Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media Communication and Society General editor: James Curran Social Work, the Media and Public Relations Bob Franklin and Dave Murphy What News? The Market, Politics and the Local Press Bob Franklin and Dave Murphy Images of the Enemy: Reporting the New Cold War Brian McNair Pluralism, Politics and the Marketplace: The Regulation of German Broadcasting Vincent Porter and Suzanne Hasselbach Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction Jerry Palmer Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media Brian McNair London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Brian McNair All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McNair, Brian Glasnost, perestroika and the Soviet media. – (Communication and scoiety). 1. Soviet Union. Mass media I. Title II. Series 302.230947 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data McNair, Brian Glasnost, perestroika and the Soviet media / Brian McNair. p. cm.—(Communication and society) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. Journalism–Soviet Union. 2. Glasnost. 3. Perestroika. 4. Soviet Union–Politics and government–1895–5. Mass media– Soviet Union. I. Title. II. Series: Communication and society (Routledge (Firm)) PN5274.M37 1991 077’.09’048–dc20 90–24484 ISBN 0-203-19219-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-19222-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 03551 1 (Print Edition) This one’s for Kathy Contents Preface viii 1 Introduction 1 Part I The apparatus 2 Marxism, Leninism and the media 7 3 From theory to practice – building the Soviet media 25 4 Glasnost, perestroika and Soviet journalism 43 5 Expanding access and socialist pluralism 64 6 Resistance and restructuring 78 Part II Some cases 7 Soviet international journalism 97 8 Reykjavik and Moscow: a tale of two summits 122 9 The world of capital 132 10 Women of the world, unite! – women in Soviet news 158 11 Conclusion: all that is glasnost is not gold 169 Notes 173 Bibliography of works in English 189 Bibliography of works in Russian 192 Index 193 Preface This book was written at a time of unprecedented change in the Soviet Union. When the research began in January 1986 the Gorbachev era was underway, but few then would have predicted the scale and pace of the reforms about to take place. When deadlines beckoned and the work was completed at the end of 1989 the Soviet Union, and the world, had been transformed. The Stalinist road to socialism, followed by the USSR with minor deviations since the late 1920s, had been publicly discredited and disavowed. Soviet society had embarked on a voyage of renewal the final destination of which even now, as this book goes to press, cannot be foreseen. In central and eastern Europe analogous processes were taking place, symbolised most dramatically by the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. On literally the last day of writing, the Brandenburg Gate was opened and President Ceausescu of Rumania fell from power. Keeping up with the changes has not been easy. As all who work in this field are aware, the Soviet Union currently represents, from the academic point of view, a ‘moving target’. That said, this book aims to describe and make sense of the ‘perestroika’ as it has affected a key element of the Soviet ideological apparatus: news and journalism. It will be of value, I hope, not only to those who are interested in Soviet affairs, but to students of mass communication in general. The greater portion of the book is concerned with the changing organisation and content of the Soviet media, but some space is devoted to a comparison of Soviet journalism with that of the west, and of the United Kingdom in particular. The purpose of this comparative approach is to show, on the one hand, the differences between journalism in capitalist and socialist societies, and on the other, to highlight some of the similarities. The reader will find in this study a rejection of the commonplace thesis that news in the USSR has been and is mere ‘propaganda’ (as that word is negatively defined in the west), while that of such countries as Britain and the USA is ‘objective’ and ‘independent’. On the contrary, this study is informed throughout by the view that all news is ideological. From this perspective, the only thing to be determined is the direction of the ‘bias’ which prevails in any particular society, and the means by which it is reproduced over time. This study attempts to deal with these questions in the Soviet context. For financial assistance I am grateful to the University of Ulster and the British Council. The recordings of Soviet television news used in the study were made by technical staff at the University of Glasgow. Still photographs were taken by Gillian Coward and Mac Pollok at the University of Ulster. I would also like to thank the Soviet journalists and academics who co-operated with the project by granting interviews, and James Curran, who supported it from the beginning. Earlier drafts of some sections of the book appeared in Media, Culture, and Society, vol.11, no.3, 1989. (To live in society, and be free from society, is impossible) Lenin 1 Introduction The Soviets refer to their news media as ‘the means of mass information and propaganda’. The term distinguishes press and broadcasting from those elements of the cultural apparatus which depend on interpersonal communication for the transmission of messages – the oral propaganda network, the education system, and the ‘knowledge’ societies.1 It also alerts us to the Party’s insistence that the Soviet media should function as engines of ideological production; machinery of social knowledge, to be harnessed and consciously directed to solving the tasks of socialist construction. The straightforward instrumentalism of this approach contrasts with that prevailing in liberal democracies such as Britain and the United States of America, where the independent, impartial, ‘watchdog’ role of journalism is held to be paramount. In these countries critical theorists have long questioned the independence of the media and debated the extent to which news and journalism should be considered as part of the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’. 2 In the USSR, as any Soviet journalist will readily concede, ‘we make no bones about it’. 3 The Party, speaking in the name of the people, openly proclaims the fact that since 1917 it has used the Soviet news media as a means of social control and engineering, rather than of communicating useful information for its own sake. As one Soviet source puts it, ‘mass media under socialism not only express public opinion, they are the most important means of its formation’ (Korobeinikov, ed., 1986, p.52). Acting on this belief, the Bolsheviks after 1917 built a media apparatus unequalled in size and complexity anywhere in the world. Moreover, the Party took upon itself the role of supervision and control of this apparatus. By gradually outlawing the great majority of non-Bolshevik media organs the Party effectively monopolised the flow of mass information in Soviet society for nearly seventy years. With the exception of those few who had access to alternative sources—principally foreign radio stations run by western broadcasting and intelligence services, and underground ‘samizdat’ publications 4—the Soviet citizen was throughout this period almost completely dependent on official media for information. The practical implications of this dependence were rather bluntly demonstrated to me in April 1986 when, while I was living and studying in Moscow doing the research for this book, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, showering radioactive debris over a large part of Europe. As a resident of Moscow the Soviet news media were my main source of information about events taking place in the USSR and beyond its borders, as well as being the subject of my academic work. Being a westerner I had access to alternative news sources such as the British Embassy library, which contained back issues of British newspapers and periodicals. I had some contact with western journalists in the city, and occasional mail from family and friends at home. Consequently, the quantity and variety of information at my disposal were substantially greater than those available to the average Glasnost, perestroika and the soviet media 2 Soviet citizen. Nevertheless, the vulnerability of my position as a consumer of Soviet media was illustrated by the fact that, like the great majority of people living in the USSR, I first heard the name ‘Chernobyl’ on the night of Monday, April 28th, nearly three full days after the explosion occurred. I had returned from visiting friends in the city to the hostel in Moscow University which the foreigners shared with Soviet students. I called into a British neighbour’s room before going to bed, to find four or five people gathered together in earnest conversation. ‘Have you heard?’ one of them asked as I joined the company. ‘A Soviet nuclear reactor’s on fire’, said another. ‘It was on the BBC.’ Lacking a suitable radio, I hadn’t heard the BBC’s account.