It seems simple enough: Thaw journalism emerged after Stalin’s death, and it ended around the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Between those two dates, a new ideal for the Soviet newspaper emerged: popular in form, dialogical in tone, humanistic in values, but retaining the ultimate goal of building a communist future. In this book we have seen numerous ways in which the Thaw press failed to live up to its ideals: journalists’ own professional dispositions provide one reason, obstruction from officials within the Komsomol and the Party was yet more decisive. But while journalists were vocal about their newspapers’ inability to fulfil their lofty ambitions, the newspapers spoke for themselves: from Tallinn to Vladivostok, Soviet newspapers sported attractive designs, reader-friendly stories, and spoke in a more conversational tone. The press became the laboratory in which Soviet propaganda overcame the crisis of identity, credibility, and popularity that had been its affliction since the Terror. In the 1930s, newspapers’ rousing mixture of heroes and daring deeds had captivated readers until the ritual hunt for enemies left them bemused and disappointed.1 During the Thaw, however, Soviet propaganda began to find a new language, new heroes, and a new set of priorities, helping it find new adherents. That era of optimism came to an end at some point in the 1960s, with the crushing of the Prague Spring, signalling the end for journalists’ dream of a press that would help bring about social reform. What followed was more than a decade of boilerplate editorials and endless stories about making agriculture and industry more productive and Soviet heroism during the Great Patriotic War.
Or so the story goes. It is perhaps too simple to narrate the history of Thaw journalism as a rise and fall. In the case of Soviet journalism, historians, myself included, have tended to fall in step with this trajectory, dating the fall to the time of Khrushchev’s ouster or, at the very latest, the end of the 1960s.2 The newspapers themselves provide strong evidence to support those arguments: as the years passed, newspapers began to discuss the same themes, using the same phraseology and the same headlines. TV and radio could be no less formulaic, yet the Party’s decision to make the daily news bulletin Vremia the flagship of its news coverage, and to grant it access to the top stories before Pravda, seemed to confirm a hegemonic shift from print to broadcast journalism.3 Television, with its entertaining mini-series, variety programmes, and quizzes, seemed better placed to propagate the values of ‘Developed Socialism’ than a hidebound press.4 To the innovative, playful iterations of Soviet ideology presented by Seventeen Moments of Spring and KVN, newspapers had no answer, except, as Komsomol’skaia pravda did, to start their own ‘Clubs of the Merry and Resourceful’.5 As opportunities for self-expression diminished, the prestige of journalism fell dramatically. While in 1969 there were ten applications for every place available in journalism faculties, this number had fallen by half by the mid-1970s, and further still by the early 1980s.6
Such statistics make it easy to regard the 1970s as the ‘fall’ that followed the ‘decline’ of the mid-to-late 1960s. It should be noted, however, that Thaw journalists dispute this narrative. Their recollections make it clear that Thaw journalism was as much an ethical orientation as a creative one and that the removal of reform-minded editors was insufficient to blunt their moral compass.7 For all the Sergei Dovlatovs, blundering through the minefields of Party ideology, there were journalists who, absent the possibility of improving the system, at least sought to rectify injustice.8 ‘A journalist’s duty’, wrote star correspondent Valerii Agranovskii in 1977, ‘is to do concrete good, regardless of whether something will be written, whether or not it will be published’.9 This idea of journalism as a question of ethical conduct was at the heart of the reformist press of the Brezhnev era. Alongside Komsomol’skaia pravda, the country’s main literary periodical, Literaturnaia gazeta, flew the flag for such values, using a newly-granted eight-page section of the paper to target Soviet officialdom, over-zealous judges, and inept managers.10 While the newspaper’s critical ethos saw numerous brushes with the authorities, the paper continued to print stories of crime, corruption, and bureaucracy throughout the decade.11 Simon Soloveichik, now working as a freelancer, regularly published articles on the innovations of ‘reformer pedagogues’ who challenged the prevailing educational consensus. And although Komsomol’skaia pravda and Literaturnaia gazeta were outliers, their continued publication of controversial material shows that newspapers still provided a niche, however precarious, for the expression of new and controversial ideas.12
This was, in part, because there were still editors willing to play the game—even if the rules had changed significantly.13 Despite the punishment meted out his predecessor, Boris Pankin pushed ahead with criticism of the Party’s plans to build a cord-cellulose plant beside Lake Baikal. Despite the Party’s annoyance, Pankin regarded criticism as crucial, not just for its social resonance, but also as giving the newspaper a raison d’être. As he explained to colleagues at an editorial letuchka:
Such articles are an event in society, they set the tone in the press. Such things don’t appear often. The article…shows the possibilities and the authority of the paper. These two weeks have been filled with ordinary days, with critiques of our shortcomings. If we look only at that side, it could seem that there are nothing other than ordinary days at our paper. But then serious things like this come out of our ordinary days, that show that what we are doing is not in vain.14
The ‘ordinary’ was provided by an endless cycle of more-or-less interchangeable articles on patriotic themes and anniversaries, but the ‘serious’ was what journalists lived for. The memoirs of most journalists contain stories about critical articles they published, and the abuse they suffered for doing so. Such stories may be embellishments, reflecting journalists’ desire to be on the right side of history, but the pitfalls were real enough. A low-level battle ensued, with journalists attempting to sneak critical materials into the paper and censors trying to keep them out.15
This continuing battle between journalists and overseers shows that journalism was governed by the same gap between written and unwritten rules that characterised Brezhnev-era society as a whole. Though newspapers were expected to clear plans with Agitprop, once editors gained a censor’s trust, they were allowed to exercise their own judgement over the suitability of an article. Editors knew that if the vertushka didn’t ring before 11 a.m., the previous day’s paper had passed muster with the Politburo.16 This allowed significant space for editors to take risks, and for journalists to engage in low-level subterfuge to ensure that their articles would be published.17 The necessity of diverging from official rules to get things done is a hallmark of a Brezhnev era characterised by the circumvention of laws.18 But the need for such ruses should not be underestimated: it suggests that the once-collegial (if often strained) relationship between journalists and the regime was in the process of breaking down: reformist journalists were increasingly acting according to their own conscience and political consciousness, basing their decisions on their own understanding of the country’s best interests.
In that sense, we might conclude that there really was a split between the state and the journalistic profession—or at least the most radical parts of it.19 Even so, the obvious mismatch between journalists’ retrospective accounts of the 1970s and the newspapers themselves should give us pause. For most journalists, the Brezhnev era did not resemble this optimistic image of the press as crusader for truth and justice. Most newspapers of the 1970s and early 1980s, argues one scholar, were ‘less a tool for social self-criticism and more a means for reaffirming the policies of the regime’.20 An important part of newspapers’ everyday work was to go on the attack against heterogeneous currents in society, whether hippies or political non-conformists. And though one Komsomol’skaia pravda editor prided himself on never going after Andrei Sakharov, the newspaper had previously printed several hard-hitting attacks on dissidents.21 Whether these articles were printed by order or from journalistic conviction, these contradictory impulses reveal the limitations of a strict state-society division. Journalists, to use Natalia Roudakova’s felicitous expression, were ‘simultaneously “in” and “out” of the state’: they furthered the ruling ideology while at the same time positioning themselves as an external force.22 The presence of the paper’s editor in the Party and Komsomol apparatus did not prevent them from savage attacks when they overstepped the mark: they were in the room when the big decisions were made, but their true ‘governmental’ power was only exerted through the newspaper page. The press of the 1970s, particular when one moves outside the framework of liberal-leaning newspapers like Literaturnaia gazeta and Komsomol’skaia pravda, looks more like the compromised and cynical world of Sergei Dovlatov than many journalists would care to admit.
For journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda, the Thaw froze over at the end of the 1970s. Fittingly, it was an outsider—to Komsomol’skaia pravda, to the Soviet press, and to Thaw values—who added the full stop. By Spring 1978, the paper had long been under siege for its reformist stance, particularly from Evgeny Tiazhel’nikov, the Komsomol’s First Secretary and a prominent Russian nationalist.23 After he was promoted to a post in the Central Committee as Head of the Department of Propaganda, one of Tiazhel’nikov’s first moves was to remove Lev Korneshov from the editor’s chair and replace him with Valerii Ganichev, who had spent the last decade in charge of the conservative ‘Young Guard’ publishing house.24 Nationalist ideas were not completely alien to the paper: Dmitrii Goriunov had been a close associate of Aleksandr Shelepin, and supported the work of prominent conservative Valentin Chivilikhin, a participant in the campaign against Komsomol’skaia pravda in the 1970s.25 But these articles never defined the paper’s editorial line, and the paper also went into battle against the so-called Russian Party in the 1970s.26
The paper’s editorial line changed under Ganichev’s leadership. The new editor, whose concerns were largely to do with questions of culture, had little interest in the paper’s day-to-day work.27 The paper printed attacks on rock music and published dozens of nationalist authors, including Mikhail Sholokhov, whose last appearance in the paper had been during the dark days of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign.28 Completing the late-Stalinist feel was the departure of dozens of staff members (‘the most furious Russophobes’, claimed Ganichev), of whom many were Jews, to be replaced by nationalist writers and critics.29 The paper’s traditions of editorial discussion were replaced by a top-down system where the editor’s word was final.30 Ganichev’s tenure at the head of the paper lasted barely two years before he was summarily fired—ostensibly for behaviour unbecoming of an editor—but the damage was done: many of the paper’s most prominent journalists had already left for pastures new, and the paper spent the early part of the 1980s trying to recover from the blow.31
Yet there were signs of life even before the onset of perestroika. Inna Rudenko’s ‘Duty’ was coy in its avoidance of the name ‘Afghanistan’, but its exploration of bureaucratic indifference in dealing with a soldier wounded in the conflict caused ructions at the top levels of power.32 Once Mikhail Gorbachev placed ‘openness’ [glasnost’] at the centre of his reform programme, a Soviet information revolution had begun. Glasnost’ represented a flowering of the Thaw ethos, albeit stripped of its romantic embellishments. Leading journalists of the sixties became part of the political elite: Iurii Voronov, fondly remembered by one of Gorbachev’s closest advisors, Aleksandr Iakovlev, was recalled from his Berlin exile and made Minister of Culture. Boris Pankin climbed highest, serving as an Ambassador to Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the UK. Today he is best known not for his journalistic work but his brief tenure as Foreign Minister, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union.33
Mirroring the waves of self-criticism that characterised the press campaigns of the late-1920s and 1956, the ratio of negative to positive stories increased dramatically from 1986 onwards. Journalists no longer had to worry about reprisals from the authorities; newspapers, books, and TV current affairs programmes discussed not just the usual procession of corrupt bureaucrats, managers, and judges, but also queues, shortages, and the dark stains of the country’s past.34 Audiences responded to this wave of exposures by engaging with Soviet media as never before. Demand for newspapers rose so sharply that the newsprint supply was unable to keep up: in 1990, Komsomol’skaia pravda appeared in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s highest-circulating daily newspaper at 22.4 million.35 Newspapers now received hundreds of letters every day from readers who saw themselves as taking part in a national conversation.36 But for many readers, the rise of critical journalism came at a cost. Nina Andreeva’s infamous letter to Sovetskaia Rossiia (now a bulwark of conservatism rather than innovation) attacked Soviet media’s obsession with negativity—fears shared by some readers and officials, who felt that the media’s onslaught would undermine the foundations of Soviet rule.37 Journalists didn’t bring down the Soviet Union—their unvarnished truth-telling was a symptom rather than a cause of the Soviet collapse—but the emergence of a new language for talking about current affairs exposed the artificiality of official discourse and, in doing so, undermined the foundations of the system.38
Journalistic Ethics after Communism
In theory, the fall of communism granted journalists more freedom than they had previously enjoyed; in practice, their situation fell far short of these expectations. The conditions of communism had sustained as much as hindered journalists’ high social standing. It gave journalists—and the intelligentsia as a whole—a public platform, a delegated authority, and, in a climate of limited media choices, a captive audience. After 1991, these foundations rapidly collapsed.39 If it had been possible to carve out a sphere of independent activity—even if that eventually led to unhappy conversations with officials—now journalistic allegiances were subject to the vicissitudes of the market.40 An alien new language of kompromat, biznes, and marketing emerged, while the election of 1996, where Russian media colluded with Yeltsin’s government to defeat the candidacy of communist Gennadii Ziuganov, pointed the way towards Putin’s capture of broadcast, and later print, media after 2000.41 The murder of leading investigative journalists, including Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Iurii Shchekochikhin, Vlad List’ev, Paul Khlebnikov, and Anna Politkovskaia, demonstrated that it was now a dangerous game to touch on sensitive political and economic questions. In such an atmosphere, the public’s faith in journalists collapsed: a 2008 survey found that journalists were trusted by only 6 percent of the population.42
While younger journalists accepted corruption as part of their everyday activity, Thaw journalists came to believe that the values that had been so dear to them were gone.43 The ‘Club of All Generations of KP’, which organises regular events and socials for the paper’s veterans, pointedly limits membership to pre-1991 journalists, and commits its members to uphold the ‘best traditions of journalistic skill’ honed in the Soviet era.44 Zoia Krylova, who ran an advice column at Komsomol’skaia pravda and later edited the women’s magazine Rabotnitsa, decried the bloodlust of modern journalism, and mused on the ‘thin layer of culture that divides people from predators, and how easy it is to strip it away’.45 Rudenko, who remained at the paper until her death in 2016, was asked by young journalism students whether she thought it was easier to write under today’s new conditions or those of the past. She was undecided: present-day journalists didn’t have to worry about censors, she said, but they did have to deal with the paper’s obsession with ‘infotainment’. To Rudenko, the idea seemed ‘impoverished’: ‘Is human life limited to information and diversion? In any case, my pen is not well inclined to such a formula’.46
The opposition between infotainment and journalism was placed in sharp relief in 2009, when Komsomol’skaia pravda—as of 2020 the top-selling newspaper in Russia—reprinted a special edition first published half a century before. On New Year’s Day 1960, the paper’s editors explained that ‘Grandfather Frost’ had left them the edition they saw in front of them, dated 1 January 2010. Fifty years later, he had once again worked his magic, bringing Komsomolka’s editors an edition from 31 December 2059. News stories from ‘2059’ included information about a spacecraft containing extra-terrestrials that had landed on Red Square; about the Tunguska meteorite, which had apparently been found to be a spaceship, and a special gel named ‘Pamela-5’, which would enable women to increase their bust size in just thirty seconds.47 These stories were run-of-the-mill tabloid sensations, with the story of ‘Pamela-5’, in particular, illustrating the impossible feminine ideals of post-Soviet life (particularly when seen alongside the come-to-bed eyes of Valentina Kostina, a political science major from Kazan’, who stared out hopefully from the back page in expectation of becoming Miss Komsomolka 2009).48 The journalists of 1960, by contrast, had imagined a discussion on whether singular possessive pronouns still had a place in the language, since their spirit was so alien to the collectivist values of 2010.49 Their news from the future evinced an optimistic faith in science to change the world, describing life in a twenty-first century where a nature reserve had been established on the Moon, extinct species had been reanimated, and a new form of video chat had been invented which would allow individuals living far apart to see and speak to one another.
For Thaw journalists, the arrival of capitalist values was accompanied by a loss of idealism. In his posthumously published autobiography, Soloveichik mused on a journalist’s civic responsibility, and argued that it was ‘impossible’ to be a journalist just for a wage, just as writing poetry for money was absurd: ‘You can’t write poems for money because they’re too personal, and you can’t write in a newspaper for money because it’s too social. Poems are very yours, a newspaper is very not yours’.50 Soloveichik’s words were published in 1999, three years after his death, at a time when the process of transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet ‘Komsomolka’ was in full flow. Once capital entered the scene, this sense of responsibility to society fell by the wayside as desperate journalists struggled to keep their newspapers afloat.51 In an era of paid-for coverage, journalists were constantly expected to act against their consciences, weighing up the compromises they were prepared to make against their own professional identity. As formerly independent outlets—Kommersant, Lenta, Vedomosti—are swallowed up by oligarchs or crushed by the state as ‘foreign agents’, the idea of professional ethics has fallen by the wayside, and an equation of journalists with prostitutes has come into currency.52
In May 2016, the editors of the news agency RBC, which had angered the Kremlin with its critical reporting, were replaced with two new heads from the state-backed TASS news agency. The editors held a question-and-answer session to discuss the outlet’s new priorities, a recording of which was leaked to the press.53 One journalist asked how the paper’s editorial line would change. Elizabeta Golikova, one of the new editors, replied by asking the journalist whether they drove a car, and whether they had ever received a speeding ticket. ‘If you drive over the solid double line’, replied Golikova, ‘they’ll take away your licence. Does this mean you’ll stop driving your car…?’ she asked. ‘Where’s the solid double line?’, asked the journalist. ‘Unfortunately, nobody knows where the solid double line is’, came the immediate reply.
These words could have been spoken during a late Soviet period where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable shifted according to the political winds. But despite the sometimes-absurd realities of their work, many Thaw journalists maintained a sense that they were working towards the improvement of the system or, when that belief became untenable, the improvement of individual lives. In today’s Russia, only a few journalists at a few media outlets maintain a faith in journalism’s power to effect real change. Squeezed from one side by capital, and from the other by the Kremlin, today’s professionals have had to rethink what journalism means. Instead of speaking truth to power, professionalism comes down to adekvatnost’: the ability to comprehend a rapidly-changing reality, avoid antagonising the Kremlin and one’s bosses, and still work creatively within those narrowed parameters.54 But for other journalists, lacking this innate sense of the solid double line, the only reaction has been despair and, ultimately, cynicism.55 As Vladimir Putin’s leadership enters its third decade, time will tell whether the despair of the current generation will be replaced by a renewed sense of journalism’s power to effect change.
News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform. Simon Huxtable, Oxford University Press. © Simon Huxtable 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.003.0008
1 David Brandenberger, Crisis of the Propaganda State: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror Under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 162–97.
2 Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Soviet Person after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 104–42; Simon Huxtable, ‘The Life and Death of Brezhnev’s Thaw: Changing Values in Soviet Journalism After Khrushchev, 1964–1968’, in Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange, ed. by Dina Fainberg, Artemy M. Kalinovsky (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 21–42.
3 Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 160.
4 On the growth of Soviet TV in the 1970s see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time; Evans, Between Truth and Time.
5 On playfulness and experiment in 1970s media culture see Evans, Between Truth and Time, 5–9 and passim. On KVN see Ibid., 183–215; Bella Ostromoukhova, ‘KVN – “molodezhnaia kul’tura shestidesiatykh?”’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 36 (2004), 34–9; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253–61.
6 Thomas Remington, The Truth of Authority: Ideology and Communication in the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 159, see also 176–7.
7 E.g. Liudmila Semina, ed., Bol’she, chem gazeta (Moscow: PoRog, 2006).
8 Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise, trans. Anne Frydman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983); Aleksei Semenenko, ‘Estonskii period Sergeia Dovlatova: ot “podenshchiny” k mifotvorchestvu’, Scando-Slavica, 54.1 (2008), 32–49.
9 V. Agranovskii, Vtoraia drevneishaia. Besedy o zhurnalistike (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 251.
10 Marie-Pierre Détraz, ‘The Attrition of Dogma in the Legal Press under Brezhnev. Literaturnaya gazeta (Second Section), 1967–1971’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1992.
11 Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 141.
12 There is disagreement about the role of newspapers like Litgazeta and KP in the 1970s: were they an ‘island of freedom’ or, as others have argued, window-dressing, designed to allow intellectuals to let off steam? See Ilya Gerol, Geoffrey Molyneux, The Manipulators: Inside the Soviet Media (Toronto: Stoddart, 1988), 80–8.
13 In the 1970s much depended on the personality and convictions of editors, as well as their relationship to the parent organization. See Lilita Dzirkals, Thane Gustafson, A. Ross Johnson, ‘Media and Intra-Elite Communication in the USSR’, Rand study R-2869 (1982), 43–61.
14 12 Aug. 1970, d.505, l.86.
15 Natalia Roudakova, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 81–93; Olessia Koltsova, News Media and Power in Russia (London: Routledge, 2006), 25–8.
16 See the reminiscences of former KP editor Lev Korneshov, ‘Ia ee liubil. A ona menia?’, in Bol’she, chem gazeta, 154, 157; interview with A. Iakovlev in Tat’iana A. Volkova, ‘A.I. Adzhubei – Redaktor i publitsist’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, MGU, 2010, 354.
17 Interview with (former KP journalist) Aleksandr Pumpianskii, John Murray, The Russian Press from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994), 223.
18 On this point see Juliane Fürst, ‘Where Did All the Normal People Go? Another Look at the Soviet 1970s’, Kritika, 14.3 (2013), 621–40.
19 Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 104–42.
20 Remington, Truth of Authority, 177.
21 Korneshov, ‘Ia ee liubil’, 151. On KP’s attacks on dissidents see Mary-Catherine French, ‘Reporting Socialism: Soviet Journalism and the Journalists’ Union, 1955–1966’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014, 370–7.
22 Natalia Roudakova, ‘From the Fourth Estate to the Second Oldest Profession: Russia’s Journalists in Search of their Public after Socialism’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2007, 53.
23 Stanislav Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda’ 1925–2005 gg.: Ocherki istorii (Irkutsk: Irkutskaia oblastnaia tipografiia No.1, 2008), 338–54; Korneshov, ‘Ia ee liubil’, 151–60. On Tiazhel’nikov see Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 94–131.
24 Brudny, Reinventing Russia, 88–93. On the broader context of the campaign see Nikolai Mitrokin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 gody (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 537–57.
25 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 100. On Chivilikhin see Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachëv (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 312–39.
26 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 126–8.
27 Nikolai Bodnaruk, ‘Nazad broda net’, in Bol’she, chem gazeta, 163.
28 Valerii Ganichev, ‘“Russkii orden” v TsK partii: Mify i real’nost’, Zavtra, 23/446 (2002). Ganichev estimated the figure at 200: Andrei Soshenko, ‘Valerii Ganichev: “Glavnoe nachalo russkoi ideologii – eto vse-taki sobornost”’, Zavtra, 16 Apr. 2018, https://zavtra.ru/blogs/valerij_ganichev_glavnoe_nachalo_russkoj_ideologii_-_eto_vse-taki_sobornost_ [Accessed: 8 Oct. 2020]; Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 542.
29 Ganichev denied the anti-semitic nature of the campaign (‘Russkii orden’), but the atmosphere at the paper is clear from eyewitness accounts (Bodnaruk, ‘Nazad broda net’, 162–3).
30 Bodnaruk, ‘Nazad broda net’, 163; Gennadii Zhavoronkov, ‘Zapiski postoronnego’, in Bol’she, chem gazeta, 253.
31 On Ganichev’s dismissal see Brudny, Reinventing Russia, 293 and Ganichev, ‘Russkii orden’. On turnover of staff see Zhavoronkov, ‘Zapiski postoronnego’, 253.
32 I. Rudenko, ‘Dolg’, 26 Feb. 1984, 4, https://www.kp.ru/daily/26618/3636808/ [Accessed: 8 Oct. 2020]. See responses to the article I. Rudenko, ‘Dolg moi, tvoi, nash’, 28 Apr. 1984, 2. On the article see Ben McVicker, ‘Afgantsy: The Social, Political, and Cultural Legacy of a Forgotten Generation’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2018, 143–55; Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 85–93.
33 Boris Pankin, The Last Hundred Days of the Soviet Union (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).
34 Brian McNair, Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Soviet Media (London: Routledge, 1991), 46–61; Murray, Russian Press, 87–114; Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time, 235–53; Ellen Mickiewicz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65–82.
35 On circulations (and offering slightly different figures) see Murray, Russian Press, 48–57.
36 On these letters see Courtney Doucette, ‘Perestroika – The Last Attempt to Create the New Soviet Person’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, 2017; Dear Comrade Editor: Readers’ Letters to the Soviet Press under Perestroika, ed. by James Riordan, Sue Bridger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
37 Nina Andreeva, ‘Ne mogu prostupat’sia printsipami’, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 13 Mar. 1987, 3. On the letter see Doucette, ‘Perestroika’, 120–67; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 158–63; McNair, Glasnost, 78–87.
38 Stephen Lovell, ‘Communist Propaganda and Media in the Era of the Cold War’, in The Cambridge History of Communism. Vol. III: Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 373–4; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 291–6.
39 The following analysis discusses the Russian situation, since Komsomol’skaia pravda continues to operate out of Moscow (although it has affiliates in many former Soviet cities). For the situation elsewhere see Epp Lauk, ‘Estonian Journalists in Search of New Professional Identity’, Javnost-The Public, 3.4 (1996), 93–106; Aukse Balčytienė, Epp Lauk, ‘Media Transformations: The Post-Transition Lessons in Lithuania and Estonia’, Informacijos mokslai, 33 (2005), 96–109; Timothy Kenny, Peter Gross, ‘Journalism in Central Asia: A victim of politics, economics, and widespread self-censorship’, International Journal of Press/Politics, 13.4 (2008), 515–25.
40 Svetlana Pasti, ‘A New Generation of Journalists’, in Russian Mass Media and Changing Values, ed. by Arja Rosenholm, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Elena Trubina (London: Routledge, 2010), 61–2, 67–8.
41 Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Ilya Yablokov, ‘Power Lost and Freedom Relinquished: Russian Journalists Assessing the First Post-Soviet Decade’, Russian Review, 76 (2017), 526–41.
42 Pasti, ‘A New Generation’, 57.
43 Ibid., 65–7.
44 ‘Khartiia Kluba zhurnalistov vsekh pokolenii “Komsomol’skoi pravdy”’, 20 May 2006, http://kompravda25.ortox.ru/vojjdi_na_shestojj_ehtazh/view/id/1111949 [Accessed 3 Sept. 2021].
45 Zoia Krylova, ‘Slovo, kotoroe vsegda so mnoi’, in Bol’she, chem gazeta, 79. See also Lidia Grafova, ‘Eto byla zhizn’ vzakhleb’, in ibid., 44–5.
46 Inna Rudenko, ‘Nado pomnit’, chto est’ liudi, kotorye luchshe tebia’, in Zhurnalisty XX veka: liudi i sud’by (Moscow: Olma-press, 2003), 762.
47 ‘Smotrite, kto prishel’, ‘Tungusskii meteorit – vsego lish’ kurabl’ inoplanetian’; ‘Biust piatogo razmera – za 30 sekund!’, 31 Dec. 2009–7 Jan. 2010, 8–9.
48 KP, 29 Dec. 2009, 28.
49 ‘Iazyk dolzhen stat’ vroven’ s vekom!’, 1 Jan. 1960, 10.
50 Simon Soloveichik, Posledniaia kniga (Moscow: Pervaia sentiabria, 1999), 124.
51 Roudakova, Losing Pravda, 98–124. On money problems at KP see Murray, Russian Press, 54–5.
52 Roudakova, Losing Pravda, 135–46.
53 ‘Esli kto-to schitaet, chto mozhno priamo voobshche vse – eto ne tak’, Meduza, 8 Jul. 2016 https://meduza.io/feature/2016/07/08/esli-kto-to-schitaet-chto-mozhno-pryamo-voobsche-vse-eto-ne-tak [Accessed: 15 Oct. 2020].
54 Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Ilya Yablokov, ‘Coercion or Conformism? Censorship and Self-Censorship Among Russian Media Personalities and Reporters in the 2010s’, Democratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 20.2 (2014), 295–312; Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Ilya Yablokov, Peter Bajomi-Lazar, ‘Self-Censorship Narrated: Journalism in Central and Eastern Europe’, European Journal of Communication, 35.1 (2020), 1–9.
55 Roudakova, Losing Pravda, 157–95.