarter of letters were complaints, a figure that had risen to around 30 percent by 1955.13 As letter-writers surely knew, writing to the press offered the possibility of publicity for their complaint, which perhaps satisfied their desire for justice or revenge. Particularly egregious cases were perfect fodder for the newspaper’s regional correspondents and Moscow-based staff who travelled on assignment to investigate problems. On location, they took on the role of investigative journalist, where they would meet sources, gather material, and attempt to untangle the conflicting evidence collected in the course of the paper’s investigations. These investigative trips were not just about accumulating journalistic colour, but to make the paper’s eventual case bullet-proof from criticisms. Journalists were allowed to accuse officials ‘without regard for position’, but given the Party’s keen eye for journalistic error, officials could seize on a tiny thread to pull a newspaper’s case apart.
Despite the dangers, the idea of journalists as critics became part of their self-image. When journalists dampened their criticism, colleagues rounded on them. In 1949, journalists at the paper complained about a the case of a certain Miaskov, a correspondent sent to the ‘Hungry Steppe’ in Uzbekistan to report on the state of construction.14 He informed his colleague, Andrei David’iants, the head of the local correspondent network, that conditions were grim and warned that it was ‘impossible’ to write anything positive. But after David’iants warned the author not to write a critical article, the correspondent changed tack: his final article was devoted to the excellent work of the Komsomol. Only the final paragraph contained any criticism of the local administration and even this mild censure disappeared once the article went through the editorial grinder. Tellingly, colleagues rounded on David’iants and Miaskov for their ‘lack of principle’ at the next editorial letuchka: David’iants, it was said, bore ‘huge guilt’ for extinguishing Miaskov’s criticisms, while Miaskov was dismissed as a ‘chameleon’ who should have stood firm under pressure.15 Journalists also opened fire on their editor, Anatolii Blatin, wondering out loud whether he might have played a role in muzzling Miaskov’s criticisms.16 Within months, the unpopular editor would be dismissed from his post; at the first Party meeting following his sacking, speaker after speaker criticised their former chief for ignoring their criticisms.17
For all their attacks on their former editor, the paper’s staff didn’t see Blatin as bearing sole responsibility. A senior journalist, Semyon Narin’iani also indicted the Komsomol Central Committee for its lack of support. He cited a recent article on problems in Moscow’s hospitals and clinics, which had been pulled because of opposition from the organisation’s leaders.18 While the organisation was happy to support criticisms of lower-ranking officials, they baulked at expanding those reproaches to the country’s capital: ‘this isn’t Chkalov or Kursk’, Narin’iani was told. This case thus revealed the tightrope that critical journalists walked in the late Stalin period: ‘the [Komsomol’s] Central Committee calls in the Secretary and takes a decision regardless of the facts, however trivial they are. In certain trivial facts the Central Committee even sees anti-governmental tendencies….’19 Narin’iani’s comments suggest three things: first, that journalists were perfectly willing to criticise their ideological overseers in their private editorial meetings; second, that they harboured an expectation that the organisation would aid, rather than hinder, their critical dispatches. Finally, Narin’iani’s words illustrate the hierarchies at work in Soviet life: Komsomol’skaia pravda’s institutional clout could easily steamroller the connections of a provincial Komsomol organisation, but bigger targets—those better connected to the centres of power—required the active protection of the paper’s ideological overseers.
The Good and the Better
As one of the paper’s elder statesmen, Narin’iani spoke from experience. Having started his career as an essayist, Narin’iani initially found fame for his reports from the mass construction projects in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s.20 Yet impeccable journalistic credentials could not save Narin’iani from suspicion. During the 1937 purge of the paper’s staff, a Komsomol commission recommended his dismissal, citing his father’s profession as a trader, his twin brother’s links with the White Guards and work in Harbin, and a reprimand Narin’iani had received during his time as a secretary of a Komsomol cell. He was said to be ‘gossipy and divorced from life’.21 The proposal was never carried out, however, and during the war Narin’iani excelled as a front-line reporter and roving editor in Stalingrad and Belarus.22 His rising profile was confirmed after the war by a posting to Germany to cover the Nuremberg Trials. But it was only when he made the switch to satire in the late 1930s and early 1940s that Narin’iani became a household name, earning fame for his articles on the comedy of everyday life. Despite Narin’iani’s reputation as one of the country’s leading satirists, his focus on the seamier sides of existence drew critics’ ire during the late 1940s. Critics asked whether his writing was helping to eliminate social ills or drawing undue attention to them.
Such questions reared their heads with predictable regularity. Despite a flowering of satirical writing in the Soviet Union’s first decade, there were voices who worried that in a worker’s society, satire was out of place.23 In the 1930s, gentle, affirmative humour, exemplified by comedies like Volga-Volga and The Cheerful Guys suggest that critical voices were becoming less welcome.24 By the end of the decade, it had become far more difficult for satirical writers like Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work was based on the identification of the unusual, the anomalous, and the scandalous.25 The Party’s 1946 resolution on the Leningrad journals Zvezda and Leningrad singled out Zoshchenko for criticism, deriding him as a ‘vulgar’ writer whose work was ‘calculated to disorient our young people and poison their minds’.26 From 1946 onwards, satirical journals like Krokodil and the Ukrainian journal Perets’ received heightened attention from Soviet officials for focusing on ‘trivial everyday questions’, rather than ‘the plunderers of public property, the self-seekers, the bureaucrats, the manifestations of conceit, servility, and baseness’, and the ‘ideological insignificance and degeneration’ of western ‘bourgeois culture’.27 Before long, even this narrowed list of targets seemed suspect, as yet another resolution seemed to cast doubt on whether the press should target state enterprises and trade unions.28 By publicising ‘individual negative facts’ as ‘general shortcomings’, Krokodil was giving readers ‘the wrong picture of the work of these organizations’, it claimed.29
Attacks on satire came dressed in aesthetic language, so we could interpret them in aesthetic terms too: as a sign of ambiguities in the Soviet philosophy of representation. Satire could be defended when its targets represented distinct social ‘types’ [obrazy] (the stuck-up official) and tendencies (corruption, venality). Through this stereotyping [tipazh, tipizatsiia], readers would be able to recognise these characters as negative, and draw appropriate conclusions: ‘The feuilletonist is obliged to raise the fact—a random occurrence—to the level of an event concerning society’, wrote novelist and critic Valentin Kataev in February 1953.30 But it was precisely this tendency to conflate a single occurrence with society as a whole that made it suspicious: it suggested that a single bad apple might characterise the whole orchard. Even if feuilletonists had an iron-cast alibi—that of improving Soviet society—officials blamed them for magnifying society’s imperfections. Satirists were placed in an unenviable bind: readers expected them to shine a spotlight on wrong-doers and expose the negative consequences of their actions, but officials pressured them to show that such occurrences were not systemic.
Narin’iani found fame precisely because of the adeptness with which he avoided these pitfalls. His skilful use of positive and negative types, juxtaposing the well-behaved, law-abiding majority (‘us’) with the uncouth, law-skirting minority (‘them’), meant that the reader was left in no doubt about his targets. His well-known (and much anthologised) retelling of Cinderella, published in 1949, told the story of student Valentin Kramarov, who suffered abuse at the hands of his ‘wicked’ stepmother, Vera Vasilevna.31 She not only refused to cook for Valentin but also forced him to sleep on the floor without bedding, and eventually hounded him out of the marital home the day before his final examination. Luckily for Valentin, he encountered Vladimir Krasavin, a Komsomol who put him up for the night. Krasavin’s fellow Komsomols sprung into action and ‘brought him into the sunlight’. They persuaded their families to take him in and resolved to make his story public, visiting Komsomol’skaia pravda’s offices and urging them to expose this woman with a ‘wooden heart’. The article was warmly praised by colleagues for raising questions about the ‘survival of the past’ in the form of bad parenting, and for counter-balancing this negative portrayal with the tender-heartedness of Komsomol members.32 Most importantly, Narin’iani had succeeded in showing how such behaviour ‘represents an exception…that it’s not a normal event’, thereby exposing a social problem without encouraging readers to extend their critique further.33
The story ends with a denunciation of Valentin’s ‘wicked stepmother’ and also his weak-willed father, who worked at the Moscow Institute for Mechanisation and Electrification of Agriculture. His actions, the article threatened, showed that Kramarov was unfit to educate young people, and called on the Institute’s ‘public organizations’ to ‘draw the appropriate conclusions’.34 These lines highlight the close relationship between journalistic criticism and judicial authority during late Stalinism and beyond, which were often alluded to in demands for the courts, the police, or for Soviet obshchestennost’ to take decisive action.35 The satirist wrote not just a metaphorical judge, but an agent of Soviet power, whose words likely portended an unhappy fate both for Valentin’s father and stepmother. While no notice appeared as a follow-up to ‘A Wooden Heart’, other Narin’iani feuilletons published around the same time informed readers that the paper had secured reprimands and dismissals, and once, when the paper had not received its desired results, stated what it thought the outcome should be.36 Narin’iani’s satirical sketches helped the press to define ‘normality’, not just by delineating proper behaviour, but also by rallying official organisations to exercise the state’s coercive power. Rhetoric and violence were intimately linked in the world of Soviet journalism.
Despite Narin’iani’s journalistic successes, he began to encounter problems in the tense atmosphere of post-war Stalinism. By the end of the 1940s writers and critics began to argue that satire should be re-purposed for new social conditions. The idea of ‘conflictless’ literature—drama that depicted the battle between the ‘good and the better’—found fertile ground in many branches of the arts.37 It emerged at the crossing-point of two interlinked ideas: that Soviet society had eliminated class conflict, and that depicting the negative aspects of life was no longer a prerequisite. In autumn 1949, the journalist and novelist Boris Gorbatov laid out a new path for Soviet humour.38 Writing in Novyi mir, he took aim at some familiar fall-guys, such as Zoshchenko, but also satirists with established reputations like the late Il’f and Petrov, whose early works were said to have exhibited ‘bourgeois-intellectual scepticism’ and ‘nihilism’.39 Gorbatov accused satirists of ‘lag[ging] seriously behind the demands of life’ and called on them to serve the needs of the present rather than using the forms of the past.40 The implication was that satire belonged to a history fraught with problems, and that a responsible author would seek to represent the world differently. Instead of clashes, Gorbatov demanded a satire that would be ‘life-affirming, optimistic and bright’.41 Soviet humour, he wrote ‘not only castigates, but also affirms our truth, our way of life and our ideals in the sharp struggle against capitalist untruth’.42 While his description did not rule conflict out entirely, satirists became wary of writing about ‘atypical’ events and began to think twice about ‘whether such an event was suitable for satire’.43 Instead, as Evgeny Dobrenko notes, they shifted focus to ‘good people and discrete and easily corrected shortcomings’.44
Gorbatov’s article followed on the heels of the Eleventh Komsomol Congress, which had taken place in April 1949. There, Komsomol’skaia pravda had been sharply criticised by a number of speakers for a lack of positive exemplars. A. Kanapin, First Secretary in Kazakhstan, claimed that the paper’s feuilletons depicted instances of ‘petty-bourgeois vulgarity [meshchanstvo], selfishness and greed’ among young people, and served to produce a mood of ‘censure and disgust’.45 The critical mood extended to the paper’s redaktsiia. Veteran correspondent Evgeny Riabchikov argued that Narin’iani’s lack of positivity was socially damaging: ‘We expect positive feuilletons from Narin’iani, we expect feuilletons which would uncover some new phenomena, so that he shows the positive…so that his pieces will grow and multiply the good things….’46 And while Vladimir Dudintsev didn’t entirely agree with the idea of the positive feuilleton, even the would-be author of Not By Bread Alone argued that a Narin’iani article about a woman who lived a dissolute life was mere gossip: ‘90 percent of this feuilleton is taken up with narrating in the most straightforward way everything that was wretched….’47 For him, as for most of his colleagues, a feuilleton was merely an effective means of ‘banish[ing] from society’ negative tendencies through positive exemplars.48 Even as Narin’iani defended himself against his critics, he pointed to the positive exemplars in his writings, rather than arguing that satire required exaggeration: such viewpoints were out of place in the current climate.49
Not everybody at the paper agreed with the climate of enforced positivity. Dmitrii Goriunov, Blatin’s replacement as editor in chief, would emerge as one of the most passionate supporters of press criticism. Born in 1915 in the small town of Kovrov, Goriunov came from the Komsomol apparat, working his way up from regional Komsomol committees to the Central Committee. Having graduated from the Komsomol’s Higher Party School in 1949, Goriunov suddenly found himself at the helm after Blatin’s sacking.50 Giving a speech to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the paper in May 1950, he spoke of the huge number of letters criticising shortcomings in Soviet life. ‘Readers’, he proclaimed, ‘refuse to reconcile themselves with a lack of ideas, bureaucratism, red-tape, and shoddy work in all its forms’, and criticised the paper for printing a lack of critical material, and for the lack of analytical rigour in the articles it did print.51 In spite of his support for press criticism, Goriunov’s early years as editor were a time of immense frustration, in which critical campaigns were largely directed from above, and where journalists’ independent energies attracted suspicion. Looking back on this period many years later, Goriunov recalled that ‘any independent thought was considered almost as dangerous ad-libbing [otsebiatina], [and] all efforts were directed towards retelling what had already been said without deviating from it one little bit’.52 In this atmosphere it proved near-impossible for journalists to engage in the practice of criticism as they might have liked.
The same was true for Narin’iani, who was forced to pen more positive stories and even, he told colleagues, considered giving up on satire.53 As Valentiv Kataev observed approvingly in a review of his work in 1952, Narin’iani’s new direction meant that he was no longer simply an ‘exposer’ of social ills.54 Instead of corrupt officials, bad parents, or nightmare neighbours, many of Narin’iani’s sketches from late 1940s onwards deal with ‘positive’ subjects: a portrait of a world-leading doctor, an affectionate article about the headaches facing a housing superintendent, or a warm profile of a local man who spent his free time improving his hometown.55 In one positive feuilleton, Narin’iani recounted a meeting with Aleksandr Trotskii, a 10-year-old Wunderkind from Leningrad. The article makes much of the mismatch between the child-poet’s mature lyrical voice and his childish demeanour, but does without conflict. In a reversal of the usual prohibition against ‘generalising’, Narin’iani was on safe ground in concluding that this exceptional case expressed the norm: ‘There are many gifted children in our country. We know of many talented child musicians, chess players, mathematicians, and artists. I would like to believe that the talent of Shurik will develop in the years to come as it becomes fortified with life experience and bears fruit.’56 By the early 1950s, positive satire was becoming more common, but it was unclear whether merited the name: subsequent anthologies of Narin’iani’s writings placed these articles in a section of ‘essays’. Aleksandr Raskin, the husband of Frida Vigdorova, had surely been right when he wrote in 1945 that the ‘positive feuilleton’ was a contradiction in terms.57
Although the debate was couched in terms of aesthetics, debates about criticism and self-criticism should also be read as a statement of unease about journalists’ governmental role. Journalists would not have understood it like that, of course, but the furore around negative examples and their effects on reader behaviour was motivated by a fear that journalists were unable to guide their readers’ behaviour. This much was evident from the anxious tones in which journalists talked about Narin’iani’s sketches: if he censured the behaviour of their protagonists, was that really sufficient to prevent readers from copying their misdeeds? The demand for ‘social optimism’ was also, then, a discussion about the journalist’s ability—or lack of it—to influence readers’ conduct.58 Over time, this vision of the newspaper as a repository of positive examples would come to appear more damaging than the alternative. Positive satire consolidated the system as it was, rather than eliminating obstacles to the future. After Stalin’s death, calls for more robust criticism would grow ever louder.
Self-Criticism after the Twentieth Party Congress
The watershed event in post-war Soviet life was an unexpected act of criticism and self-criticism. As Nikita Khrushchev stood before the assembled dignitaries at the Twentieth Party Congress to deliver his ‘secret’ speech, he was engaging in a ritual of denunciation with deep historical roots. In his speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s attacks on Party members and national minorities, as well as his unpreparedness for the German invasion and his paranoid outbursts after World War II. At the heart of his address was a powerful call for the return of ‘socialist legality’ and ‘Leninist principles’, as well as the reimplementation of criticism and self-criticism ‘from top to bottom’.59 It is well documented that rank-and-file Party members were left confused and believed Khrushchev had not done enough to explore his own culpability.60 In attempts to explain the speech to its confused readers, Pravda placed the speech within the Party’s long-standing traditions, claiming that it was an act of ‘courageous self-criticism’ and ‘inner party democracy’.61 This was not entirely untrue, given that officials had spent the last few years trying to revive critical practices in the press and Party, and had issued resolutions to this effect in 1954.62 The year after, Khrushchev had claimed that journalists who failed to expose errors because they feared reprisals were out of place in Soviet journalism: ‘such a line of work is not for cowards’, he argued.63 Despite these precedents, the speech’s impact proved difficult to contain, particularly because its revelations encouraged officials to rethink their own attitude to authority.64
For journalists, discussions of the ‘cult of personality’ started with their editor. While Goriunov came off unscathed, it was a different story at Izvestiia, where colleagues roundly condemned Editor-in-Chief Konstantin Gubin’s high-handed style and his refusal to listen to the creative initiatives of his staff.65 Some measure of Gubin’s conservatism can be glimpsed in his plea—out of place in the heady climate of March 1956, though perhaps faithful to Khrushchev’s aims—that colleagues should not ‘completely negate the achievements of I.V. Stalin’. He added: ‘If we completely negated his positive role, then it would be impossible to understand how the cult of personality was created’.66 Staff at the paper were outraged at his defence and asserted that the editor’s ‘unhealthy attitude to criticism’ was one of the cult of personality’s main consequences.67 Even at Pravda, where a member of the Party’s Central Committee held the reins, Dmitrii Shepilov was subject to criticism, albeit milder, for his inattentiveness to the paper’s work.68 Discussions at Komsomol’skaia pravda, while lacking the iconoclastic edge of those at the country’s two largest papers, make plain the sense of shock that Khrushchev’s revelations engendered. At the first post-Congress editorial letuchka, that week’s reviewer, Semyon Garbuzov, began by admitting to colleagues: ‘I have a very difficult task. I don’t know how I’ll manage it’, adding that there was ‘a great deal to reconsider, many values to reappraise’, and that the paper needed to ‘reject many certainties and habitual forms and find new ones’.69 Unusually for a post-1953 meeting, where conversation was normally free-flowing, the transcript indicates a period of silence after Garbuzov’s address.70
Despite their uncertainty, the fundamental importance of finding a new editorial line was not lost on the paper’s staff. In an editorial on 1 March, the paper spoke of the cult of personality being ‘alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism’ and as ‘diminishing the role of the party and working masses’.71 Letters told them that these cryptic references confused readers rather than reassuring them, however. The workers of one factory shop provided their own interpretation of the paper’s recent editorial: ‘An important person comes along, i.e. a manager, and he never says “hello”, even though he should say “hello”; people who want to show themselves to be better and more cultured than everyone else and have suits and dresses made to order, etc.’ ‘If you can’, they asked, ‘then please tell us in Komsomol’skaia pravda or by letter whether we understood correctly or not’.72 But journalists were only marginally less confused than readers and responding to their enquiries was, as deputy editor Aleksei Adzhubei admitted, a ‘very important task, but not a very easy one’.73 But in spite of their difficulties intuiting the exact meaning of the Congress, journalists rapidly set about changing the character of their work.
Khrushchev’s frequent mention of the need for (socialist, revolutionary) legality was immediately taken as a call for a change in the relationship between rulers and ruled. Attacks on bureaucracy and lawlessness became the means by which the Congress was translated onto the pages of national newspapers. Around two months after the end of the Twentieth Party Congress, Pravda Editor-in-Chief Dmitrii Shepilov found fault with many aspects of the paper’s work.74 Correspondent Ivan Pustovalov admitted that his department had failed to take on bureaucracy within ministries, central authorities, and administration. ‘We still don’t have articles which would criticise a whole system of work of a certain ministry and its leaders…We don’t go further with criticism of raikoms and gorkoms. This is our great mistake. We need to subject high-level organisations to criticism, too.’75 In Pustovalov’s account, criticism was crucial in eliminating the remnants of the cult of personality and for ensuring the smoother running of the Soviet system. At Izvestiia, too, there were similar calls for an end to the cult. Journalist A. Semenov evoked the presence of a vast system of mini-fiefdoms in industry and politics, ruled by the principle of one-person rule [edinonachalie]:
‘My factory,’ says the Director; ‘My oblast’, says the Secretary of the obkom. In these words we hear the belittling of the role of the masses, and an attempt to attribute successes to one person. We need to dethrone vozhd-ism in the regions. […] We still have much bureaucracy. One of the reasons for that is the cult of personality. Bureaucratism appears in many forms, including a negligent attitude to the needs of individuals.76
Semenov saw the consequences of ‘vozhdizm’ closer to home, claiming that the poor state of Izvestiia’s offices were part of the problem. But the problem went beyond a leaky ceiling and noisy ventilators: ‘how many letters reach the editorial offices with complaints about bureaucrats? We don’t do a good job of struggling against bureaucrats through the newspaper’, he concluded.77 The paper’s editorial debates suggest that such demands were not put into practice. Although Gubin was sharply criticised in meetings, the combative energy of the paper’s rebels slowly drained away, and Gubin remained in post until 1959.78
Criticism and the Courts
Wide-ranging debates at the country’s leading newspapers show that Komsomol’skaia pravda’s critical line was the expression of a wider impulse in the profession. After a sudden spike in critical letters, journalists at the paper estimated that 70—perhaps even 80—percent of the paper’s postbag now comprised complaints, many from workers who had been unfairly dismissed or Komsomol members complaining about excessive rigidity in decision-making.79 As a correspondent in the Department of Letters, Vladimir Babanov was only too aware of this. After the Congress he emerged as the champion of a more critical line, arguing that the two key tasks of the paper were to observe socialist legality and protect the rights of youth. He read out a letter about a worker who had been injured in an accident but who, because of bureaucratic indifference, had been unable to obtain the benefits to which he was entitled. Babanov urged the paper to investigate and to ‘stand up for young people, to fight for the preservation of their rights’.80
T. Iakovlev’s ‘The Case of the Urn’, published in Komsomol’skaia pravda on March 21, provides an example of the sort of article Babanov wanted to see.81 The young sobkor’s article told the story of a student in Burnar in Chuvashiia who was sentenced to two years in jail for extinguishing a cigarette in a mug. The article was an indictment, not just of the arbitrariness of the head of the school who reported the matter to the police, but also the entire system of justice, which circumvented due process to secure a guilty verdict. The paper condemned the legal process as ‘judicial wilfulness’, called the evidence a ‘doctoring of the facts’, and criticised the judicial apparatus for failing to see ‘behind the protocols and conclusions [in the court report] a living, suffering boy’. When the judge, confronted by the paper, suggested that ‘in any line of work there are always defects’, the paper replied: ‘Where we are concerned with the fate of a person, such reasoning cannot be taken into account. Lawlessness can never be justified’.
At that week’s editorial meeting, Akhiiar Kireev, the paper’s correspondent for Bashkiria, praised the article as a ‘defence of the Soviet person’ and urged colleagues to canvass judicial organs to ensure that ‘there are fewer people who continue to breach the rights of the Soviet individual’.82 Such articles, which journalists clearly saw as a means to transform their society, were part of a broader shift in the ways journalists understood the role of the newspaper—and, by extension, their own social role.83 According to Thomas C. Wolfe, Thaw journalists’ ‘governing’ role involved a double move: first, journalists would demonstrate the forms of conduct, and the types of relations, that would create a harmonious Soviet society. Second, they would place themselves at the forefront of that social transformation as ‘moral custodian[s]’, informed by the values of ‘compassion and critique’.84 One could read the paper’s new line as a way for journalists to atone for past sins by re-positioning themselves as compassion-filled public servants. Journalists used their power not just to change readers’ conduct, but also to influence the state’s judicial and policing apparatus. In a series of cases between 1957 and 1959, editors worked behind the scenes to secure the reversal of judicial decisions ranging from a case of bribery, to an allegation of rape and another of police corruption.85 It was this combination of journalistic powers—access to the public sphere and access to the levers of the carceral state—that made the Thaw journalist a particularly formidable actor.
In a society where judicial checks and balances were weak, however, the press’s twin powers could often acquire a sinister colouring. It was barely three years since newspaper headlines had demanded harsh action against medics caught up in the fabricated ‘doctor’s plot’. And while the reformist climate of the post-Stalin years helped blunt the sharper edges of newspaper rhetoric, there were still occasions—often relating to hooliganism—where newspapers called for harsher punishment.86 Even when journalists wanted to soften the court’s punishment—or eliminate it entirely—their perceived connection to the courts sometimes led to the exact opposite outcome. In 1958, Babanov told the story of a visitor to the paper’s reception who had accused a man of beating his own mother, driving her out of the house and causing her death—all to get hold of her savings.87 The paper passed the complaint to the procurator, and the suspect spent six months in custody before his case went to trial. It rapidly emerged, however, that the complaint was unfounded: more than a dozen witnesses testified on behalf of the defendant, while the prosecution could only muster one. But the judge interpreted the presence of a journalist in the courtroom as a sign that he needed to deliver a guilty verdict which, despite the shaky evidence, he duly did. Thanks to Babanov’s intercession, the paper managed to secure an appeal, and was confident that the guilty verdict would be overturned. Nevertheless, the case demonstrated the press’s power in judicial matters: judges would adjourn cases to speak to journalists, and seek to do the paper’s bidding rather than listen to the evidence. For that reason, it was all too easy for judges to feel pressured to ‘convict a person for nothing’.88
Student Unrest and the Hungary Effect
Both in this case, and in the cases of bribery, rape, and corruption mentioned earlier, all taking place between 1957 and 1959, the paper sought to overturn judicial decisions. But the fact that it made those representations in private, rather than in the newspaper, suggests that something changed during 1956. To understand what, it is necessary to turn our lens on a crucial part of the paper’s audience: students. The Twentieth Party Congress was a formative event for Soviet student body.89 The questions that Khrushchev’s speech raised—and those he failed to answer—became the starting point for a re-examination of the assumptions underpinning public life. This process of root-and-branch questioning turned Komsomol organisations and other public organisations into ‘debating societies which often flaunted control from above.’90 As a new, more combative, relationship emerged between a restive student body and a university hierarchy that had hitherto enjoyed unquestioned authority, the potential for conflict was obvious.
The fractious relationship between students and officials was the subject of an article by Nina Aleksandrova and A. Tarasov, who focused on two students from a technical institute in Taganrog who were expelled for asking ‘unseemly’ questions at a seminar.91 The authors printed a list of their questions, which included queries about potential obsolescence of machinery under Soviet conditions, wage scales, product shortages, and peaceful coexistence. Yes, the article argued, the students’ questions and ideas were sometimes incorrect, but a good teacher should have been able to answer them. An unwillingness to do so, they claimed, was alien to the spirit of Marxism, which was a living theory rather than a set of dogmas. And, in a phrase that echoes across the Thaw, they quoted from the institute’s indictment: ‘The students, it is said, not only asked questions but expressed “their own ideas” and argued. Is that a sin?’ The institute’s actions, the article argued, were anti-pedagogical: students who did not understand would now be afraid to ask for explanations.
Aleksandrova and Tarasov saw in the questioning attitude of the student body a natural—and necessary—reaction to the unsettling revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress. The situation they describe—of students confused by the omissions of the Secret Speech and setting off on their own quest for explanations—was explicitly endorsed by the authors who believed that this was the only way for the country to overcome the cult of personality.92 But within a few months, reports such as these, with their faint tone of iconoclasm, began to look dangerous. What turned journalists’ passionate advocacy for free thought into dangerous subversion was the situation beyond the Soviet Union’s borders. First in Poland in June, then in Hungary in October and November, protests threatened Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Coupled with unpredictable responses to the Secret Speech (both for and against), and continued problems with so-called ‘hooliganism’, it is easy to understand why officials began to take fright. And they were soon joined by a number of journalists.
Hungary was the moment that the unstable post-Congress consensus, in which journalists saw it as their role to speak out against abuses, started to unravel. The paper was slow to react to the tensions, hamstrung by its own uncertainty about the political significance of the events and the manner in which they should be reported.93 Discussions in the aftermath of the uprising brought to the fore a tension between the press’s watchdog function and its propaganda function. The regime began to place increased pressure on newspapers to stabilise the country’s foundations rather than promoting change. The Soviet intervention had placed a harsh international spotlight on the country’s actions and critical articles of any stripe were eagerly seized upon by the western press. At the first post-Hungary letuchka, Vasilii Khomus’kov told colleagues of an unfortunate incident at a press conference. The Soviet leadership had put out feelers about hosting the 1964 Olympics in Moscow, and an American correspondent asked the Chairman of the All-Union Committee of Physical Culture, a certain Romanov, about the possibility. Romanov replied that the Soviet Union had capacity to do so, and a range of high-quality sporting facilities. However, an article had recently appeared in Komsomol’skaia pravda about problems with drainage at the newly-built Luzhniki stadium in Moscow, which had turned the running track to sludge in wet weather, and endangered spectators’ safety.94 Asked about the article, Romanov tied himself in knots, first asserting that everything was fine, and then, when asked whether the paper had printed something untrue, meekly replied that journalists merely wanted things to be perfect, and, resurrecting a Stalinist slogan, claimed that this was merely a conflict between ‘the good and the excellent’.95 After the press conference, Romanov demanded to know why the paper had published such an article, and complained that Deputy Editor Aleksei Adzhubei had ‘aired dirty washing’ in public.96 Khomus’kov drew his own conclusions from the affair, pointing out that bureaucrats frequently dealt with criticism in the same high-handed way. They were concerned ‘not with a desire to make everything as good as it can be, but for a quiet life’.97
However, in the conditions of a diplomatic Cold War, where every problem was apt to be seized upon by the other side, another interpretation was possible: that critical articles handed the enemy a propaganda victory. The Luzhniki incident showed how criticism could become an embarrassment on the international stage and from here it was a short step to the idea that all criticism was potentially damaging, and should only be voiced in private. In a climate of heightened tensions around the mass media’s role in events in Hungary and Poland, the capacity for negative materials to cause similar problems in the Soviet Union was acutely felt. At the beginning of 1957, a Komsomol report suggested that the paper’s critical articles were giving rise to troublesome stories in the foreign media.98 Articles on the problems of Soviet youth started to appear with greater frequency in the western press, and collections of these texts were pored over by Agitprop officials.99
Before long, some of the paper’s journalists started to express disquiet about the implications of the paper’s critical line. In mid-November 1956, Iurii Komolov, the paper’s reviewer for that week, criticised what he called a ‘pseudo-revolutionary’ inclination among staff.100 He said that, while he supported colleagues’ desire to ‘speak sharply and act sharply’, their ‘superficial’ critiques would only satisfy ‘vulgar and philistine critics’ of Soviet shortcomings. In Komolov’s address, he expressed the importance of ‘marking off’ these individuals so that they would not become ‘heroes of the leftist crowd’ who could do ‘real damage’ to the paper’s cause. In an era in which the boundaries between friend and enemy, principled critic and leftist demagogue, had become blurred, Komolov seemed to argue that the paper needed to cut through the fog and show who was a genuine critic and who was a demagogue. This needed to be done, he claimed, through well-aimed articles that hit their target, rather than the more scattershot approach to criticism the paper had been taking. Criticism was not a good in itself, but a means to a social end, Komolov suggested.
Satire and Sensationalism
One of Komolov’s targets was an article published a few months before which had become a national talking point. Il’ia Shatunovskii and Allan Starodub’s satirical feuilleton, ‘Once More on Mould’, examined the high-living lifestyle of the children of the political elite, and achieved notable success by pushing prosecutors to reconsider the sentences they handed down. But amid widespread fears of a ‘youth crisis’, and at a time when the Party was looking for stability rather than activism, the article ignited questions about the wisdom of the paper’s campaign and whether, despite its condemnatory tone, the authors had titillated readers with their depictions of crime and debauchery.
The appearance of Shatunovskii and Starodub’s article shows that the era of the ‘positive feuilleton’ had been short lived. Between 1952 and 1954, the theory of ‘conflictlessness’, under which Narin’iani had suffered, came under attack.101 Articles in a range of publications, including Pravda, referred to the negative effects of positive satire, and reaffirmed the importance of exaggeration and ridicule in exposing the ‘ills of life’.102 Only ‘ruthless satire’, wrote critic Vladimir Ognev, would allow journalists to ‘sweep away everything that hinders our path to Communism’.103 Journalists began to discuss the difficulties of satirical writing under Stalin and discussed ways to re-establish the feuilleton as a revolutionary medium, driving the country towards communism.104
By the end of the 1950s, Il’ia Shatunovskii was a household name, but at the time of Stalin’s death in March 1953 he was still a relative unknown. A fighter pilot during the war, Shatunovskii had graduated from the Central Komsomol School, and soon became a fixture in the paper’s Department of Propaganda.105 After Narin’iani left the paper for a prestigious role at Pravda in 1952, Shatunovskii became the paper’s leading satirist. Compared with his time drafting Party propaganda, Shatunovskii would recall that his years as a satirist were much easier, since his work was not as closely examined by Soviet authorities: propaganda was supervised by the Komsomol’s Department of Propaganda, but a Department of Satire? No such thing.106 Shatunovskii was a divisive figure in Soviet journalism. In an interview in 2003, Shatunovskii claimed that his credo had always been to ‘stand for truth and justice’.107 But his understanding of those terms was distinctly party-minded in ways that became difficult to defend in later life. While Shatunovskii would vehemently claim never to have written about dissidents, in reality he attacked the mathematician and human rights activist Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, who even took him to court for libel.108 Shatunovskii’s contradictory political convictions were on full display at Komsomol’skaia pravda, where he was sometimes prepared to advocate new and radical solutions, but equally ready to denounce colleagues when the political winds changed direction.109
Shatunovskii made his name in November 1953 with a feuilleton that lived long in the memory.110 ‘Mould’, co-written with fellow satirist Boris Protopopov, told the tale of young people from elite families who spent their days drinking and stealing, and eventually turned to murder to fuel their fast-living lifestyle.111 A follow-up article, ‘Once More on Mould’, returned to the dubious behaviour of the children of the Soviet elite. Co-written with correspondent Allan Starodub, and published in August 1956, the article’s target was a group of young women whose fathers had attained high status in the army.112 While their tastes were the same as in the 1953 article—drinking, smoking, shopping and ‘bacchanalia’—the protagonists in this story were slightly less extreme in their criminality: theft rather than killing.
These iconic articles fanned the flames of a broader ‘moral panic’ around youth behaviour, as officials, journalists, pedagogues, and critics circled around the question: who is to be blamed? If the individual was a product of the economic base, then how had the Soviet Union—a society free from exploitation—produced something akin to the ‘gilded youth’ of the nineteenth century? The answer, once again, was to blame parents who had ‘failed to instil in their children a respect for and fidelity to work’ and turned a blind eye to the indiscipline of their children. Vera Panova’s novella Seasons of the Year (1953) featured a character who rebels against his Party-member parents and ultimately becomes involved a criminal gang. There, the fault lies with the mother, whose tireless work for the Party led her to ‘literally ruin’ her son.113 Stories in other periodicals ran with the same theme.114 In the two articles on ‘mould’, the elite status of the parents allowed journalists to ‘de-socialise’ the problem yet further. Just as Narin’iani had described one of his targets as the sort of woman ‘one doesn’t invite to dinner’, drawing a convenient distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the high-ranking status of the children and parents allowed Shatunovskii to imply that the problem stemmed from an out-of-touch elite whose behaviour was quite unlike that of the Soviet mainstream. In ‘Once More on Mould’, the authors devote much space to discussing the behaviour of its female protagonists, whose drinking, smoking, and promiscuity posed a threat to established norms of gender propriety.115
The gap between readers and protagonists, between ordinary and elite, acquired a potentially subversive edge. In their conclusions to both articles, the authors sounded a warning to young people who sought an ‘easy and carefree life’, but also to their parents, who had failed to inculcate ‘respect and fidelity to work’ in their children and believed that social status was hereditary. ‘In our country’, ‘Mould’ concluded, ‘everybody lives according to their labour’.116 Perhaps for that reason, Shatunovskii took pains to argue that these behaviours were atypical for Soviet society: ‘We have returned once more to a discussion of mould not because there is a lot of it but because among healthy, joyous Soviet youth there should be none at all.’117 In other words, these cases were unrepresentative of the whole, but still required publicity to help eradicate them entirely.
The authors’ attempt to paint this case as a deviation from the norm was probably an attempt to anticipate and deflect charges of sensationalism. Satirists writing about social problems raised the same questions about ‘typicality’ that plagued journalists before Stalin’s death. Could writers ever be sure that the reader’s sympathy was with the law enforcers, the Party committees, and the Komsomols, rather than with speculators, thieves, and drinkers? In his address at the First Journalists’ Congress in Moscow, Krokodil editor M. Semenov argued that some satirists were attracted only to the darker sides of life: ‘It sometimes happens that a person comes along and says: “What a brilliant theme for a feuilleton! You know, a person squandered a hundred thousand, burned down a pig farm, and beat up a pensioner! These are brilliant facts for a feuilleton”. But what’s so great about it? They’re just pathological occurrences.’118 By spending excessive amounts of time focusing on extreme events instead of ‘great moral and ethical themes’ journalists were distorting their readers’ image of the everyday, Semenov claimed.
Similar criticisms were raised about Shatunovskii’s articles. Colleagues upbraided him for romanticising the anti-heroes of one article, and suggested that the detailed description of their actions might encourage the very behaviours it wanted to critique.119 It isn’t difficult to see why. Both articles contain descriptions of the lifestyles of the country’s gilded youth, including brief snippets of slang, and mentions of the dances they danced, and the drinks they sipped—all of which must have piqued readers’ curiosity. Journalists criticised Shatunovskii for ‘sensationalism’ and reproached him for failing to ‘think through’ the consequences of youth hooliganism.120 Nina Aleksandrovna, one of the paper’s leading essayists, accused the paper of failing to back the article up with a plan to discuss the question more widely: ‘We published material which generated a sensation and then stopped’.121 These criticisms lay bare a pervasive fear within a crime-obsessed society that the representations of negative youth behaviours could have unintended consequences.122
Not all readers shared the misgivings of Shatunovskii’s colleagues. One such reader was Nikita Khrushchev who, upon reading ‘Mould’, commented to his children that it contained lessons that needed to be learned ‘so we don’t raise our children as spoiled little noblemen and shirkers’.123 Shatunovskii’s articles also spurred discussion among the public and the intelligentsia, who took wildly differing views about the article’s merits.124 Although he was not the first to employ the term ‘mould’ (it had been used in the paper as early as 1945 to describe young hooligans), Shatunovskii’s articles certainly popularised it.125 Before long, ‘mould’ began to acquire a life of its own, as journalists, artists, writers, and members of the public began to encounter mould on the streets.126 Readers wrote to the paper in their hundreds to respond both to Shatunovskii’s article and, more broadly, to the related phenomenon of the stiliagi: fashion-obsessed individuals whose love of clothes, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll caused a scandal.127 While many of those letters were attacks, others expressed their anguish at having become a target of abuse: some for wearing their collar upturned, others for sporting earrings. An article by Elena Rusakova argued against the indiscriminate targeting of individuals, noting that the desire to make outcasts of others led to ‘bitterness, hurt, the torment of unwarranted shame’, which would, in the end, lead to ‘animosity’.128 The article won over hostile colleagues, who agreed with the article’s main message that one could be ‘garishly dressed’ but still have a Soviet heart beating beneath those clothes.129
Articles like Rusakova’s were unusual in the midst of this moral panic, however. Readers believed the paper was justified in taking on ‘mould’, and called for more articles to explain the reasons for its appearance.130 A letter from ‘Renata’, a girl worried that her 7-year-old brother had started stealing, and might therefore be ‘mould’, shows how the term had ceased to be a mere insult, but instead a vernacular apparatus for interpreting society.131 Renata wrote of arguments with her mother, who believed that the best way to discipline her child was to ‘influence the child’s consciousness’. Evidently worried that her family might be to blame, Renata reiterated that she was a good student and Komsomol member who closely read the newspaper, but remained confused as to how ‘mould’ was growing in her family, and at such an early age. She appealed to the authors for advice to ensure her brother didn’t grow into ‘real mould’. In response, the authors, having first ‘armed [them]selves with reputable works on pedagogy’ decided to pass on a letter from a reader from Saratov, who recounted a similar case which was resolved only when the father beat his son.132 Mirroring the blind spots of the individual approach to pedagogy, by advocating individual solutions to systemic problems, Shatunovskii steered the reader away from the idea of a youth crisis, and argued that solutions were to be found in a violent reassertion of patriarchal authority.
Tellingly, it was the paper’s attempts to shift the article’s meaning from parenting to elite privilege that exposed Soviet satire’s explosive potential. In October 1956, the paper published a follow-up report on the trial of the three young women which complained about the one-year prison sentences, which it attributed to the court’s indulgent treatment of the elite.133 As the article stated: ‘The Soviet court is strict, but just and impartial. It does not draw distinctions between people; everyone is equal before it in the eyes of the law. This is why our public reacts so strongly to court sentences which could give rise to false rumours.’134 By December, the Assistant Procurator-General V.A. Boldyrev was forced to explain why the courts sometimes reached verdicts that the public did not agree with. Nevertheless, he noted the paper’s reaction to the verdict, and promised that ‘additional measures’ would follow from the prosecutor.135 This follow-up article, in which journalists were able to speak on behalf of the public to secure a required judicial outcome, yet again betrays the intimate relationship between journalist and judiciary in an authoritarian state. Journalists were subject to attacks from bureaucrats, but at the same time possessed the possibility of securing their own desired outcomes in the name of public opinion.
In spite of the paper’s apparent victory, more radical journalists felt that the paper had not gone far enough. Boris Pankin, a young graduate from Moscow State University’s prestigious journalism faculty, was present in the courtroom at the trial and wrote the follow-up article. He noted that readers had protested against the paper’s timidity and he railed against the interference of the Komsomol’s leadership in the preparation of the article. At an editorial letuchka in early November he recounted a ‘laughable’ scene where Goriunov was forced to read his article over the phone to Komsomol First Secretary Aleksandr Shelepin, ‘as if it were some kind of counter-revolutionary article’. He was especially vexed about the editors striking out the most glaring fact in the case: the fact that the father one of the accused was a leading government minister.136 Readers who had first-hand information about the case complained that it had failed to ‘follow things through’, and Pankin tartly observed that ‘Shelepin and the Komsomol Central Committee often interfere with our bravery.’ Colleagues agreed: ‘If we’re bold enough to print the article, then let’s be bold enough to ask Comrade Bulganin [the Chairman of the Council of Ministers—S.H.] about the Council of Ministers’ relationship to the Minister. If we’re not bold enough then we shouldn’t have printed the article so we don’t inflame passions’, commented Mikhail Sokolov.137 The paper should either have gone all out for the Minister’s head, he seemed to suggest, or not bothered at all.
Despite these criticisms, the paper’s activist stance was a success: because of its articles, the court had been forced to reconsider its judgement. But journalists like Iurii Komolov were unnerved by Pankin’s tone, and in his attack on colleagues, discussed in the previous section, Komolov condemned journalists ‘who think they’re uber-sharp people, who don’t like it when certain material doesn’t appear, who think that the editorial board are reactionaries, and the Central Committee of the Komsomol are too.’138 Such an exchange suggests that long before the end of the year, more cautious voices were already beginning to question the paper’s combative attitude to authority.139
How Criticism was Extinguished
Boris Pankin had good reason to be concerned about these attacks. As Komolov made his comments in November, Pankin was putting the finishing touches to a hard-hitting exposé based on events in Kaluga oblast’ near Moscow. Entitled ‘How the “Torch” was Extinguished’, the article recounted the fraught relationship between the initiators of the Kaluga Torch, a ‘youth initiative club’, and the local authorities.140 ‘Youth initiative clubs’ were a child of the post-Stalin period. Promoted heavily by the Komsomol during and after the Twentieth Party Congress, they stressed independent activity rather than hierarchy. They allowed young people greater autonomy in choosing their everyday activities and, the Komsomol leadership hoped, would restore young people’s enthusiasm for state-sponsored leisure.141
Pankin’s article detailed the range of activities that took place within the Kaluga Torch. It convened a ‘discussion club’, organised excursions, photography lessons, winter sports, and formed a ‘flying brigade’: a rerun of a pre-war Komsomol initiative to investigate social problems.142 While the dull fare of Komsomol activities was a frequent basis for criticism, the ‘Torch’ offered something different: it was a club run by young people for young people—something to which the paper had previously given its support. Pankin’s article, published on 9 December, censured local officials, showing how the local bureaucracy had connived to obstruct the club’s activities and shut it down. At the heart of Pankin’s article was a conflict between the volunteer-initiators of the club, variously described as ‘lively’, ‘cheerful’, and ‘smiling’, and the grey bureaucrats who accused the founders of ‘show[ing] too much initiative’. In prizing rules over initiative, Pankin argued that officials were stifling young people’s ability to innovate: ‘The overcautious do not love the new but fear it. But without searching for the new, there can be no interesting Komsomol life’.
Pankin’s article met with a positive response. At an editorial meeting on 17 December, arts critic Natella Lordkipanidze cited him as an example for other journalists to follow—someone who didn’t pull his punches and was willing to ‘think and analyse’ and ‘generalise’. ‘Only Boris Pankin decided to criticise even the Secretary of the raikom of the Party and to reveal what was going on, to dot the “i”. There’s not any sharpness, or depth in many critical materials’, she argued.143 Lordkipanidze’s comments suggest that, notwithstanding the paper’s gradual shift away from its critical line, there remained a powerful faction at the paper who believed that criticism could uproot the cult of personality. Lordkipanidze’s mention of ‘generalising’ also hinted at a challenge to the informal rule ‘Criticise, but don’t generalise!’ whereby journalists were supposed to limit their analysis to individual errors rather than systemic problems.144 Press criticism, she seemed to suggest, ought to move from the identification of isolated errors towards a broader critique.
But just two days after this meeting, two ‘closed letters’ from the Central Committee, one discussing the use of ‘social forces’ in fighting delinquency, and another on unhealthy moods amongst students, changed the tone of the debate.145 The latter referred to events in Hungary, intellectuals’ responses to Dudintsev’s ‘Not By Bread Alone’, foreign radio broadcasts, and articles in the press which showed Soviet reality ‘in an incorrect light’.146 At a Party meeting to discuss the letters, Il’ia Kotenko, a distinguished correspondent at the paper, repeated earlier criticisms of ‘demagogues’, argued that the paper needed to take a tougher line on Novyi mir for breaching the tenets of Socialist Realism and asked for more material on the ‘positive hero’ as a means for educating young people.147 At the same meeting, Shatunovskii, under attack for his article on mould, trod a more conciliatory line, admitting that the paper had ‘created a clamorous atmosphere and given nourishment to demagogues and enemies’, with ‘poorly-qualified articles’. And, in a line that was frequently repeated over the course of the following year, he argued that while criticism was essential, it needed to be well targeted: ‘One well-founded, efficient article is better than a constant screeching tone’.148
Initially, it seemed that Pankin’s article represented such an ‘efficient’ article. It formed part of a broader, co-ordinated campaign by the initiators of the club to appeal against the obkom’s decision, which eventually led the Komsomol Central Committee to re-open the club.149 Following Pankin’s article, the Kaluga obkom admitted its errors and promised support for the initiative.150 However, powerful elements within the Party and Komsomol apparatus remained wary of the energies unleashed by ‘initiative clubs’, most likely because university students’ boldness had temporarily called all manner of grass-roots activities into question. That same month, an official within the Ministry of Culture wrote to the Komsomol to complain about initiative clubs for creating a ‘Komsomol within the Komsomol’ and explicitly criticised Komsomol’skaia pravda for defending the Kaluga Torch.151
This was the first salvo in a campaign during which, over the course of a month, the paper’s victory would be snatched from its grasp. It culminated in an admission of defeat in January 1957, as Dmitrii Goriunov told colleagues about his appearance before the Komsomol Central Committee.152 Those present at the meeting identified dozens of problems with the paper’s work, Goriunov reported. Among the litany of complaints, including the significant charge that the paper was too distant from the Komsomol’s Central Committee, by far the weightiest criticism was that the paper had written about negative aspects of Soviet life ‘more vividly than the positive’ and, connected with this, that it had failed to print sufficient material on positive heroes.153 A subsequent Agitprop report concluded that the paper printed two to three times as much critical material as positive stories which, the officials argued, led to negative stories in the foreign press.154 Even from the transcript, it is clear that the weight of the attacks shocked Goriunov:
I repeat that the discussion was quite sharp and I recognise that, having left the Central Committee, for a few minutes afterwards I could not inwardly accept all the criticism that was levelled at the paper. But when I cooled down and once again considered everything from the position of the paper’s interests, I had to recognise that the criticism of the Central Committee Bureau was, in the main, completely correct. I need to put it bluntly: in general, the paper was sharply criticised, and rarely praised. In the collective, in the editorial board, and on the part of the Editor-in-Chief elements of conceit have started to appear.155
Goriunov’s words were hardly a wholehearted acceptance of the Komsomol’s attack, but according to the ritual of criticism and self-criticism he had to accept them.
In a much-weakened position, the paper’s militant stance rapidly unravelled, as the fate of Pankin’s article reveals. At the Seventh Komsomol Plenum at the end of February, Sazonova, the Kaluga obkom’s First Secretary, lambasted the paper for articles such as ‘Once More on Mould’, doubting whether the paper’s ‘sensations’ had delivered real results: ‘they took a big swing but hit nothing’.156 She conceded that Pankin’s article had been partially true, but nevertheless argued that it had ‘vulgarised’ the paper’s name. She cited the strained international context as justification for her attack: ‘Who is this criticism from Komsomol’skaia pravda educating? It’s no accident that responses to this article have appeared in the bourgeois press saying that “in the Soviet Union they are flouting the rights of youth”.’157 In March 1957, Komsomol’skaia pravda printed a follow-up, relating the happy news that the club was now up and running, and that the obkom of the Komsomol had recognised its mistakes.158 However, the last sentence of the short article provided evidence of the paper’s defeat: ‘Having noted that Komsomol’skaia pravda’s article…was both timely and correct; equally, the bureau of the obkom considers that a number of positions stated in the article are inaccurate’. Even this was too much for Sazonova, who fired off a further complaint to Shelepin, the Head of the Komsomol, complaining that Goriunov’s failure to print a full correction was down to the editor’s desire to ‘cover his own back’.159
Had Pankin’s article been published earlier in the year, when the rules were unclear, it is likely that his criticisms would have succeeded. But now that the political elite was worried about centrifugal forces threatening the stability of the nation, it was considered to be ‘adding fuel to the fire’ at a time when student ‘demagogues were speaking out’.160 Central Committee officials urged Goriunov to ‘take account of the situation when publishing critical materials.’161 Pankin, too, was hauled before officials for a Party reprimand, both for his article on events in Kaluga and for his vocal criticism of Shelepin at editorial meetings.162 Komsomol’skaia pravda’s critical interlude was over less than a year after it began.
Epilogue: Criticism and Self-Criticism after 1956
Komsomol’skaia pravda’s critical line was a short-lived attempt to reform Soviet socialism, but it was crucial for defining the limits of reform in the post-Stalin era. After the Secret Speech, journalists wanted to create conditions for a more humane form of socialism which would redress the balance of power between authorities and the public. By exposing egregious breaches of ‘socialist legality’, whether from Party elites, the police, or the judiciary, the paper’s journalists would rebuild trust with readers. Such a line was consistent with the tone of the Secret Speech, which suggested that radical steps were needed to set the communist project back on the right path. But as unrest built up in the country’s Central and Eastern European satellites, and as intellectuals, artists and students became restive, officials forced the paper to rein in its attacks, much to the relief of the officials who had been in the firing line.
The paper’s defeat in December 1956 and January 1957 was mirrored in the fate of their former colleague, Vladimir Dudintsev. While early reviews of his novel had been positive, Not By Bread Alone came under increasing attack by the end of 1956, especially after discussions of the novel met with raucous scenes at the Writers’ Union and in universities.163 Komsomol’skaia pravda never reviewed Dudintsev’s novel, but mentions of his name in print show how the Party line had shifted. An article by the conservative writer V. Ozerov, published in the paper at the end of January 1957, cited Dudintsev’s novel as an example of writing which lacked a ‘constructive programme’ for reform.164 While the goal of criticism could not be abandoned, so tightly was it bound up with the Party’s self-identity, Ozerov argued that such attacks were often ‘exposure for the sake of exposure, criticism for the sake of criticism’.165 It was crucial that writers avoid ‘philistine grumbling, despondent scepticism, and moral passivity’; alluding to criticisms of the Stalinist practice of ‘varnishing’ reality, he warned of a situation ‘in which the lovers of black varnish replace the lovers of rose-coloured varnish’.166 A month later, Pravda printed a more authoritative attack on press criticism. While its author, B. Ukraintsev, conceded that criticism could be sincerely meant, he exposed the international stakes of the discussion by accusing critics of ‘rehashing[ing] motives from Western propaganda’.167 For Ukraintsev, many critics were unrealistic in their expectations for change ‘given that the economic conditions for solving a given question may not exist’. He noted a number of cases where individuals had sought to indict the Soviet system: it was not permissible, Ukraintsev argued, to ‘exten[d] the shortcomings and defects of individual officials to the entire Party and government apparatus as a whole’. In editorials published in this period, the emphasis was on restoring discipline against a host of enemies, including ‘demagogues’ who took their criticisms too far. Komsomol officials, too, were warned to be on guard against individuals who wanted to sow ‘nihilistic views’ among Soviet youth as they had in other Eastern European countries.168
The events of late 1956 and early 1957 did not put an end to criticism in the Soviet press—it was too much a part of its identity for that—but it did establish new ground rules. Criticism was still allowed, but journalists and editors were never on stable ground when they did it. It was easy to target individuals with few connections, especially if Party or Komsomol officials had ordered such an attack, but criticism of higher-ranked targets remained a more difficult proposition.169 Pankin’s article provides a model of how things might proceed: a critical article would be published; officials would accept its conclusions, before later arguing that ‘certain’ propositions were inaccurate. Enlisting the support of the local Party organs, those criticised would focus on these problems to discredit the article and the journalists who wrote it.170 Almost exactly three years after Pankin’s article on the Kaluga Flame, an article published in December 1959 alleged that Komsomol officials had stifled the initiative of another youth brigade, this time in Gor’kii.171 Once again, the Gor’kii obkom of the Komsomol recognised the criticism, before two weeks later writing to Voronov and Sergei Pavlov, the Head of the Komsomol, to complain about unjust criticisms and inaccuracies.172 Though the article’s authors attempted to justify their position, the complaints were upheld, and one of the authors was disciplined. Similar patterns of acceptance followed by protest were commonplace at other newspapers, too.173 Sometimes the investigation would find in the paper’s favour, as was the case with two Komsomol’skaia pravda articles published in 1960 and 1961. But investigation of those complaints took numerous reports, circulars, interviews, requests for clarification. One suspects that their failure was due to the fact that Komsomol’skaia pravda’s connections trumped those of their accuser.174 Even though a successful critical article was a cause for celebration and a strong marker of cultural capital, exhausted journalists could be forgiven for wanting an easier life.
Events in the latter months of 1956 thus demonstrated the limits of Party-minded criticism but also the difficulties of discerning what these limits were. While it had initially been possible to interpret the Secret Speech as a call to arms, tensions in Poland and Hungary, coupled with an increasingly vocal student minority and continued fears over criminality, made the newspaper’s reliance on criticism and self-criticism appear increasingly damaging. To attribute the failure of the paper’s critical line to the breach of well-established rules would therefore be inaccurate. The boundaries of acceptable criticism shifted in line with Soviet officials’ confidence in the country’s ability, in the face of domestic and foreign policy pressures, to endure it. Criticism which achieved its intended goals without reprisal in the summer might be decidedly unwise by the winter, as the events of 1956 so clearly showed.
In place of the ‘negative’ characters the paper had featured the year before, 1957 would see a new cast of ‘positive heroes’, whose selfless actions would show readers how to construct the future. In place of Goriunov arrived a new editor, Aleksei Adzhubei, whose ideas would revolutionise the Soviet press. Adzhubei was a lynchpin of Thaw journalism who used his powerful connections to change the face of Soviet newspapers. But though he is lionised as one of the great innovators of the Thaw media, he was surprisingly timid (or astute, depending on your judgement) when it came to using the paper as a forum for criticism.175 Shatunovskii recalled that Goriunov would never entertain appeals from the accused (‘The newspaper is right, complain all you want, but there’s no going back’) while Adzhubei would be more circumspect.176 As an individual with powerful connections to the Kremlin, the paper’s new editor could have ridden out the consequences of his paper’s exposés. However, whether out of political expediency or—here Shatunovskii speculates—Adzhubei’s congenital good nature, he would usually give wrongdoers a timeframe to rectify their errors before going to print.177 The result was a paper that exerted its power differently: no longer an organ designed to rouse the public to indignation against bureaucrats and managers, but a branch of government which used its influence to achieve results behind the scenes.
The issue of satire and criticism sheds light on journalists’ ‘governmental’ role. If in Wolfe’s account, government was exercised through the dissemination of ‘texts and images’, this chapter has suggested that word and deed were often united.178 Journalists were supposed to transform society by acquainting readers with the negative aspects of Soviet society. By reading satirical feuilletons and exposés of public misdeeds, readers would be inspired to identify and eliminate such behaviours from everyday life as a prerequisite for building communism. In the end, it was Soviet authorities’ anxieties about potential misreadings of such articles in a climate of social ferment—in particular the fact that negative part could be mistaken for the social whole—that occasioned attacks on satire in the 1940s, and the end of the paper’s critical line in 1956. But journalists’ power did not simply reside in the strength of their representations. Whether they were demanding action from bureaucrats following a reader’s letter or advocating harsher (or more lenient) prison sentences, journalists possessed a social authority that illustrates how government by journalism was more than just government through representation.
News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform. Simon Huxtable, Oxford University Press. © Simon Huxtable 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.003.0003
1 V. Dudintsev, Not By Bread Alone, trans. Edith Bone (London: Hutchinson, 1957), 215.
2 V. Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir 8 (1956), 31–118; 9 (1956), 37–118; 10 (1956), 21–98.
3 ‘Kritika i samokritika’, in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia. 2-e izd. Tom 23 (Moscow: Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1953), 515.
4 Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 57–96.
5 G. Malenkov, ‘Tovarishch Stalin – vozhd’ progressivnogo chelovechestva’, Pravda, 21 Dec. 1949, 2.
6 Ibid.
7 On the origins of self-criticism see Lorenz Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008), 59–73 and passim; David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200–7; Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 182–211.
8 Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 190–195, 208–9.
9 On self-criticism in the 1930s see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999) and Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); J. Arch Getty, ‘Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–8’, Russian Review, 58.1 (1999), 49–70.
10 26 Dec. 1949, d.81, l.223; Izvestiia letuchka, 2 Jan. 1950, GARF, f.1244R, op.1, d.96, ll.34–5.
11 The Ukrainian youth newspaper Stalinskoe plemia was upbraided not for its copious amounts of criticism, but for failing to follow up these articles (‘O tone kritiki’, 5 Mar. 1946, 3).
12 22 out of a staff of 220, making it the largest editorial department. See ‘Shtatnoe raspisanie na 1957 god’, n/d 1957, RGASPI, d.218, ll.1–6.
13 ‘Uchet pisem po temam za avgust mesiats 1951 g.’, after Aug. 1951, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.662, ll.28–30; ‘Spravka o kharaktere pochty gazety KP’, Jan.–Jun. 1956, RGASPI, d.178, l.56.
14 11 Jul. 1949, d.79, ll.49–50.
15 Ibid., ll.59–60 (see also ll.61–2).
16 Ibid., l.59.
17 Closed Party Meeting, 23 Jan. 1950, TsGAM, f.1968, op.1, d.25, ll.1–12.
18 Ibid., l.2.
19 Ibid.
20 Dmitrii Strovskii, Istoriia otechestvennaia zhurnalistiki noveishego perioda (Ekaterinberg: Izd. Ural’skogo universita, 1998), 118–19.
21 Stanislav Gol’dfarb, ‘Komsomol’skaia pravda’ 1925–2005 gg. (Irkutsk: Irkutskaia oblastnaia tipografiia No.1, 2008), 140.
22 ‘Semen Davydovich Narin’iani’, https://www.kp.ru/best/msk/korrespondenty_pobedy/page19926.html [Accessed 24 May 2018].
23 Annie Guérin, Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State (1920s–1930s) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 60–65, 74–123; John Etty, Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019).
24 Guérin, Devastation and Laughter, 119–121, 179; Serguei Oushakine, ‘Red Laughter: On “Refined Weapons” of Soviet Jesters’, Social Research, 79.1, Spring 2012, 189–216 [199–201].
25 Richard L. Chapple, Soviet Satire of the Twenties (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1980), 131. On Bednyi’s downfall see A.M. Dubrovsky, ‘Chronicle of a Poet’s Downfall: Dem’ian Bednyi, Russian History, and The Epic Heroes’, in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, ed. by Kevin Platt, David Brandenberger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 77–98.
26 ‘On the Journals Star and Leningrad’, 14 Aug. 1946, in Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, ed. by Kateria Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 421–4 (for background see also 393–431).
27 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, ‘O zhurnale Krokodil’, 11 Sep. 1948, in Sovetskaia pechat’ v dokumentakh (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1961), 101–3; Soviet Culture and Power, 429–30. For discussion of the resolution see ‘Za boevuiu sovetskuiu satiru!’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 May 1949, 2; D. Belyaev, ‘Improve Humor Magazines’, Kul’tura i zhizn’, 21 Jun. 1949, 3, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 1, 30 (23 Aug. 1949), 76–7; ‘Obzor pechati: O poshlykh pisaniiakh odnogo zhurnala’, Pravda, 24 Aug. 1946, 3; ‘TsK KP(b)U o zhurnale satiry i iumora “Perets”’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 Oct. 1946, 1.
28 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, ‘O nedostatkakh zhurnala Krokoidil i merakh ego uluchsheniia’, 28 Sep. 1951, in Sovetskaia pechat’ v dokumentakh, 107–8.
29 Ibid.
30 Valentin Kataev, ‘Fel’etony rasskazy’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 Feb. 1953, 2.
31 S. Narin’iani, ‘Dereviannoe serdtse’, 1 Jul. 1949, 3.
32 4 Jul. 1949, d.79, ll.14, 17.
33 Ibid.
34 Narin’iani, ‘Dereviannoe serdtse’.
35 On the relationship between journalistic power and legal power see Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘The Gogols and the Shchedrins: Lessons in “Positive Satire”’, Russian Studies in Literature, 50.2 (2014), 44–7.
36 ‘Po sledam vystuplenie KP’, 16 Jul. 1949, 8 Sep. 1949, 23 Nov. 1949, all p. 2.
37 Jesse Gardiner, ‘No Conflict on the Stage: The Theory of Beskonfliktnost’ in Postwar Soviet Drama’, Russian Review 77.3 (2018), 427–45.
38 Boris Gorbatov, ‘O sovetskoi satire i iumore’, Novyi mir 10 (1949), 215–16.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Gorbatov, ‘O sovetskoi satire’.
42 Ibid.
43 Vasilii Ardamatskii, ‘Zhanr, liubimyi narodom’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 Mar. 1952, 3.
44 Dobrenko, ‘Gogols and the Shchedrins’, 34.
45 ‘Rech’ tov. A.K. Kanapina’, 2 Apr. 1948, 2.
46 21 Nov. 1949, d.81, l.64.
47 21 Nov. 1949, d.81, l.69.
48 Ibid., l.68.
49 Ibid., ll.77–81.
50 Bol’she, chem gazeta, ed. by Liudmila Semina (Moscow: PoRog, 2007), 331.
51 ‘Rech’ D.P. Goriunova v sviazi s 25-letiem gazety KP’, May 1950, RGASPI, f.98M, op.1, d.99, l.9.
52 Dmitrii Goriunov, ‘Delo vsei zhizni’, in Soldaty slova: Rasskazyvaiut veterany Sovetskoi zhurnalistiki. Tom 5, ed. by B. S. Burkov, V. A. Miakushkov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), 56.
53 29 Nov. 1949, d.81, l.67.
54 Kataev, ‘Fel’etony rasskazy’.
55 ‘Chelovek iz “orlinoi lozhi” ’, ‘Bespokoinye zhil’tsy’, ‘V rodnoi sem’e’, in Fel’etony (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1952), 83–8, 104–8, 151–7.
56 ‘Shurik’ in Ibid., 50–6 see also ‘Glazun’ia s kliasami’, 10–14.
57 A. Raskin, ‘Razgovor o fel’etone’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 6 Oct. 1945, 4.
58 Véronique Jobert, La satire soviétique contemporaine: société et idéologie (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1991), 198.
59 ‘O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh’, 25 Feb. 1956, in Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalin na XX s’’ezde KPSS. Dokumenty, ed. by K. Aimermakher [Eimermacher] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2002), 117–18.
60 Polly Jones, ‘From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to de-Stalinization’, in The Dilemmas of Destalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. by Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006), 41–63.
61 Susanne Schattenberg, ‘“Democracy” or “Despotism”? How the Secret Speech was Translated into Real Life’, in Dilemmas of Destalinization, 64–79 [66].
62 ‘O rabote gazety Sovetskaia Chuvashiia’, Mar. 1954 and ‘O faktakh zazhima kritiki v Kromskoi raionnoi partiinoi organizatsii Orlovskoi oblasti’, Jan. 1954 in Sovetskaia pechat’ v dokumentakh, 199–200, 283–4.
63 N. Bogdanov, B. Viazemskii, Spravochnik zhurnalista (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1960), 41–2.
64 Jones, ‘From the Secret Speech’, 46.
65 Izvestiia Closed Party Meeting, 29–30 Mar. 1956, TsGAM, f.453, op.2, d.27, ll.31, 33.
66 Ibid., ll.23–4.
67 Ibid., l.30.
68 Pravda Closed Party Meeting, 27–8 Apr. 1956, TsGAM, f.3226, op.1, d.54, l.14.
69 5 Mar. 1956, d.170, ll.107–8.
70 Ibid., l.116.
71 ‘Svoei sobstvennoi rukoi’, 1 Mar. 1956, 1.
72 5 Mar. 1956, d.170, ll.124–6.
73 Ibid., l.138. See also 21 May 1956, d.172, l.65.
74 Pravda Closed Party Meeting, 27–8 Apr. 56, TsGAM, f.3226, op.1, d.56, ll.13–24.
75 Ibid., l.14. See also l.18.
76 Izvestiia Closed Party Meeting, 29–30 Mar. 1956, TsGAM, f.453, op.2, d.27, ll.15–16.
77 Ibid.
78 On criticisms of Gubin see Stanislav Sergeev, ‘Do I posle slavy’, in Polveka na Mokhovoi (1947–1997) (Moscow: MGU, 1997), 106.
79 Closed Party Meeting, 14 Mar. 1956, TsGAM, f.1968, op.1, d.30, ll.97–8.
80 19 Mar. 1956, d.170, ll.64–8.
81 T. Iakovlev, ‘Delo ob okurke’, 21 Mar. 1956, 2.
82 26 Mar. 1956, d.170, l.14.
83 Thomas C. Wolfe describes a similar case in his Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 45–8.
84 Ibid., 47.
85 Adzhubei to Kudriavtsev, 6 Jun. 1957, RGASPI, f.98M, op.1, d.199, ll.21–6; Adzhubei to Otdel upraveleniia delami, 26 Sep. 1957, d.199, ll.48–54; Adzhubei to Otdel upraveleniia delami, before 23 May 1959, d. 258, ll.13–16.
86 On the press and crime see Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
87 28 Apr. 1958, d.225, ll.70–7.
88 Ibid., l.75.
89 Benjamin Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 129–56.
90 Ibid., 136.
91 N. Aleksandrova, A. Tarasov, ‘Istoriia s voprosami’, Aug. 9 1956, 2.
92 Journalists at the paper praised the article for raising an important social question. See 13 Aug. 1956, d.175, ll.45–7.
93 On coverage of Hungary see Simon Huxtable, ‘Making News Soviet: Rethinking Journalistic Professionalism after Stalin, 1953–1970’, Contemporary European History, 27.1 (2018), 76–7.
94 I. Mel’nikov, E. Cheronov, ‘V Luzhnikakh vse dolzno byt’ prekrasno’, 23 Oct. 1956, 4.
95 5 Nov. 1956, d.821, ll.67–8.
96 Ibid., l.68.
97 Ibid.
98 ‘O kriticheskikh vystupleniiakh gazety Komsomol’skoi pravdy’, 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.847, ll.133–134, 137–8.
99 Kristin Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, 1950s–1960s’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2003, 46–98. On Soviet interest in foreign discussions of Soviet youth, see RGANI, f.5, op.55, d.57; G. Zhukov to TsK KPSS, 30 Sep. 1957, RGANI, f.5, op.33, d.31, ll.82–94.
100 19 Nov. 1956, d.177, ll.46–7.
101 Gardiner, ‘No Conflict’, 440–3; Dobrenko, ‘The Gogols and the Shchedrins’, 27–32.
102 V. Frolov, ‘Iskusstvo oblicheniia’, Pravda, 8 Feb. 1953, 2; Vladimir Ognev, ‘Zapiski G. Troepol’skogo’, Znamia 1 (1954), 182–9 [182].
103 Ognev, ‘Zapiski’, 189.
104 Iurii Chaplygin, ‘Ne suzhat’ granits zhanra!’, SP 3 (1956), 30–3 [33]. See also, among many others, K. Kovalevskii, ‘Fel’eton ili korrespondentsiia?’, SP 2 (1955); Iurii Chaplygin, ‘Ne suzhat’ granits zhanra!’, SP 3 (1956), 30–3; Iurii Zolotarev, ‘Nevnimanie k zhanru’, SP 8 (1956), 24–5.
105 For Shatunovskii’s memories of the war see ‘Peshkom po voine’, in Sekretov ne budet (Moscow: Pravda, 1974), 5–52 and in Zapiski strelianogo vorob’ia, 359–425.
106 ‘Politicheskaia satira’ (interview with Shatunovskii), Radio svoboda, TX: 13 Nov. 2003, https://www.svoboda.org/a/24201045.html [Accessed: 22 Aug. 2018].
107 Ibid.
108 Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksander Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under “Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, 66.4 (2007), 650–2.
109 On the instability of the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ see Polly Jones, ‘The Personal and the Political: Opposition to the Thaw and the Politics of Literary Identity in the 1950s and 1960s’, in The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 231–65.
110 When Shatunokskii appeared on Radio Svoboda fifty years later to discuss political satire, he was quizzed about the feuilleton by a listener. See ‘Politicheskaia satira’.
111 B. Protopopov, I. Shatunovskii, ‘Plesen’’, 19 Nov. 1953, 3. 1953 letuchki are not preserved in the Komsomol archive so journalists’ response is difficult to discern.
112 A. Starodub, I. Shatunovskii, ‘Eshche raz o pleseni’, 15 Aug. 1956, 2.
113 Vera Panova, Vremena goda. Iz letopisei goroda Enska (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1954).
114 E.g. Iu. Nagibin, ‘Nochnoi gost’’, Ogonek, 4, 1955.
115 On fears of youth sexuality see Kristin Roth-Ey, ‘“Loose Girls” on the Loose: Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth Festival’, in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. by Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, Lynne Attwood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75–95. On the press and sexuality during NEP see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
116 Protopopov & Shatunovskii, ‘Plesen’.
117 Starodub & Shatunovskii, ‘Eshche raz o pleseni’.
118 ‘Rech’ M.G. Semenova’, 168.
119 16 May 1955, d.148, ll.38–41.
120 5 Nov. 1956, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.821, l.70.
121 27 Aug. 1956, d.155, l.133.
122 Dobson, Cold Summer, 122–8; Vladimir Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 136–62.
123 Il’ia Shatunovskii, ‘Sdelal bol’she, chem mog, no men’she, chem khotel’, in Aleksei Adzhubei v koridorakh chetvertoi vlasti (Moscow: Izvestiia, 2004), 41.
124 A. Adzhubei, Te desiat’ let (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1989), 92.
125 ‘O rabote Komsomol’skoi pravdy’, 21 Mar. 1946, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.366, ll.177–89 [183].
126 V. Mikhailov, ‘Kak vyrastaiut tuneiadtsy…’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 Dec. 1953, 2–3 (3); I. Orestov, ‘Nedostatki iarkkogo, bol’shogo proizvedeniia’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 23 Mar. 1954, 3; Aleksandr Drozdov, ‘O Peten’kakh i Feden’kakh’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 30 Mar. 1954, 3; I. Kliustina, ‘Tantsevat’ krasivo’, Sovetskaia kul’tura, 27 Dec. 1956, 2; Lev Kassil’, ‘Molodye i “razmolozhennye”’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 25 Mar. 1957, 2.
127 14 Sep. 1956, d.176, l.40.
128 E. Rusakova, ‘Kto iz nikh stiliaga?’, 11 Aug. 1956, 2; A. Nuikin, ‘Stiliaga li Vladimir Tokarev?’, 5 Apr. 1958, 4.
129 13 Aug. 1956, d.175, l.47.
130 14 Sep. 1956, d.176, l.40.
131 The label ‘stiliagi’ is praised for enabling rapid identification of a social type in Ia. El’sberg, ‘Zametki o sovetskoi satire’, Znamia 3 (1954), 172–82 [180]. The letter is contained in an article by Protopopov: ‘…i vot fel’eton stoit v polose’, Sovetskaia pechat’, 8 (1959), 32–4 [34].
132 Ibid.
133 ‘Po sledam vystuplenii Komsomol’skoi pravdy: Eshche raz o pleseni’, 26 Oct. 1956, 2.
134 Ibid.
135 V.A. Boldyrev, ‘Beregis’ zakona’, 8 Dec. 1956, 2.
136 5 Nov. 1956, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.821, ll.76–7.
137 Ibid., l.70.
138 Ibid., l.71.
139 Correspondent Natalia Kolesnikova identified a difference in values between those, like Komolov (Shatunovskii was another), who graduated from the Central Komsomol School, and those, like Pankin, who came from Moscow State University. Natalia Kolesnikova, ‘Schastlivyi stol’, in Aleksei Adzhubei v koridorakh, 37.
140 B. Pankin, ‘Kak pogasili “Fakel”’, 9 Dec. 1956, 1–2.
141 Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2016), 107–10. On the paper’s response to such initiatives, see Chapter 4.
142 Pankin, ‘Kak pogaasili ‘Fakel’’; Dmitrii Bykov, Bulat Okudzhava (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2009), 252.
143 17 Dec. 1956, d.177, ll.204–5.
144 Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Quadrangle), 370.
145 Postanovlenie TsK KPSS, 6 Dec. 1956, ‘O merakh po presecheniiu imeiushchikh mesto vylazok antisovetskikh i vrazhdebnykh elementov’, in Prezidium TsK KPSS, 1954–1964. Tom 2: Postanovleniia 1954–1958 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), 493–510; Juliane Fürst, ‘The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy Between Stalin and Khrushchev’, in Dilemmas of Destalinization, 148.
146 ‘O merakh’, 497–501.
147 25 Dec. 1956, d.30, ll.168–9.
148 Ibid., l.170.
149 Tsipursky, Socialist Fun, 121.
150 Sazonova to Shelepin, 9 Mar. 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.846, ll.142–4.
151 Tsipursky, Socialist Fun, 121–2.
152 28 Jan. 1957, d.189, l.122.
153 Ibid., l.122, 124. See ‘O kriticheskikh vystupleniiakh’ on this point.
154 ‘O kriticheskikh vystupleniiakh’.
155 28 Jan. 1957, d.189, l.122, l.129.
156 ‘Stenogramma VII-go plenuma TsK VLKSM ob uluchshenii ideino-voispitatel’noi raboty Komsomol’skikh organizatsii sredi Komsomol’tsev i molodezhi’, 26–7 Feb. 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.2, d.356, l.198.
157 Ibid., l.199.
158 ‘Po sledam vystuplenii Komsomol’skoi pravdy: Kak pogasili ‘Fakel’’, 5 Mar. 1957, 2.
159 Sazonova to Shelepin, 9 Mar. 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.846, ll.142–4.
160 28 Jan. 1957, d.189, l.127.
161 Ibid.
162 Boris Pankin, Preslovutaia epokha. V litsakh i maskakh, sobytiiakh i kazusakh (Moscow: Voskresen’e, 2002), 74.
163 Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, 69–77; Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 70–84; Tromly, Making, 140–6.
164 V. Ozerov, ‘Pafos bor’by’, 25 Jan. 1957, 1.
165 Ibid.
166 Ibid.
167 B. Ukraintsev, ‘Za printsipial’nuiu, delovuiu kritiku i samokritiku’, Pravda, 22 Feb. 1957, 2.
168 See also B. Baianov, ‘Komsomol – politicheskaia organizatsiia’, Molodoi kommunist (April 1957), 14–24; ‘Ob osveshchenii v komsomol’skikh gazetakh voprosov vospitaniia molodezhi’, undated, between 1–6 Apr. 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.17, ll.43–45, and journalists’ own criticisms of Dudintsev, 27 May 1957, d.193, ll. 146–55.
169 E.g. Selivanov to KP, 22 Jun. 1957, RGASPI, f.98M, op.1, d.201, ll.42–3.
170 Hence Wolfe’s argument that suppression of criticism under Brezhnev shows authorities trying to suppress journalists’ governmental role seems shaky: similar investigations took place under Khrushchev and Stalin (Governing Soviet Journalism, 112–26).
171 V. Il’in, A. Skrypnik, ‘Ugasaiushchie ogon’ki’, 13 Dec. 1959, 3.
172 ‘O stat’е KP ‘Ugasaiushchie ogon’ki’, 23 Feb. 1960, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.1002, ll.79–87.
173 E.g. ‘O stat’e gazety Sovetskaia Rossiia “V zashchitu sel’kora”’, after Oct. 1958, RGANI, f.96, op.1, d.22, ll.118–53; ‘O stat’e gazety Literaturnaia gazeta “Sapogom v dushu”’, Feb.–Mar. 1962, RGANI, f.5, op.33, d.202, ll.47–117.
174 ‘O stat’e KP ‘Gde zhe oni ustali’, 5 Feb. 1961, RGANI, f.5, op.33, d.173, ll.46–56; ‘O stat’e KP ‘Eparkhiia na pensii’, 11 Nov. 1961, Ibid., ll.135–50.
175 On Adzhubei as Thaw hero see Wolfe, Governing, 38–70; Aleksei Adzhubei v koridorakh.
176 Shatunovskii, ‘Sdelal bol’she, chem mog’, 45.
177 Ibid.
178 Wolfe, Governing, 18.