The weekly Ogonyok in Soviet and American public discourse The image of the Soviet liberalisations in East and West (1986-1991) Editor-in-chief Vitaly Korotich at Ogonyok’s editorial office in Moscow. Masterscriptie Geschiedenis van de Internationale Betrekkingen Universiteit van Amsterdam Name: Judith Jongeneel Date: 10 January 2018 Student number: 10198504 Supervisor: Sudha Rajagopalan Second evaluator: Rimko van der Maar Table of contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 2 The changing international climate ............................................................................................ 3 Ogonyok and Vitaly Korotich ....................................................................................................... 6 Research question and sources ................................................................................................. 11 1. Ogonyok and its editor-in-chief Vitaly Korotich........................................................................ 15 1.1 Strategizing glasnost ........................................................................................................... 15 1.2 The reader speaks out in Slovo chitatelya (‘Word of the reader’) ...................................... 17 1.3 Changing Ogonyok’s content and style ............................................................................... 20 2. Ogonyok in Soviet public discourse .......................................................................................... 27 2.1 Positivity about Ogonyok’s new character.......................................................................... 28 2.2 The conservative counter-offense ...................................................................................... 33 3. The image of Ogonyok in the United States ............................................................................. 39 3.1 Ogonyok in the American newspapers The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times .. 39 3.2 The emergence of Korotich as a public figure and the personification of Ogonyok. ......... 44 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 50 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 53 Primary sources ......................................................................................................................... 53 Secondary literature .................................................................................................................. 55 1 Introduction Cover of Ogonyok magazine (July 1991) No. 29. It was July 1991, when Soviet magazine Ogonyok portrayed this house of cards on its cover, the cards resembling the different flags of the fifteen Soviet Republics. Together they represent the still standing Soviet Union, but – as is always the case with a house of cards – destined to collapse. Faced with growing separatism, the Soviet Union experienced trouble to maintain its centralized government. In the following five months, all individual republics would secede from the union, before its formal dissolution on 26 December 1991. It was one of the many ways Ogonyok and other media signalled that times were changing. Many Soviet citizens increasingly voiced discontent with the quality of life they were having in their country. The introduction of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost had profound effects on this change. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television enabled the changes that were started by the government. The control on the media was somewhat loosened and they started to voice the discontent 2 of Soviet citizens. Ogonyok was an important magazine at the time. The weekly journal took a leading role in the new openness and was soon hailed as ‘the flagship magazine of glasnost’.1 Not only in the Soviet Union the climate was changing. The introduction of perestroika and glasnost caused socialism to be rethought in both East and West. Schismatic issues of the past were increasingly seen as irrelevant.2 Many historians have argued that this contributed to the transformation of the international climate that was characterized by the tapering off of the Cold War.3 Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were decreasing in the second half of the 1980s. The introduced openness in the Soviet Union was just one of the many factors that contributed to the transformation. Yet, the role of Soviet media to influence society outside the Soviet Union is underestimated. Many historians have focused on how Soviet media influenced national developments, but also in the United States the absorption of glasnost in public discourse influenced the American image of the Soviet Union.4 In the United States, the new role for Soviet media was closely followed and discussed in national media. Especially Ogonyok became renowned because of its new status. The magazine and its editor-in-chief Vitaly Korotich were widely discussed by other media and soon took prominent place in both Soviet and American public discourse. The changing international climate In the late 1980s, the transformation of the international system was not yet acknowledged as distinctive from other episodes in the Cold War. International security researcher Phil Williams concluded in 1987 that the United States and the Soviet Union have remained adversaries and that détente never could become entente. The 1980s were just another episode in the Cold War, in which the balance of power was fluctuating.5 Similar to Williams, no political scientist or historian saw the 1980s as a clearly distinctive period, let alone that they considered that the Cold War was coming to end. Shortly after 1991, historian John Lewis Gaddis concluded that international theory had failed, and that a ‘scientific’ method in the study of international relations to forecast events is no better than older 1 Chris E. Ziegler, ‘Introduction to the Paperback edition’ (added in 1990), in: Chris E. Ziegler, Environmental Policy in the USSR (1987) xi-xxv, xi. 2 Julian Cooper, ‘The Prospects for the Socialist Economy’, in: Walter Joyce, Hillel Ticktin et al., Gorbachev and Gorbachevism (London 1989) pp. 64-70, 64 and 69. 3 Judy Marie Sylvest, Glasnost. The Pandora’s box of Gorbachev’s reforms (Montana 1999) 53 and 54. 4 Nick Lampert, ‘The Dilemmas of Glasnost’, in: Walter Joyce, Hillel Ticktin et al., Gorbachev and Gorbachevism (London 1989) pp. 48-63, 48, 58-60. 5 Phil Williams, ‘Soviet-American Relations’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science Vol. 36 (1987) 4, pp. 54-66, 54 and 55. 3 methods based on analogy.6 However, after the end of the Cold War many theories arose. These theories shed light on the understanding of certain dilemmas and present how decisions have influenced society years and decades later.7 A widely supported theory about the end of the Cold War is about the transformation of the international system in the second half of the 1980s. The transformation of the international climate was set in motion after both superpowers had experienced the crisis of 1983, a period in which the threat of a nuclear war reached new heights and showed alarmingly many similarities with the Cuban Missile Crisis of twenty years earlier. It was a year of deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.8 President Ronald Reagan spoke about the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ and started a political offensive.9 Feeling threatened by the United States, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, mistaking the passenger jet for an American intelligence plane.10 An improvement of Cold War-relations seemed far from reality. However, just five years President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came together in the Moscow Summit to finalise the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Both countries sought a rapprochement with each other. On the Red Square, students of the Moscow Technological Institute asked Reagan whether he still thought about the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’. ‘No’, answered Reagan, ‘I was talking about another time, another era’.11 Something drastically changed in those five years and created an international climate characterized by the tapering off of the Cold War. Many scholars have attempted to explain the sudden change in Cold War-relations. An internationalising context, broader meaning and evolved methodological approaches have led to an expanding and complicating historiography. Research fields have enlarged from customary subjects of ideology and diplomacy to human rights, media, literature, and an assortment of cultural, social, intellectual and economic approaches.12 How can we understand the period and add relevant information in such a diversifying, dissecting and expanding historiographical field? Historian Federico Romero argues that the diversifying field resulted in a looser 6 John Lewis Gaddis, ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, International Security Vol. 17 (Winter 1992/93) 3, pp. 5-58, 56. 7 Jeremi Suri, ‘Conflict and Co-operation in the Cold War: New Directions in Contemporary Historical Research’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 46 (2011) 1, pp. 5-9, 6. 8 Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington 1994) 352. 9 Ronald Reagan, ‘Evil Empire’-speech