The Weekly Ogonyok in Soviet and American Public Discourse the Image of the Soviet Liberalisations in East and West (1986-1991)

Home , Artyom Borovik, Evil Empire speech, Moscow Summit (1988), Ogonek, Union of Soviet Writers, Vitaly Korotich

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

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 to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida (8th of March 1983). 10 Jeremi Suri, ‘Explaining the End of the Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 4 (2002) 4, pp. 60-92, 68. 11 Garthoff, The Great Transition, 352. 12 Federico Romero, ‘Cold War historiography at the crossroads’, Cold War History Vol. 14 (02 October 2014) 4, pp. 685-703, 686.

4 understanding of the Cold War, and advocates for a broad cultural understanding. ‘Are we still dealing with one Cold War or many’, asks Romero, ‘and how do they relate to each other?’.13 Historian Jeremi Suri explains the end of the Cold War by drawing attention to the events of 1983, the decisions made by leaders until 1986 and the subsequently transformation of the international system that ended the Cold War by the end of 1991. According to Suri, all these events are related to each other and can be organised into a ‘pattern of concentric circles’, which form together a ‘pluricausal explanation’ to the end of the Cold War.14 The events of 1983 increased Soviet-American tensions and marked a ‘significant fork in the road’ (the first circle). These events facilitated broad, long- term changes in which social, economic, cultural and political forces affected the decision-making processes of both governments (the second circle). The influence of old orthodoxies decreased and the support for change by pre-existing pressures increased. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ expressed the increased support for change.15 In the United States, the second-term Reagan administration became increasingly peace seeking.16 These developments ultimately transformed the international system (the third circle), in which the decisions made in the first two circles could not be backtracked and paved the way to the end of the Cold War.17 The theory suggests that there were many factors that played a role in the end of the Cold War. It suggests that there were social, political and cultural developments that together characterized the tapering off of the Cold War. One of these developments that signalled that times were changing was the way the media worked. Ogonyok was one of the most important publications at the time in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev appointed Ogonyok as one of the few media to implement his new policies with poet and writer Vitaly Korotich as its editor-in-chief. Korotich made a whole new magazine of Ogonyok and the circulation of the weekly magazine increased from one million in 1985 to almost five in 1991.1819 According to historian Stephen Lovell, Ogonyok carried out a ‘distinct social function’.20 The magazine reached the ideals of the shestidesyatniki, the 1960s generation that formed liberal

13 Romero, Cold War historiography, 687. 14 Suri, Explaining the End, 60. 15 Archie Brown, New Thinking in Soviet Politics (1992) 12-13. 16 William D. Jackson, ‘Soviet Reassessment of Ronald Reagan, 1985-1988’, Political Science Quarterly Vol. 113 (1998) 4, pp. 617-644, 617. See also: Suri, Explaining the end, 70-71. 17 Jeremi Suri, Explaining the End, 61. 18 Alexei Yurchak, Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos’ (Princeton 2005) 32. 19 Yekaterina Krongauz, ‘Vigilyansky: V “Ogon’ke ya ponyal – narod nevezhevenen i neobrazovan’, RIA Novosti (12 November 2013). Website: https://ria.ru/media_Russia/20131112/976087751.html (consulted 12 September 2017). 20 Stephen Lovell, ‘Ogonek: The Crisis of a Genre’, Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 48 (1996) 6, pp. 989-1006, 989.

5 worldviews during the Krushchev Thaw, but had to hold back and adapt when the thaws were ended with Leonid Brezhnev’s installing.21 Researching Ogonyok will offer more insight into the dilemma of explaining the end of the Cold War. It offers insight into a period of a transforming international climate that was caused by earlier decisions and played a part in influencing the end of the communist era.

Ogonyok and Vitaly Korotich

On the official website of Ogonyok is stated that ‘with his arrival [Korotich], the magazine turned 180 degrees’.22 The weekly magazine Ogonyok, before 1986 a typical ‘hairdresser magazine’ and primarily read because of its crossword puzzle, changed into a popular magazine with a critical tone to politics, culture and society.23 Vitaly Korotich, a Ukrainian born Soviet journalist and writer, was in 1986 appointed by the Soviet government as editor-in-chief of Ogonyok to implement the measures determined by Gorbachev’s reforms. He exchanged Ogonyok’s ideological content for modern contemporary topics, such as the troubles with socialism, the problems in Soviet society, the market economy and mafia and presented once-forbidden topics on history and literature. It turned out to be a great success. He attracted a diverse and widespread audience that echoed Ogonyok’s call for discussion. Today Ogonyok still exists. With its origins in 1899 it is the oldest weekly magazine in contemporary Russia and the former Soviet Union. Until 1917, Ogonyok was a cultural magazine that engaged in the discussion of literature and art. The magazine disappeared after the Russian revolution, but returned after the establishment of the Soviet Union. The magazine’s headquarters moved from Saint Petersburg to publishing house Gosizdat in Moscow and Mikhail Koltsov became the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Koltsov was a star reporter for multiple newspapers and a convinced communist who worked close together with the NKVD.24 He started with the publication of music scores, the reproduction of paintings and implementation of photojournalism in Ogonyok. In 1938, Pravda

21 Lovell, Ogonek, 989. 22 Author unknown, ‘Izvestny zhurnalist Vitaly Korotich prazdnuyet yubiley’, Sputnik (26 May 2016). Website: https://ru.sputnik-news.ee/events/20160526/1863129.html (consulted 13 September 2017). 23 Nataliya Rostova, ‘Ya sdelal, chto mog. Pust’ drugie sdelayut, chto mogut. Glavny redaktor zhurnala “Ogonyok” (1986-1991) Vitaly Korotich’, Republic (1 December 2009). Website: https://republic.ru/russia/ya_sdelal_chto_mog_pust_drugie_sdelayut_chto_mogu-199802.xhtml (consulted 13 September 2017). 24 Jessica Werneke, ‘Photography in the Late Soviet Period: Ogonek, the SSOD, and Official Photo Exchanges’, Vestnik: The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies (2015) p. 18. Website: http://www.sras.org/photography_late_soviet_period (consulted: 7 May 2017).

Publishing House replaced Koltsov’s editorship. Koltsov was accused of espionage and fell victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.25 Pravda redesigned Ogonyok into an ideological magazine used for propaganda purposes. The many illustrations and photos remained, despite the strict ideological guidelines for photojournalists.26 During the Khrushchev Thaw, the Communist Party slightly decreased the strict guidelines for journalists. Ogonyok published limited travelogues about foreign countries and provided information about world events and international cinema. In 1958, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Anatoly Sofronov received an official warning from the Central Committee Commission on Ideology, Culture and International Party Relations for ‘serious shortcomings in the decoration of the magazine’.27 The flexible understanding of guidelines was restrained and the anti-Western political content increased. American financial wealth was connected to the domination of workers and atomic bombs.28 Everyday life was coming to the fore, without losing the socialist realist glorification of communist values and teleological orientation towards socialism. Determined personhood changed into everyday personhood.29 Korotich spent his early life in the era of Khrushchev Thaw in Kiev, the city where he was born in 1936. Korotich committed to Kiev Medical University and graduated in 1958. Between 1959 and 1966, he worked as a gynaecologist and cardiologist, before fully committing to writing and poetry. As a member of the Soviet Union of Writers he published fifteen books in his native language of Ukrainian. In the late 1970s, he became the head editor of magazine Vsevit, a Ukrainian periodical that translates foreign literary works.30 Korotich became the editor-in-chief of Ogonyok in 1986, but was forced to resign in 1991 after the journalistic assembly stated he had ‘shown cowardice’.31 During the August Coup of 1991, hard-line communists succeeded to take control of Gorbachev’s leadership. Afraid for reprisals from State Committee on the State of Emergency, Korotich decided to await the coup in the United States.32 Lovell argues that the defeat of the Putsch proved that Ogonyok had fostered social

25 The accusation of espionage came a few weeks after Koltsov’s publication about Stalin’s Great Terror, the political repressions in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. In the article, Koltsov criticised aspects of this large- scale purge of government officials and the Communist Party. 26 Jessica Werneke, ‘The Boundaries of Art: Soviet Photography from 1956 to 1970’ (Texas 2015) 84. 27 Werneke, Photography. 28 Sonja D. Schmid, ‘Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear topics in Ogonyok¸ 1945-1965’, in: Dick van Lente, The Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965 (New York 2012), pp. 19-52, there 19-23. 29 Werneke, The Boundaries of Art, 152, 153 and 157. 30 Marshall Fine, ‘Poet provides a view of Soviet writers’, Lawrence Journal World (28 September 1976) p. 5. 31 Alexander Mosyakin, Strasti po Filonovu. Sokrovishcha, spasennie dlya Rossii (Saint Petersburg 2014). 32 The August Putsch or Coup was the attempt of hard-line members of the Communistic Party to take over Gorbachev’s leadership. After two days, the State Committee on the State of Emergency capitulated.

7 change in the Soviet Union. With Korotich’s progressive editorship, Ogonyok became a forum for liberalists and spread their ideology all over the Soviet Union.33 Ogonyok soon became known as the leader in Gorbachev’s openness.34 Korotich replaced photos of Lenin by modern Soviet art, photography and political montage. Because of Ogonyok’s ground-breaking articles, the letters sent to Ogonyok’s editorial office and the magazine’s circulation strongly increased. Ogonyok wrote about bribery, corruption, Stalin’s war crimes, the increasing suicide rate and drug trade, but also attacks towards the anti-Semitic beliefs of organisations as Pamyat.35 According to some scholars, Ogonyok did not only reflect the changing of Soviet society, it also ‘accelerated’ it.36 Progressive thinkers welcomed the direction of the magazine and echoed its call for change. Scholars from the United States have tended to describe the call for change in the Soviet Union as ‘pro-American and pro-capitalist’37, while others more recently pleaded not to treat similar movements as capitalist: ‘Indeed, like perestroika and glasnost, the 1989 revolutions took hold as movements to reform socialism, for “socialism with a human face,” not for capitalism’.38 Korotich’s personal beliefs and intentions with Ogonyok are an intriguing topic to study. Soviet government appointed Korotich as the editor-in-chief of Ogonyok to implement Gorbachev’s perestroika, but it is not clear whether he fulfilled the government’s intentions. Orthodox thinker Yegor Ligachev accused Alexander Yakovlev – chief of ideology who supposedly assigned Korotich – of undermining socialism by appointing anti-communist editors.3940 However, his memoirs tell that Ligachev himself appointed Korotich as the editor-in-chief of Ogonyok. Ligachev was convinced of the editor’s capabilities after reading his book Litso nenavisti (‘The face of hatred’), a propagandistic publication which makes strong diatribes against American life and Zionists who according to the book

33 Lovell, Ogonek, 997 34 Felicity Barringer, ‘Moscow magazine is leader in openness’, The New York Times (22 March 1987). Website: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/22/world/moscow-magazine-is-leader-in-new-openness.html?mcubz=0 (consulted 16 September 2017). 35 Cathy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in: Vitaly Korotich and Cathy Porter, The Best of Ogonyok (London 1990) pp. 2-6, 2- 5. 36 Lovell, Ogonek, 989; Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin, Literatura kak sotsialny institut (Moscow 1994) 332-333. 37 David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above. The Demise of the Soviet System (London 1997) 38 Penny von Eschen, ‘Locating the Transnational in the Cold War’, Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford 2013) 458. 39 Richard Pipes, Alexander Yakovlev. The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (Illinois 2015) 61, 64-65. 40 Alexander Yakovlev and Mikhail Gorbachev supposedly had a three-hour conversation in Canada, where they together planted the seeds for perestroika and glasnost’ and became instant friends. See: Allan Levine, ‘How a three-hour conversation at a Liberal cabinet minister's home triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union’, National Post (17 March 2013). Website: http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-walk-that-changed-the-world (consulted 16 September 2017).

8 are conspiring for world domination.4142 Korotich confirms Ligachev’s account of the allocation, but says it was a decision of all three men – Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Ligachyov – to assign him as editor-in- chief.43 Whether this information is correct is not clear. Korotich seems to recall a variety of accounts over the allocation in different interviews. The expressed ideas in Litso nenavisti stand in contrast with Korotich’s progressive editorship. His vision about American Zionists shows similarities with the ideas expressed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic late nineteenth-century fabricated text that describes a Jewish plan for world domination.44 Korotich’s ideas can therefore be regarded not only as anti-Zionist, but also as anti- Semitic. During his editorship, Korotich printed many attacks against such views in Ogonyok. For example against the anti-Semitic convictions of Pamyat, a political party with strong orthodox and nationalist values. The magazine became one of the figureheads to oppose anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Surprisingly, Korotich expressed his support for the book even after 1986 and reprinted it several times.45 An interviewer of The New Yorker describes Korotich fittingly: ‘Korotich has a selective memory: […] his account of an event may vary from month to month or from one interlocutor to another’.46 His conservative views about the United States did also not originate out of ignorance. Korotich travelled to Canada and the United States as early as the 1960s. Thanks to the detailed descriptions of his activities by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Korotich’s personal convictions of that time are evident. A declassified report about Korotich’s stay in Montreal, Canada, describes how Korotich met several Ukrainian émigrés and had conversations about Ukrainian politics, literary criticism and Ukrainian nationalism.47 It turns out that Korotich found connection with the ideals of Ukrainian nationalists. The reports describe meetings of Korotich with Ukrainian nationalist émigrés Bohdan Panchuk and Marko Antonovich. The latter was a member of the Melnyk section, a moderate division of

41 Stephen Cohen and Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin. The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev (Boulder 1996) 95-97. See also: Kotz and Weir, Revolution from Above, 65. 42 Vladimir Shlapentokh, ‘The Changeable Soviet Image of America’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 497 (1988) 1 pp.157-171, there 164 en 165. 43 Gibbs, Gorbachev’s Glasnost, 26-27. 44 Alexander Soldatov, ‘”Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov” priobschili k ugolovnomu delu’, Novaya Gazeta (28 November 2017). 45 Vitaly Korotich and Antony Gardner, ‘Interview: Vitalii Korotich: The Media under Gorbachev’, Journal of International Affairs Vol. 42 (1989) 2, pp. 357-362, 358. 46 John Newhouse, ‘Profiles [Vitaly Korotich]. Chronicling the Chaos’, The New Yorker (31 December 1990) pp. 38- 39. See also: Gibbs, Gorbachev’s Glasnost, 110 (footnote 27). 47 CIA Electronic Reading Room, ‘Subject: Korotych Vitali, his stay in Montreal, Que.’, Aerodynamic Vol. 31 (Operations, 24 May 1965) 42, pp. 1-15. Released in 2007.

9 the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).48 One of Korotich’s statements suggests that Korotich might have been more radical than Panchuk and Antonovich: ‘Anyone who says that Moscow knows everything, that it managed to Russify everything, that nothing can be done, that person is a Bandera capitulator’.49 Korotich refers to Stepen Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist and proponent of an independent Ukraine. In the 1940s, the OUN split into two sections: the moderate Melnyk section and more radical Bandera section. Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in 1959. 50 Shortly before his visit to Montreal, Korotich had a conversation with Ukrainian émigré Rostislav Chomiak51 in Toronto, where he referred to himself and his literary colleagues as ‘the boys’ and ‘nation- builders’ of Ukraine.52 The CIA notes that Korotich ‘said many of these things because he wanted to impress Chomiak and win his complete confidence’.53 To define Korotich as a radical Ukrainian nationalist might therefore be doubtful. In addition, the OUN source warned the CIA that Korotich ‘had betrayed his friends and therefore one should be very careful with him’.54 In 1966, Korotich became Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Union of Writers UkSSR, which made him no longer accepted by ‘the boys’. Ivan Svitlichny, Ukrainian literary critic and Soviet dissident to whom Korotich referred as a ‘good critic’55, did not want to be associated with Korotich anymore.56 Also later in his life, people became disappointed in Korotich. Well-known Russian writer Viktor Nekrasov said that he lost his sympathy for Korotich after reading Litso nenavisti. He was of the opinion that Korotich’s views are ‘tendentious, if

48 The CIA used ‘various OUN wings in ideological warfare and covert actions against the Soviet Union’. The agency’s source was most likely as well a member of OUN. See: Per Anders Rudling, ‘The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right. The Case of VO Svoboda’, in: Ruth Wodak and John. E. Richardson, Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York 2013) pp. 228-255, 230. 49 Quote of Vitaly Korotich. See: CIA Electronic Reading Room, Subject: Korotych, 12. 50 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York 1999) 361-362. 51 Also known as Rostyk (Ross) Chomiak, who at that time was a reporter for the Calgary Herald but later committed as radio commentator to provide Ukrainians in the USSR with truthful news reports. See: Yaro Bihun, ‘Remembering Rostyk Chomiak’, The Ukrainian Weekly (16 January 2016). Website: http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/remembering-rostyk-chomiak/ (consulted 18 September 2017). 52 The CIA investigations to Korotich are all part of Project Aerodynamic, which granted support to a Ukrainian émigré political group. Soviet press attacked these collaborators often for their ‘bourgeois nationalist’ activities. See: CIA Electronic Reading Room, Aerodynamic Vol. 5 (Development and plans) 4. 53 CIA Electronic Reading Room, ‘Vitaliy Korotych aka Korotich and his Contact With Rostislav Chomiak’, Aerodynamic Vol. 35 (Operations) 31, pp 1-4, 3. Released in 2007. 54 CIA Electronic Reading Room, Subject: Korotych, 7. 55 Ibidem, 12. 56 CIA Electronic Reading Room, ‘Memorandum for Record [by source AECASSOWARY/29]’, Aerodynamic Vol. 35 (Operations) 94 (16 February 1967) pp. 1-4, 1. Released in 2007.

10 not lies’.57 Korotich’s worldviews seem to have changed quite often and abruptly. Being a proponent of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s to a strict conservative communist in the decades after and a liberal reformer in the second half of the 1980s, Korotich currently seems to have taken a pro-Russian attitude towards the conflict in Ukraine. Recently he said to believe that Crimea should be a Russian protectorate and independent from Ukraine.58 At the moment he lives in Moscow and does not own a Ukrainian passport any longer.59 Korotich’s personal beliefs seem rather unpredictable. Over time, he seems to have surprised many acquaintances and colleagues with his perspectives. His intentions seem contradictory. Nevertheless, he was a popular editor-in-chief and achieved Ogonyok’s greatest success of all times. After 1991, the magazine’s circulation quickly dropped. The novelty of rediscovered literature was wearing off. Because of their wide targeted audiences, the journals began to resemble almanacs rather than lively debates.60 Ogonyok attempted to redefine itself, but never again exceeded the limit of one- hundred thousand copies per issue. One of the reasons why Western scholars often have forgotten and neglected the magazine’s social function in the period of perestroika, according to historian Stephen Lovell, and have preferred to research the largely read newspapers and monthly journals.61

Research question and sources

My purpose with this thesis is not to give another account of the ground-breaking articles Ogonyok published in the late 1980s. Neither is it to give another analysis of the reasons why the international climate changed and played a role in the end of the Cold War. The new flow of information made the upheaval in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries inevitable, but the emerging mass-media reached much further than the national borders of their countries.62 Historians have pleaded for decades to approach the end of the Cold War from a transnational perspective. They advocated that civil society, businesses, labour unions and other non-governmental organisations directly interacted

57 Radio speech Viktor Nekrasov ‘Litso nenavisti Vitaliya Koroticha’, Radio station unknown (between 1983 and 1987). Published by Yegunets Almanac (2003) No. 13, pp. 172-174. Website: http://nekrassov- viktor.com/Books/Nekrasov-Korotich.aspx (consulted 20 September 2017). 58 Radio interview ‘Bez durakov [Ezhenedel’naya programma Sergeya Korzuna. V gostyakh Vitaly Korotich]’, Radio Moskva (25 April 2015). 59 Radio interview ‘Vitaly Korotich: “Nas Sovetskaya vlast’ vygnala von iz chelovechestva” [v programme Leonida Velehova]’, Radio Svoboda (21 February 2015). 60 Lovell, Ogonek, 989. 61 Ibidem, 989 and 1003. 62 Karen A. Frenkel, ‘The European community and information technology’, Communications of the ACM Vol. 33 (1990) 4, pp. 404-410, 410.

11 across state boundaries and are not controlled by their national government.63 Yet, the contribution of Soviet media to the transformation of Soviet-American relations in the late 1980s is mainly approached from the classical perspective, which focuses on the national influences of Soviet media on the Soviet Union.64 Direct transnational influences have been neglected. According to political scientist William D. Jackson, Gorbachev started a peace offensive against the second-term Reagan administration to influence Western public opinion. His foreign policy aimed at ‘isolating American imperialism in the eyes of peaceloving world society’.65 Moreover, the new role of Soviet media as a result of glasnost was broadly discussed in the United States and caused American citizens to form a particular view about the situation in the Soviet Union.66 Especially Ogonyok’s revelations and new character received much attention. Only a few years before, Soviet-American relations seemed strained and ideals contradicted each other, but after the introduction of glasnost many people in both countries applauded the new direction Soviet media. It is my aim to analyse how the magazine’s new direction was interpreted in the two countries. How was Ogonyok perceived in the Soviet Union and the United States? Comparing Ogonyok’s role in both countries will offer more insight into one of the larger changes of the international climate in the late 1980s that caused the Cold War and communist era to end. I will examine the research question by studying public discourse in both countries. Until the arrival of Gorbachev as Secretary General and the introduction of his reforms, public discourse in the Soviet Union was very limited. There were no political rallies and the content of literature, news, films and television was intensively checked and adjusted before published. The civic space that appeared to be present was controlled by the state. With the introduction of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, a limited form of public discourse came into existence. The tight grip was somewhat loosened, meaning that the content of media and other forums for public discourse were less controlled. Individual thoughts could easily flow into public forums, newspapers and television, causing open discussions and lively debates. In the United States, on the other hand, the climate was from a total different order than in the Soviet Union. In contrast to the new acquired space for public discourse in the Soviet Union, the space for public discourse in the United States was one of the greatest, if not the

63 Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane, ‘Transnational Relations and World Politics: An Introduction’, International Organization Vol. 25 (1971) 3, pp. 329-349, 331. 64 Joseph Gibbs, Gorbachev’s Glasnost. The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika (Austin 1999) 3-4. 65 Jackson, Soviet Reassessment, 617, 618 and 622. 66 Arnold L. Horelick, The West’s response to Perestroika and Post-Soviet Russia (Santa Monica 1995) 2-3.

12 leading example for the rest of the world.67 Analysing the perceptions in both countries may contribute to a better understanding of the changing international climate. The definition of the term ‘discourse’ is dependent on the theoretical orientation and background discipline of the researcher. The change that I analyse requires a social conception of discourse. Post-structuralist philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have pleaded to treat discourse as a much broader and influential concept that is closely related to social entities and power relations.68 Foucault described discourse as the ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak'.69 According to his definition, discourse does not just represent social entities, but it constructs social relations and is able to change a reality of society. The meaning of discourse is in this sense determined by dialogues and discussions, and structures a reality with a particular image of the world. It can be summarized as ‘systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’.70 This understanding is crucial to draw any conclusions about how Ogonyok reflected the changing public opinion in the Soviet Union, influenced public discourse in both countries and contributed to improved Soviet-American relations. In the first chapter, I will analyse the development of Ogonyok’s strategy and content under the editorship of Korotich from 1986 to 1991. According to the secondary literature, the defeat of the August Putsch was evidence that Ogonyok helped to foster social change. Analysing the magazine in the years between 1986 and 1991 will help to determine how Ogonyok could have contributed to this social change and the American image of the Soviet Union. Apart from its news-providing function, the magazine dedicated to the discussion of literature and contained a readers column and in-depth articles about political, social and cultural topics. Besides examining the magazine’s content in the issues in the period of 1986 to 1991, I will use the secondary literature about Ogonyok to track this development. According to Lovell, Ogonyok made the liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki accessible to the mass, which caused Soviet citizens to advocate for their needs and demands.71 In the second chapter, I will examine how the renewed image of Ogonyok was perceived in Soviet public discourse. In Literatura kak sotsialny institut (‘Literature as a social institution’), Russian

67 Carolyn Calloway-Thomas and John Luis Lucaites, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse (Tuscaloosa 1993) 88. 68 Katsue Akiba Reynolds, Discourse and Social Change. From "personal" to "political" (Honululu 1989) 18. 69 Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York 1972) 49. 70 Iara Lessa, ‘Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare: Restaging Teen Motherhood’, The British Journal of Social Work Vol. 36 (2006) 2, pp. 283-298, 285. 71 Lovell, Ogonek, 990 and 991.

13 sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin take the journals as an example to demonstrate the growing ‘interest articulation’ in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s: the way Soviet citizens expressed their needs and frustration to the government.72 Ogonyok did not only reflect public discourse, it also affected it. With its critical tone and sharp comments, it caused the broader public discourse to talk and write about Ogonyok and its addressed topics. Topics that Ogonyok pointed out were re-discussed by other media. Moreover, Ogonyok became discussed by other media as a symbol of the new era and the increasing division between the conservatives and liberalists.73 I will analyse media, such as newspapers, journals, television or radio, but also public meetings, speeches and movies. Also, I will use the readers column of Ogonyok, which functioned as a forum where readers could respond to topics in earlier issues of the magazine. In the last chapter, I will repeat the same analysis as in chapter two, but for the United States. I will analyse how American public discourse about Ogonyok was characterized and differed from the way it was perceived in the Soviet Union. This will offer insight into the American image of the Soviet Union and Ogonyok’s role in it. A variety of books were published outside the Soviet Union about Ogonyok’s ground-breaking articles and readers column and how the magazine tested the limits of glasnost.7475 Moreover, American newspapers were regularly reporting about Ogonyok’s revelations, in particular the daily newspapers The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. These newspapers were two of the most circulated newspapers in the United States and I will therefore focus mainly on these media. Also, Korotich became a prominent figure in the United States because of his vision with the magazine. He became a frequently interviewed guest by newspapers and television shows.76 His gained fame was due to the success of the magazine. Gradually, Korotich became a public figure in the United States and he took over Ogonyok’s role as the figurehead of glasnost.77 I will therefore also analyse how he as a person was perceived.

72 Gudkov and Dubin, Literatura; Lovell, Ogonek, 989. 73 Author unknown, ‘Liberal Policies of Gorbachev Face Stiff Opposition from Conservatives’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (28 February 1989) p. 3. 74 Vitaly Korotich and Cathy Porter, The Best of Ogonyok (London 1990); Christopher Cerf and Marina Albee, Small Fires. Letters from the Soviet People to Ogonyok magazine. 1987-1990 (New York 1990); Irène Commeau-Rufin, Lettres des Profondeurs de I'URSS. Le Courrier de Lecteurs d'Ogonyok. 1987-1989 (Paris, 1989). 75 Korotich participated in the American publication by fulfilling a role as co-author and writing the introduction of the book. Nevertheless, the book is aimed at the American public and offers insight into the way Korotich communicated Ogonyok’s role in the Soviet Union to the American public. 76 CIA Electronic Reading Room, ‘Special Memorandum. Leading Soviet Commentators and Midlevel Officials’, General CIA Records (May 1987). 77 Lovel, Ogonek, 997-999.

1. Ogonyok and its editor-in-chief Vitaly Korotich

Sociological research to the Soviet journals of the 1980s was for the first time executed by Russian sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin. In Literatura kak sotsialny institut, they argue that the publication of newspapers, magazines and television broadcasting put Soviet social life into ‘acceleration’.78 Due to the new possibilities that glasnost offered, media became a resource for Soviet citizens to express their needs and frustrations to the government. According to Gudkov and Dubin, Ogonyok was one of the leading magazines in expressing this ‘interest articulation’.79 The magazine soon became considered as one of the most progressive magazines in the country. Under the editorship of Korotich, the magazine became dedicated to large analyses of society, discussions about the undemocratic character of political institutions and absence of parliamentary forms in political life. According to the secondary literature, Ogonyok became with its new character a zhurnal dlya vsekh (‘magazine for everyone’). The magazine reached a whole new public in the Soviet Union and mobilized people to express their needs and frustrations. With the role the magazine sought to play, Ogonyok needed a broad support of the intelligentsia, the educated working class and thoughtful youth. It needed a new social scene, one that dared to discuss about reforming the socialist state. Appealing to a wide and large audience was a difficult task and asked for a kind of specialism that is able to interfere in all economic, political and juridical discussions. Ogonyok needed staff and reporters with a scientific education who could analyse, put subjects into context and catch the attention of professional scientists.80 In this chapter, I will outline how Korotich succeeded to change Ogonyok into the successful magazine that was read by millions of people. The development will form the foundation for my analyses in the second and third chapter.

1.1 Strategizing glasnost

Ogonyok was striving for reforms within socialism, for ‘socialism with a human face’. It clung to the pressing problems of the day, recognized reality and used a modern language and style. The new rules of perestroika and glasnost made people desire novelties that Ogonyok provided for.81 This change actually developed more gradually than often is assumed. Lovell argues that there was no fixed political

78 Gudkov and Dubin, Literatura, 332-333. 79 Ibidem, 332-333. 80 Ibidem, 332 and 333. 81 Ibidem, 333 and 334.

15 line visible in Ogonyok until 1989.82 In 1986, Ogonyok set itself the goal to be a truly national nardodny (‘peoples’) magazine. Lenin was removed from the magazine’s masthead in 1987, but it still took some years before the magazine fully took the liberal side. The magazine grew out to unite all middlebrow people in the cause of modernisation and democratisation. It was the first time that a journal as Ogonyok was fulfilling this kind of role. Before, newspapers usually performed a popularising function in Soviet society and the thicker academic and institutional journals were known for initiating the intellectual debate.83 By 1990, internal tensions arose between the old shestidesyatniki and the younger generation of employees. The Law on the Press guaranteed the independency of the press from Soviet institutions and it released Ogonyok from the management of Pravda Publishing House. Being chained to Pravda, Ogonyok had often complained about how its distribution was intentionally limited throughout the Soviet Union by political motivations. After Korotich announced that the magazine’s staff would take over the management, the state seemed determined to punish its call for independence. It forced up the price of Ogonyok’s subscriptions and the Ministry of Finance was slow to arrange the magazine’s financial independency. One week after the editorial staff had threatened to sue the state, the magazine finally won the battle for independent registration. Korotich promised ‘the return of Ogonyok’s convictions to its origins of a narodny zhurnal, to the concept of a weekly that speaks to a large part of the population’.84 However, a twist within Ogonyok’s staff made Korotich’s promise unreachable. The shestidesyatniki stood behind Korotich’s statement, but the younger employees believed that the magazine should provide a new strategy and image if it wanted to survive as an independent journal.85 By 1991, Ogonyok was forced into difficulties and its popularity decreased. Ogonyok’s editors were increasingly clinching with each other. The younger generation of employees were convinced that mass entertainment would maintain the magazine’s success in the future. Fourteen editors of Ogonyok demonstratively announced their resignation because of the internal twist. In addition, the magazine endured competition of other media that adapted their strategy to the new time of mass information. People were becoming tired of the endless political commentary and historical writings of the magazine. The novelty of rediscovered literature began to wane. It was evidence that Ogonyok needed to renew its image, despite the convictions of the shestdesyatniki. Korotich’s successor Lev Gushchin promised a

82 Lovell, Ogonek, 990. 83 Ibidem, 990. 84 Vitaly Korotich, ‘My podpishemsya tol’ko na svobodny “Ogonyok” – vot leytmotiv vashikh pisem. Chitatel’, Ty pobedil! “Ogonyok” – svoboden!’, Ogonyok (1990) 39, inside cover. See also: Lovell, Ogonek, 995. 85 Lovell, Ogonek, 995.

‘highly professional and informative magazine that reports with honesty, without gossip and trash’.86 Despite his efforts, Gushchin did not succeed to relive the success of Korotich’s editorship. Ogonyok struggled hard to find new readers and the overall circulation quickly dropped to beneath one million.

1.2 The reader speaks out in Slovo chitatelya (‘Word of the reader’)

Once described as a dull magazine that was only read at hairdressers, Korotich exchanged Ogonyok’s content with modern and present-day topics.87 His predecessor Anatoly Sofronov attracted ‘devotees of serialized detective novels, crossword-lovers and collectors of colour illustrations’.88 Korotich changed the lay-out and started to implement the new rules of glasnost by discussing problems in Soviet society, the troubles with socialism and other once-forbidden topics. The most discussed feature of Ogonyok is the readers column slovo chitatelya (‘word of the reader’). After the arrival of Korotich, the readers column was soon acknowledged as the first national forum where individual opinions about social, cultural and political topics were expressed to society. The column was granted much prominence in the mobilizing role of Ogonyok and this vision has been supported ever since.89 The meaning of glasnost for the readers column was outstanding. Without the control of the Communist Party, the magazine could publish letters that before were censored. The possibility to make information accessible to the general public attracted people from all over the Soviet Union. At the beginning of 1986, just before Korotich’s editorship, Ogonyok received about twenty letters a day. By 1990, it received around two-hundred thousand a year. Readers wrote about everything, but mostly about needs and frustrations: the problems with socialism, market economy, criminality, prostitution and vagrancy and mafia. The problems they wrote about sometimes appeared to be simple, such as the shortages of smoked sausages in the Omsk Oblast and the long waiting lines for everyday groceries, but often reflected larger problems of the socialist system. Others expressed criticism towards greater political frustrations, such as the ongoing censorship and the falsification of history.90

86 Lev Gushchin, ‘Foreword’, Ogonyok (1992) 1, p. 2. See also: Lovell, Ogonek, 995-996. 87 Iina Kohonen, ‘The Space Race and Soviet Utopian Thinking 1’, The Sociological Review Vol. 57 (2009) 1, pp. 114- 131, 122-123. 88 Feliks Medvedev, Tsena Prozreniya (Moscow 1990) 4. See also: Lovell, Ogonek, 990. 89 Cerf and Albee, Letters from the Soviet People, 7-9; Author unknown, ‘Censorship makes headlines in Ogonyok’, Nature Vol. 329 (29 October 1987) 6142, p. 784. For later academic publications, see: Lovell, Ogonek, 991; Kotz and Weir, Revolution from Above, 65. 90 Cerf and Albee, Small Fires, 13-21, 24, 27, 28 and 67.

In a letter dating from July 1988, a reader writes about the ‘surprising’ truth around Andrei Sakharov. The reader from Moscow refers to an article in Moskovskie Novosti (‘Moscow News’), which revealed all the lies told about the Russian physicist. Sakharov, who became well-known because of his inventions in the Soviet atomic bomb project, became a dissident when he realised about the political and moral implications of his work. In response to Sakharov’s dissidence and turn to activism, Soviet government attempted to denigrate Sakharov by telling lies about him and his family. The reader, who says to have found it ‘very unpleasant’ to read the book about Sakharov and his family, seems amazed that all what he believed in turns out to be a lie. ‘It turns out that Academician Sakharov is not swimming in luxury from the money supplied by foreign intelligence, and his wife, Yelena Bonner, is not simply an amoral adventurist who married the academician for money.’91 The reader asks in his letter for more information about the reasons why these lies were told. The letter is an example of how readers found out about the lies that were told by the Soviet government. For some, it was clear even before the introduction of glasnost that information was held back or that lies were told to denigrate certain people. For most others, the announcements were shocking, causing confusion and loss of the Soviet ideology.92 In another letter, Soviet academician Vitaly Goldansky shows his concerns about the ongoing censorship in the Soviet Union. In his letter, Goldansky writes about how the academic journals Nature and Science were censored. Nature was imported from Britain, but before when it reached the institutes and library shelves parts of the journal were carrying blacked-out entries. Science was reproduced in the Soviet Union under license, but pages about sensitive or offending articles were often removed entirely.93 The letter shows how Goldansky tried to bring the issue to the attention of a larger audience. He later argued that the extreme right-wing was to blame for the ongoing censorship, which sought to subvert perestroika.94 Ogonyok took a hard stance against this extreme right-wing. Despite Korotich’s views of American Zionists and their anti-Semitic character, the magazine often attacked the anti- Semitic views of nationalist organisation Pamyat. According to historian Vladimir Shlapentokh, the changing opinion about the subject symbolizes Korotich’s ‘radical turn to the left’ in those years.95

91 A. Yu. Shcherbakov, ‘Letter to the editor’ Ogonyok (1988) 28, pp. 4-5, 5. 92 Leon Aron, ‘Everything you think you know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong’, Foreign Policy (1 July 2011) 187, pp. 64-70, 67 and 68. 93 Author unknown, Censorship, 784. 94 Hon. Tom Lantos of California in The House of Representatives, ‘The Congress must condemn the outrage of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union; Support House Concurrent Resolution 264’, Extensions of Remarks (22 February 1990) pp. 2456-2491, 2465. 95 Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power. The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton 1990) 263.

Korotich explained his policy for the readers column in a 1988 interview as follows: ‘Well, we have two aims: first of all we make a point of publishing purely controversial, problematic letters; secondly, we print letters from Stalinists, from people whom we consider dangerous'.96 Only from 1988 and 1989 onwards, anti-Stalinist letters would take prominent place in the readers column. A letter dating from January 1988 illustrates how Stalin’s repression and the falsification of history was approached in the readers column: ‘The new generation should know the truth about that, what their fathers and grandfathers lived through’, the reader starts. ‘Take for example the famine of 1933. […] Was that famine a fatal inevitability or is someone to blame, and could it have been avoided? […] Keeping silent about it is at least immoral. After all, the number of victims during the year 1933 surpasses all other victims of the Stalinist repressions.’97 The causes of the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union in 1933, are currently still a subject of debate. Some claim that the famine was caused by the collectivization policies of Stalin, others claim that it was a deliberately attack on Ukrainian nationalism and to the prevent peasant uprisings.98 More publications on Stalin’s crimes and the falsification of history appeared from 1989, after newspaper Pravda published an article in which an organ of the Communist Party admitted that the famine had been instigated by Stalin to force collectivization and break Ukrainian nationalism.99 The careful strategy Korotich handled in the readers column also appears from another interview. Korotich said in a 1989 interview to have slowly approached the point of printing critical pieces on contemporary Soviet policy, but that caution maintains necessary:

We have to create the appropriate atmosphere right now. […] So far we have only begun to change the atmosphere rather than the climate. There is no alternative: we cannot wage battle against these people to all throw them into prison. Above all we must increase the amount of information that is available to the public. In the old days, the public could only read commentaries about Reagan’s speeches rather than the original texts. We have begun to change that.100

Despite the new rules of perestroika and glasnost, Korotich felt that his radical policy had to be accompanied with caution. Letters critical on contemporary Soviet policy would only be published from 1990 and especially in the very last months before the union’s formal dissolution in December 1991.

96 John Murray, The Russian Press from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Aldershot 1994) 176-177. 97 M. E. Galushko, ‘Letter to the editor’, Ogonyok (1988) 2, pp. 2-3, 2. 98 Taras Kuzio, Ukraine. Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism (Santa Barbara 2015) 17. 99 Cerf and Albee, Small Fires, 243. 100 Korotich and Gardner, Interview, 361.

According to the secondary literature, Ogonyok was ‘the first magazine in the USSR to publish a regular, broad-based “Letters to the Editors” column’.101 It is often stated that Ogonyok was one of the first Soviet magazines to implement a readers column, but this seems to be incorrect. In the 1920s, Vladimir Lenin was the first one to initiate the concept of a readers column in the Soviet Union. He used the so-called ‘village correspondents’ to create feedback for the leadership and urged journalists to ‘expose the unfit’ and ‘actual malefactors’ in society.102 In the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of a reader’s (and viewer’s) column was re-established in mainstream journals when the Soviet Union entered the Thaw period. One example was the literary journal Novyi Mir (‘New World’), which regularly stirred a storm of controversy and generated agitated responses in the readers column.103 The difference was that with glasnost, the relative form of openness was larger than ever before. It is true that during glasnost, the letters stirred a bigger storm of controversy than ever before, but the concept of a readers column was in the Soviet Union present for decades.

1.3 Changing Ogonyok’s content and style

Apart from the readers column, Ogonyok dedicated to the discussion of rediscovered literature, poems and to illustrated in-depth articles about cultural, social and political topics. Their radical content and critical tone were a successful formula that delivered Ogonyok in 1991 its highest circulation of all times. The degree of radicalism seems to have developed gradually during Korotich’s editorship. When an issue dating from 1986 is opened, the reader will find that a big part of its content is dedicated to the discussion of the literature, art and poems and illustrated with ideological photos of everyday life. When an issue dating from the end of 1991 is opened, one will find a very different magazine. Literature and poems are still present next to a small amount of art, but the biggest part of the magazine’s illustrated articles covers the discussion of political and social topics. The photos with happy and smiling Soviet citizens appear to have been replaced by photos that express the crisis in which the Soviet Union was finding itself. The changes that came along with the transition from Sofronov to Korotich were less sudden than often is assumed. Until 1986, Ogonyok was a dull magazine that for decades did not report about

101 Ibidem, 7. 102 Matthew E. Lenoe, ‘Letter-writing and the State. Reader correspondence with newspapers as a source for early Soviet history’, Cahiers du Monde Russe Vol. 40 (1999) 1-2, pp. 139-170, 159 (footnote 50). 103 Robert Legvold, ‘Recent Books: Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics: The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms With the Stalinist Past’, Foreign Affairs Vol. 93 (2014) 1, pp. 201-202, 201

20 any internal problems. No ships sank and no planes crashed. The magazine represented nobody. In the beginning of Korotich’s editorship, Ogonyok continued to portray ideological photos of Soviet life and largely covered reprints of literature and art. One of the first changes that Korotich applied was in September 1986, with the removal of the Order of Lenin from Ogonyok’s cover. His intentions were to make the magazine less official, but the removal stirred a storm of controversy. One of the opponents was the nationalist organisation Pamyat, known because of its fascist and anti-Semitic views. The organisation protested against the removal by a letter writing campaign to the Communist Party and Party officials.104 The removal of the Order of Lenin was the first of many collisions that would follow between Korotich and Pamyat. By the second half of 1988, Ogonyok had started to test the boundaries of glasnost. The magazine slowly rose to the point of publishing once-banned content. In the autumn of 1987, Ogonyok published articles on social irregularities in the country, such as prostitution and vagrancy, police brutality and domestic violence. Besides that, Ogonyok ran negative accounts on Joseph Stalin and Stalinism. These accounts were not per se considered daring, as Gorbachev had already condemned Stalin’s crimes.105 However, their different definition of the term ‘Stalinism’ was somewhat problematic. Ogonyok used Stalinism as a synonym to describe the purges of the 1930s.106 Gorbachev defined Stalinism as the collectivisation and rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union something that praised. Scholars have stated that Ogonyok’s stance on Stalinism played an important role for the rehabilitation of some of Stalin’s victims, such as Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Fyodor Raskolnikov. Ogonyok published memoirs and letters addressed to Gorbachev, for example one written by Anna Mikhailovna Larina, Bukharin’s widow. According to historian Roy Medvedev, the letter and memoirs have accelerated the debate on rehabilitation.107 Also on the area of literature Ogonyok started to publish some daring content. In December 1987, Ogonyok published one chapter of Doctor Zhivago, preceding the publication of the full text in the journal Novyj Mir in 1988.108 The book was banned in the Soviet Union for decades, as the Communist Party considered the book as anti-Soviet. Boris Pasternak had not used the dominant style of socialist realism. He highlighted the individual and subtly criticised Stalinism and collectivisation. To the anger of

104 Felicity Barringer, ‘Russian nationalists test Gorbachev’, The New York Times (24 May 1984). 105 William J. Eaton, ‘Gorbachev Calls Stalin Crimes “Unforgivable”: But He Praises Decisions to Collectivize Farms and Push for Rapid, State-Run Industrialization’, The Los Angeles Times (3 November 1987). 106 Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Boston 2000) 217. 107 Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, Time of Change. An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation (New York 1991) 146. 108 See: Ogonyok (1987) 50, pp. 10-15, 10.

21 the Communist Party, the book was published in 1957 in Italy and in the following year Pasternak was awarded with the Nobel Prize of Literature.109 Andrei Voznesensky, poet and one of Pasternak’s former protégés, described the publication as ‘a very important step, you could say an historic one’.110 The official line against semi-banned authors such as Pasternak changed. The new policy of glasnost allowed Ogonyok to publish the works of Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and other officially disfavoured poets and writers. Although his revelations were considered daring, Korotich acknowledged there was a fierce hostility towards the new policy form. He handled his radical policy with caution.111 From mid-1988, criticism to the anti-Semitic views of nationalist organisation Pamyat became a recurring subject. Except the hard line that Ogonyok adopted against people with such views, Ogonyok attempted to rectify the historical image of Jews. In June 1988, Ogonyok published a criticising article about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The anti-Semitic text calls Jews ‘conspirators’, ‘secret agents’ and ‘mysterious villains’112, who want to destroy the state to achieve world domination. Ogonyok’s reporters Vladimir Nosenko and Sergej Rogov explained the historical origin of the Protocols and call it a myth, which ‘instead of the historical truth, lined [people] with forgery that was uncovered many years ago’.113 Many articles about the anti-Semitic views of Pamyat would follow, to the anger of the organisation’s members. Ogonyok attempted to demonstrate how the denial of anti-Semitism was responsible for such views. Similar to other forms of ‘evils’, such as prostitution, drug addiction and criminal activities, anti-Semitism in the USSR had simply been denied. ‘Anti-Semitism and its roots were passed over in silence or received an incorrect evaluation’.114 This caused Pamyat’s views to be deeply rooted. Until the end of the 1980s, the radicalism of Ogonyok seemed to have pointed mainly towards domestic issues and policy. Despite the new openness, there still rested censorship on foreign and military policy.115 Criticism towards the foreign policy was absent in Ogonyok, but some articles about the Afghan War examined the Soviet Union’s occupation critically. In July 1988, Ogonyok published an open letter written by Soviet General Kim Tsagalov. Tsagalov, who had served as a military advisor to

109 Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair. The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (New York 2014) preface. 110 Philip Taubman, ‘Soviet writers reinstate Pasternak’ (12 January 1988), in: Robert Justin Goldstein, Political censorship (London 2001) 403. 111 Murray, The Russian Press, 179 and 180. 112 Vladimir Nosenko and Sergej Rogov, ‘Ostorozhno: Provokatsiya! Komy nuzhny chernosotennye mify’, Ogonyok (1988) 23, pp. 6-7, 6. 113 Nosenko and Rogov, Ostorozhno, 6. 114 William Korey, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism (Chur 1995) 119 and 120. 115 Murray, The Russian Press, 115-118.

22 the Kabul regime, expressed criticism towards the occupation. He showed disappointment about the fact that many Soviet soldiers had lost their lives and argued that Soviet foreign policy was not succeeding in winning over the opposition.116 According to Tsagalov, the policy was instead causing Islamic fundamentalism to grow.117 The letter received attention from all over the world. It is the only example of Ogonyok’s discussed the foreign and military policy of the Soviet Union. Although the Afghan War was a much discussed topic, most articles were expressing criticism towards the absence of public assistance for war invalids.118 Similar to the readers column, Korotich was of the opinion that Ogonyok should write with caution and create an appropriate climate to pass through all debate and criticism. For the same reason, Korotich says not to have expressed any criticism of Lenin yet, but only of Stalin, Brezhnev and Chernenko. ‘It’s a purely tactical move’, Korotich explained in a 1988 interview. ‘And if we begin criticizing Lenin, then we’ll end up destroying the whole temple, beginning with the foundations’.119 Korotich’s careful strategy also characterizes that his liberal worldviews were moderate. In the same interview, Korotich speaks out against dissident magazines such as Glasnost’, an unofficial publication led by Sergei Grigoryants. While he published daring content in Ogonyok that often embarrassed the government, Korotich stayed loyal to the Soviet system. He sought to reform socialism from within the system and considered every dissident to be a threat to the establishment.120 From the end of 1990, politically charged covers containing pessimistic photos or caricatures increasingly replaced the covers that resembled a fairy-tale everyday life. Short call-outs or questions were often added to the cover. In figure one, the cover of Ogonyok pictures a grenade. Parts of its iron shell are coloured with the different flags of the Soviet Republics. A big bow with the flag of the Soviet Union is knotted around the igniter, meaning that the union is seeking to prevent the ignition, blast and separation all republics. The meaning of the cover shows resemblance with the house of cards on the cover of July 1991, as described in the introduction, but a big question mark is still added to the photo of the decorated grenade. The cover poses the question that will be put to voters in the upcoming referendum of 17 March 1991: ‘Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom

116 Mark Urban, War in Afghanistan (New York 1990) 248. 117 Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism. 1973-1996 (Cambridge 1999) 277. 118 Korotich and Gardner, Interview, 360. 119 Murray, The Russian Press, 180. 120 Von Eschen, Locating the Transnational, 458.

23 of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?’121 The three Baltic republics had just declared themselves independent from the Soviet Union and other Soviet republics had declared in 1990 the supremacy of their laws over the laws of the Union.

Figure 1. Cover of Ogonyok magazine (1991) No. 12

121 John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton 1993) 33.

In figure two, the cover of Ogonyok shows a poor man is sitting in front of his izba (‘peasant’s house’). On the background, an almost futuristic skyscraper distinguishes itself from the foreground. The sharp division symbolizes the increased income inequality in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev privatized some of the Union’s state-owned assets. He passed the Law on State Enterprises, which allowed employers to increase wages to cope with the shortage in labourers. In 1988, farmers became permitted to rent land from the state, to purchase equipment and hire workers. Some people gained great fortunes with the privatization. For others, the standard of living declined. The words vozdushnye zamki are added to the cover, forming the Russian phrase ‘building air castles’. The idiom is used to illustrate when someone is dreaming about the unrealizable, with illusory assumptions and hopes. Besides the photo, a new cover layout can be distinguished. New graphics can be distinguished, but most noticeable are the English words ‘The weekly journal’ that are added to the cover. It signifies how Korotich handled the derived attention and support for Ogonyok from outside the Soviet Union. After the defeat of the Putsch in August 1991, all control was released. Every week there was a new cover with a politically loaded message, often criticizing past decisions of the state. The defeat of the August Putch was for Ogonyok evidence that it had helped to foster social change. The younger generation wanted to continue this trend, while the shestidesyatniki were longing back to Ogonyok’s vision in the first few years of perestroika and Korotich’s editorship. However, Korotich did not want to take part in this discussion. He appeared not to repent his forced leave from Ogonyok, but rather turned it into a symbol for his liberal editorship. According to Lovell, Korotich found the attention and lecture circuit in the United States much more interesting than the ongoing political struggle within the Soviet media.122 The internal division in the editorial office of Ogonyok and the leave of Korotich remain outside the reader’s sight, although the increasing black and white printed content signifies how Ogonyok struggled with the limitations imposed by the government. The sudden change of the magazine in 1986 that often is described in the secondary literature actually appears to have developed more gradually. The magazine slowly adapted its strategy and content to the new climate in the Soviet Union. Korotich’s editorship and strategy seem to have been most important for this development. For the readers column, but also for the magazine’s other features, he handled and implemented the new possibilities for journalism very carefully. A certain climate had to be set, according to Korotich, before the rules of glasnost could be fully implemented and stretched. In the first few years of his editorship, Ogonyok continued to illustrate everyday life and most

122 Lovell, Ogonyok, 997.

25 of the magazine’s content was dedicated to the discussion of literature, poems and art. Slowly, debates and criticism about the Soviet Union’s domestic policy arose. At the same time, once banned literature became available in the magazine. From 1988, some criticism was expressed towards foreign and military policy, but most criticism remained pointed towards domestic issues. By 1990, Ogonyok regularly expressed harsh criticism towards domestic policy.

Figure 2. Cover of Ogonyok magazine (1991) No. 36.

2. Ogonyok in Soviet public discourse

Ogonyok’s position in the Soviet media landscape was distinctive.123 Gudkov and Dubin argue that the ability of Soviet journals in becoming a popular resource for interest articulation was dependent on the size of the journal. There were mainly two types that could be distinguished, namely the tolstye zhurnaly (‘thick journals’) and tonkie zhurnaly (‘thin journals’). The thick institutional and academic journals were known for the intellectual debate. After the introduction of glasnost, these journals lost many readers. Due to their long preparation time they could not meet the new demand for modern and up-to-date news. The thinner journals, such as newspapers, were able to meet that demand and took on a popularizing and mobilizing role. Because of their smaller size, these journals were frequently published and therefore able to respond to present-day topics.124 Ogonyok was a combination of a thin and thick journal. Not only in its size, but also in its objective. The magazine had both a mobilizing position and took part in the intellectual debate. It urged people to come into action and accelerate the discussion. Its reporters were academically educated.125 Korotich changed Ogonyok’s content to stage discussion about the troubles with socialism, problems in Soviet society and the advantages of a market economy. Subsequently, the magazine’s audience changed. ‘In fact’, Gudkov and Dubin say, ‘it [Ogonyok] became a completely different magazine’.126 Apart from the name, the richness of colours and photos and the successful crossword puzzle, there were no leftovers of the old magazine. The first chapter has demonstrated how Ogonyok’s strategy and content changed under the editorship of Korotich. In this chapter, I will analyse how Soviet public discourse responded to these changes. The positive response is often described in the secondary literature. Ogonyok took a leading development in glasnost by discussing once-banned topics and fulfilled a mobilizing function. Korotich became the personhood of liberal identity, despite his former extremist views. However, there were also negative responses expressed towards Ogonyok’s new role and Korotich. These responses together reflect the general social development and increasing division between the conservatives and liberalists in the Soviet Union.

123 Lovell, Ogonek, 990 124 Gudkov and Dubin, Literatura, 332-334. 125 Ibidem, 332 and 333. 126 Ibidem, 305 (footnote).

2.1 Positivity about Ogonyok’s new character

In the first few years of Korotich’s editorship, the readers column was the centre of public discourse. Here, readers would discuss and criticise social topics and respond to the revelations Ogonyok and other media were making. Until 1987, Ogonyok’s staff was not very satisfied with the letters it received. They hoped that the column would grow out to a forum of public discussion, but instead the letters were mainly discussing personal issues and demanded to send a reporter.127 People had to get used to the sudden possibility to discuss and criticise social topics. Therefore, the Letter’s Department of Ogonyok published a letter in the magazine, encouraging Soviet citizens to send letters about relevant topics and to which Ogonyok could make the difference: ‘Meanwhile, we, the employees of the journal, and you, the comrades in the field, act together. There is a common, state-run business. And in solving the problems, the reader and the executive committee or department should meet the main conditions: mutual trust, principle, openness and concrete result’.128 The department’s staff asked people not to write anymore about situations in which readers do not agree with the decisions of the government on their personal requests, such as the allocations on the waiting list for houses: ‘[…] Is this not why many readers write directly to Ogonyok? They are bypassing the executive body, which is vested with high powers to resolve the issue on the spot and without the interference of the editorial staff’.129 From 1987, the column became of more importance for the discussion of social problems. The French scholar Irène Commeau-Rufin has analysed the letters Ogonyok received in the period of Korotich’s editorship until 1989. She concluded that the received letters could be divided into four categories: ‘the reaction of Soviet citizens to glasnost and perestroika; questions of national and Soviet identity; the debate on the past; and complaints about Soviet society’.130 The readers column soon became renowned and discussed by other liberal media, such as Argumenty i Fakty and Moskovskie Novosti. Also in the column itself, reader’s letters contained responses to the revelations made by Ogonyok and other Soviet media and the ongoing discussions in the readers column itself. A letter dating from January 1988 is a typical example of how discussions were fuelled for debate:

127 Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution. Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (New York 2000) 117. 128 Letter’s Department of Ogonyok, ‘Pis’ma na kontrole’, Ogonyok (1986) 32, p. 6. 129 Letter’s Department, Pis’ma, 6. 130 Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, 117.

I would like to declare my love for you, comrade journalists, and to Ogonyok, which has become so interesting from cover to cover. Personally, I find the most striking pages are the ones where you publish letters from readers and material about historical subjects. I do not agree with those readers who demand that the difficult subject of the thirties be “closed” and that you write only about our victories. Apparently, they are living by inertia. Living the modern way means writing the truth. I was born in 1953 and grew up in the countryside. When I read today’s Ogonyok, I never cease to be amazed at how little I know my own history. You probably read a confession like this in practically every other letter. This is what is surprising: articles and books abound about some kingdom across the seas—whole centuries lie before us but we write the story of the country in which we live and work in such a way that no one wants to read it, and we forget about folk heroes, events and tragedies along the way. And if one book reveals some interesting facts, in the next “updated” edition they are gone. For example, take the three volumes of works by M. A. Suslov. It is a very interesting collection, but you would not find his speech at the February Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1964, in which he spoke about the Cult of Personality. And there are lots of such examples. I think that the revelations about the Cult of Personality have recently been stopped by people who themselves helped create it, and who have stayed in power for many years. In our village library—with great difficulty—I managed to find the materials of the Twentieth, Twenty-first and Twenty-second Party Congresses. Reading them I found answers to a lot of questions. And once again I was convinced that, yes, we have to write about Dneproges and Magnitka, but we cannot not write about the fear of thousands of people waiting for the doorbell to ring in the middle of the night. These things are part of our heritage, as is the history we are making today. And if we are not “cogs,” but “knights of perestroika,” as the journalists say, then we must know who it is that is putting sticks in the spokes of our wheels, who is putting the brakes on the process of democratization. I would not bore you with my examples and opinions. I will only say that it is Ogonyok itself that forced us to look at life more broadly and brought out the urgent need for us to participate in the social reconstruction of our society.131

The reader discusses multiple issues in the letter. In the first place, the debate on the past and Stalinism: ‘I do not agree with those readers who demand that the difficult subject of the thirties be “closed” and that you write only about our victories’. The reader criticises the vision of conservatives, who according to the reader are only writing about victories and ignore the other facts in history. Secondly, the letter expresses the reader’s response to glasnost and perestroika: ‘And if we are not “cogs,” but “knights of perestroika,” as the journalists say, then we must know who it is that is putting sticks in the spokes of our wheels, who is putting the brakes on the process of democratization.’ This sentence is both a complaint against the opponents of perestroika as a call to accelerate the process of democratization. In the third place, the reader pleads for reforms in Soviet society: ‘I will only say that it

131 N.I. Krasnoborodko, ‘Letter to the editor’, Ogonyok (January 1988); Translated by Cerf and Albee, Small Fires, 240.

29 is Ogonyok itself that forced us to look at life more broadly and brought out the urgent need for us to participate in the social reconstruction of our society’. Looking to the defined categories of Commeau-Rufin, the letter discusses elements of all four categories. It also praises Ogonyok for its role in Soviet society. The vision of the reader was exactly what Ogonyok tried to achieve with its publications and fits with the vision of Ogonyok’s shestidesyatniki, which I described in the first chapter. In the first few years of his editorship, Korotich handled a policy that fitted with the visions of the shestidesyatnik generation. Korotich and Ogonyok’s editorial staff mostly consisted of a generation that was born between 1925 and 1945. Some of them experienced Stalin’s Great Purge and almost all of them experienced the disasters of World War II. They formed their cultural and political views in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of liberalisations in the Soviet Union and also known as the Krushchev Thaw. As a result, the shestidesyatniki formed anti- totalitarian and liberal views. Some of them became active in dissident groups, such as in the samizdat network, but of most of the shestidesyatniki only expressed their ideals from the period of Gorbachev’s reforms.132133 However, the shestidesyatniki were not the only group of people that supported Ogonyok’s views in the second half of the 1980s. In the first few years of Korotich’s editorship, the magazine’s circulation increased with several million. Readers complained in the readers column and at other forums that they had to stand in line at the newspaper kiosks on Sunday morning at 5 AM. Only a few hours after the newsstands would open at 7 AM, all prints of Ogonyok’s newest issue were sold out.134 Ogonyok’s staff regularly complained about how Ogonyok’s distribution was deliberately limited by the Soviet government and masked by the paper shortage.135 Nevertheless, the deficiency of Ogonyok’s printed issues also illustrates how popular Ogonyok was becoming. Many of Ogonyok’s readers belonged to the shestidesyatnik generation, but also to a much younger public. The letters that Ogonyok received expressed support from all groups in the social stratification. Apart from the old shestideyatniki, Korotich and his staff were able to mobilise all people of society to engage in the same liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki. On the contrary, the conservative part of the population saw their numbers decreasing.

132 Derek Jones, Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (New York 2001) 2494. 133 Some of the Ukrainian shestidesyatniki took part in dissident groups that supported democracy and promoted the Ukrainian language and culture (See: Jones, Censorship, 2494). Apparent from the documentation of the Central Intelligence Agency, Korotich initially tended to take part in such Ukrainian dissident groups. Becoming a member of the Ukrainian Writer’s Union, however, marked the end to his dissident tendency. 134 Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until it was No More. The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton 2006) 3. 135 Lovell, Ogonek,

Many Western scholars have wrongly described Ogonyok’s mobilisation as a movement that attempted to bring down the Soviet establishment. Historians Kotz and Weir described Korotich’s vision as ‘pro-American’ and ‘pro-capitalistic’.136 However, the liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki contained the idea that the socialist system should be reformed from within, and not by overthrowing the establishment. An explanation for this wrong assumption of many Western scholars is that they generalise the shestidesyatniki with the New Left of the West. The New Left and the shestidesyatniki shared the same ideals: they both advocated for ‘socialism with a human face’ and found connection in Marxist tradition. They were critical of Stalinism, Soviet bureaucracy and the suppression of self- expression. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two. The ideals of the New Left can be regarded as ‘anti-Soviet’, while the shestidesyatniki were no enemies of the establishment. The shestidesyatniki advocated for reforms within the socialist system, while the New Left attacked its foundations and sought to subvert the establishment.137 In the movie Avariya – doch menta (‘Avariya, the daughter of a cop’), the clashes between Avariya and her surroundings demonstrate this increasing division between the conservative and liberal sides. The story of the movie follows the rebelling teenage girl Avariya. Valeriya, the real name of Avariya, argues with everyone around her. At school, she asks the teacher provocative questions. At home, she rebels against her family. When her father tries to make some contact with her by watching one of her favourite bands on television, Valeriya yells: ‘I like everything that you do not like!’.138 In the first instance, the story seems to resemble the typical rebellious behaviour of a teenager against her parents. However, from the twenty-second minute of the movie it turns out that the story actually resembles the much greater social division in Soviet society. Valeriya ends up in a discussion with her grandfather, after she criticises him for participating in the murders of innocent people during Stalin’s repressions. The next moment, the grandfather loses his temper and starts to yell against Valeriya: ‘Back in the days, everything was in order! We worked! We won the war! But now, God forbids to start about it! You read your Ogonyoks and writers write about everything, but you also have a lot of boldness!’. The grandfather citing Ogonyok proves that the magazine served as a great example for the ideals of the liberal ideology. The use of a teenager to illustrate the liberal side underlines the mobilizing function of Ogonyok for the liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki. Besides the group of people that

136 Kotz and Weir, Revolution from Above, 65. 137 Boris Kargarlitsky, ‘1960s East and West: The Nature of the shestidesiatniki and the New Left’, Boundary 2 Vol. 36 (2009) 1, pp. 95-104, 97 and 98. 138 ‘Avariya – doch menta’, Mosfilm (1989).

31 formed their worldviews in the period of the Krushchev Thaw, Ogonyok persuaded a part of the population to join the ideas of the liberal ideology. However, the teenager and her collisions with her family and school resemble that this kind of behaviour or ideals were considered as rebellious, as some group that fought against the establishment. It demonstrates that Ogonyok’s boldness was getting increasingly associated with rebellion. The fact that the father of Valeriya is a cop confirms this thought. On the one hand, the association with rebellion is surprising. Korotich was obviously a shestidesyatnik, who only wanted to reform the system from within. The editor spent his early life in the Krushchev Thaw, the period of liberalisations in the 1950s and 1960s and in which the shestidesyatniki formed their worldviews.139 Moreover, Korotich showed in many interviews that his ideals connect with those of the shestidesyatniki. In the cited interviews with John Murray in The Russian Press in 1988 and Antony Gardner for the Journal of International Affairs in 1989, Korotich literally says that he does not want to attack the foundations of the Soviet system with the provocative publications in Ogonyok. He pleads to reform the system from within and opposes everyone who wants to subvert the establishment.140 On the other hand, the rebellious portraiture fits with the increasing rebellious character of the liberals of that time throughout the Soviet Union. The revolutions of 1989 taking place in the Eastern and Central European part of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the revolutionary wave that called to end the Soviet repression. Also within the editorial staff of Ogonyok this development was visible. I described in chapter one that the ideological division within Ogonyok’s editorial staff increased in the late 1980s. While the older generation of the shestidesyatniki wanted to fall back on Korotich’s original policy, a younger generation of employees wanted to increase the radical and political content of the magazine. The younger generation gained more influence in the end of 1989 and is probably responsible for the reason that Ogonyok started to take a fixed political and more rebellious line.141 There is no evidence that this development within the editorial staff of Ogonyok was meaningful for the social change within the liberal ideology, but the mentioning of Ogonyok in the movie proves that the development within Ogonyok’s editorial staff coincided with the general development within the liberal ideology in the Soviet Union of getting more rebellious.

139 Kargarlitsky, 1960s East and West, 98. 140 Murray, The Russian Press, 180; Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 360. 141 Lovell, Ogonyok, 991.

2.2 The conservative counter-offense

Not everyone expressed satisfaction with the revelations Ogonyok and other progressive media brought into the open. Ogonyok may have increased in popularity and its audience was widely distributed over all social classes, but a part of the conservative population was becoming increasingly critical towards progressive publications such as Ogonyok. In the beginning of 1989, a demonstration near the Lenin Library in Moscow occurred. People held banners with statements that the government should place restrictions on Ogonyok’s subscriptions. Korotich brought the issue forward in an interview less than a week later. He says the demonstration ‘was like spitting in the face of perestroika’.142 The protest illustrates the political struggle that was developing in the Soviet Union. On the one side, the part of Soviet citizens taking the liberal side was growing. In the first few years of Korotich’s editorship, many Soviet citizens adopted the ideals of the shestidesyatniki, the generation that had lived through the reforms in the 1950s and 1960s and believed that the system should be changed from within. From 1989, some supporters of the liberal ideology took a fixed political anti-Soviet line. On the other side, the decreasing number of conservatives stood by in agony to see the liberals increase in numbers. From the end of 1988, the extreme right-wing began to use the openness for protests against the growing liberal side. The reason for the conservatives to come into action against Ogonyok and Korotich can be explained by Korotich’s announcement to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies. The editor’s step to politics was for many conservatives a bridge too far. Especially members of the nationalist organisation Pamyat came into action against Korotich’s eligibility. Instead of campaigning for their own candidates in the election, Pamyat’s members saw more opportunities in campaigning against the political supporters of liberals. Korotich was the most important target in their counter campaign. In the years before, Ogonyok had repeatedly attacked the anti-Semitic views of the Pamyat. After the article about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but also when Ogonyok criticised the monthly journal Molodaya gvardiya for its anti-Semitic policies, members of Pamyat were furious. They pointed to Korotich for the attacks against Pamyat’s convictions and accused him of being ‘the mouthpiece of the Jews’, neglecting

142 Garder, Interview, 359.

Korotich’s former anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic views in Litso nenavisti.143144 Wherever Korotich showed up as part of the election, supporters of Pamyat were there to intimidate the public. In the night of the 9th of January for example, fifty Pamyat ‘thugs’ entered a Moscow auditorium filled with seven-hundred people who were visiting a gathering for the upcoming elections. People entering the meeting were told to ‘go back’ and intimidated with ‘we know your address’ if they voted for Korotich. In the hall, they exclaimed ‘There is no place for friends of Jews on Russian soil’, while swinging yellow Stars of David marked with black crosses. On the podium, they yelled: ‘Korotich, you Jew: give back your silver coins’ and held a banner reading ‘No trust in the leader of the yellow [Jewish] press’.145 Residents of Moscow’s Sverdlovsk district, where Korotich contested the nomination, anxiously awaited Pamyat’s next moves. Pamyat was not afraid to lose any future voters with their intimidations. After all, they did not choose the Sverdlovsk precinct because of any expected winnings of Pamyat in the district, but because it was one of the most publicised campaigns.146 Korotich fought back, dedicating a full page about the event in Ogonyok with statements of eyewitnesses. One witness compared the event with the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt of Adolf Hitler in 1923 to seize power in Munich. Another compared the interceptors with ‘the children of Sharikov’, the narcissistic character of the novel Heart of a Dog from Mikhail Bulgakov.147 Later that month, Pamyat also disrupted the pre-election speeches that took place in Dom Kultury. A footage taken by Pravda shows how members of Pamyat are chanting ‘Down! Off!’, demanding the departure of Korotich from the gathering. The banners that the protestors are holding read ‘The magazine, which is read by millions, should not lead the chameleon!’, ‘Never trust the vanguard of the tabloids’ and ‘Korotich is the homegrown Gol’dshtyukker!’.148 The last phrase refers to the Jewish Eduard Goldstücker, who was the editor-in-chief of the hard-line communist weekly magazine Literární noviny in the 1960s. In 1968, Goldstücker became a forefront figure in the Prague

143 Korey, Russian Antisemitism, 171. 144 I did not find any comments of people in Soviet public discourse pointing out this apparent contradiction. Pamyat targeted Zionists and Masons in their demonstrations, regardless of whether the subject they demonstrated against had an actual link with Zionists or Masons. See: Semyon Reznik, ‘Soviet Jews in the glasnost era’, Society Vol. 28 (1991) 4, pp. 73-83, 75-76. 145 Author unknown, ‘Soviet workers must act – crush Pamyat! Fascist cancer in Gorbachev’s Russia’, Workers Vanguard (17 March 1989) 473, pp. 6-9, 6. 146 Fyodor Krasheninnikov, ‘Regional power in Russia: why is it getting more fragile?’, Website Intersection (7 July 2017). Website: http://intersectionproject.eu/article/politics/regional-power-russia-why-it-getting-more-fragile (consulted 29 December 2017). 147 V. Chernov, ‘Deti Sharikova’, Ogonyok (14 January 1989) 3, p. 31. 148 NetFilm Archive, Film document No. 25511: DK Pravda, ‘Disruption of pre-election speeches, VA Korotich, Chronicle (January 1989).

Spring as one of Alexander Dubcek’s principal advisors. He also became the chairman of the Czech Union of Writers, but began to test the boundaries of Dubcek’s relaxations for press freedom.149 The story bears resemblance with that of Korotich, and the fact that Goldstücker was Jewish gave Pamyat even more reason to depreciate him. Korotich was forced to leave the gathering early, when supporters of Pamyat did not stop to yell disfavouring chants towards him. After the departure of Korotich from the gathering, the footage shows a chauvinist who is being interviewed on Pushkin Square. The man is talking about the Russian Jewish mafia, while the camera films his missing leg and his crutches. Some old veterans of the war in Afghanistan had come under the control of Pamyat, after they returned to their home country and faced a difficult time reintegrating into society. The so-called Afghantsy formed a small, but the most threatening group of Pamyat.150 Ogonyok reported about the psychological problems of many war veterans. General Tsagolov slipped out about the real situation in Afghanistan and other media as well reported about the extensive drug usage, despite the censorship that still rested on the topic. Also after their return, many war veterans continued their drug usage, engaged in vigilant activities against punks, heavy-metal fans and other despised sub-cultures and found connection in right-wing organisations such as Pamyat. Pamyat’s leader Dmitry Vasilyev even used Afghan veterans as body guards.151 Pamyat succeeded in forcing Korotich off the ballot. Just a few weeks later, Korotich decided to step down because of the ongoing riots. On the 19th of February, Pamyat members celebrated their ‘victory’ in Moscow. They chanted ‘Hang Korotich! Hang Korotich!’ and one speaker wore a shirt with the text ‘Down with the occupation by Jewish nationalists’. The real victory for Pamyat remained elusive. The Moscow voters rejected a conservative coalition and only ten out of the 468 deputies of Moscow’s City Council were sympathetic to Pamyat’s perspective.152 For a part, Pamyat’s actions seem to have developed in response to the publications of liberal media such as Ogonyok. Pamyat targeting Korotich in their campaign for the Moscow district is evidence that Ogonyok brought up many emotions in the Soviet Union. Ogonyok’s articles about the falsification of history, the problem of anti-Semitism and attacks towards Pamyat made Korotich the centre of public discourse in the right-wing’s political circles. On the other hand, Pamyat had developed to a patriotic association and became preoccupied with ‘mythical enemies’ before Ogonyok and other media started to become increasingly critical of

149 Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath. Czechoslovak Politics. 1968-1970 (Cambridge 1997) 69. 150 Korey, Russian Antisemitism, 139. 151 Uri Ra’anan, Gorbachev’s USSR. A System of Crisis (New York 1990) 108. 152 Korey, Russian Antisemitism, 171.

35 conservative ideas. The nationalist organisation was founded in 1980 with the aim to preserve cultural and historical monuments. Many of its members had actually nothing in common except their delusional ideas of despised sub-cultures. By 1985, Pamyat’s policy consisted of demonstrations and attacks against other groups, instead of having an own policy to actual problems.153 From the end of 1989, military publications and Russian nationalist magazines started to defend the Soviet military and its policies and printed hard attacks against perestroika and glasnost. Some of these publications directly attacked Ogonyok for its negative portrayal of military life, such as Molodaya gvardiya and Nash sovremennik, two soviet journals that opposed perestroika. The reason for the Afghantsy and other old war veterans to support Pamyat’s extremist views may be because of these negative portrayals. The extreme-right magazine Literaturnaya Rossiya defended the bloody suppressions of Soviet military and added harsh criticism towards Ogonyok’s negative portrayal of the military, suggesting that Ogonyok and other perestroika media ‘were fueling dangerous “pacifist hysteria”’.154 Another explanation for the military to support the extreme right-wing might have been the efforts of Yegor Ligachev to increase the support for the conservatives. On behalf of Ligachev’s ‘conservative counter-offensive’, the Union of Writers attempted to strengthen the position of nationalist and military publications to the disadvantage of reformist publications.155 Because of their traumatic experiences and psychological difficulties, many soldiers in Afghanistan were an easy target to influence after they had returned to the Soviet Union. Evidence that these influences were at least for a part successful is the absent support for Tsagalov after his open letter was published in Ogonyok. The Khalqi-Parcham rivalry, the feud between the Khalq and Parcham factions to represent the true People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, extended in the early 1980s to the Soviet Union. Tsagalov received a lot of support from the military in 1982 after he openly took the side of the Khalq, while the KGB took the side of the Parcham.156 The division between the liberalists and conservatives in the Soviet Union seemed growing because both sides were able to increase support. During a plenary meeting in December 1988, several

153 Howard Spier, ‘Soviet Anti-Semitism unchained: The Rise of the “Historical and Patriotic association, Pamyat”’, in: Robert O. Freedman, Soviet Jewry in the 1980s. The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement (London 1989) pp. 51-60, 52 and 53. 154 Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia, 234. 155 Simon Cosgrove, Russian Nationalism and the Politics of Soviet Literature. The Case of Nash Sovremennik. 1981- 91 (New York 2004) 106-107. 156 Artemy Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, 1980-1992 (Boston 2011) 66.

36 members of RSFSR Union of Writers’ governing board accused Ogonyok of causing the crisis. Much of the governing board consisted of conservatives, who were of the opinion that Ogonyok and other leading reformist publications were demonstrating anti-Russian behaviour. By placing Russian nationalists in the editorial staff of many media outlets, the members of the governing board attempted to increase Russian nationalist ideas throughout the country.157 They sought to replace the chief editor of Literaturnaya Rossiya, Mikhail Kolosov, because of its large circulation and wide distribution. Kolosov had published an essay that strongly condemned Russian nationalism. The governing board demanded him resign. In an open letter published by Ogonyok, Kolosov accused the governing board of transforming Literaturnaya Rossiya into a nationalist publication and tool for political ambitions.158 On the 18th of January 1989, Pravda published a letter signed by six Russian nationalists and members of the RSFSR Writer’s Union. They condemned Ogonyok for publishing Kolosov’s attack and also denounced Ogonyok for critically reporting about the Ryazan meeting, a meeting of the Secretariat of the RSFSR Union of Writers that took place in September 1988.159 In the meeting, many conservative members of the Writer’s Union pointed at the destructive impact of ‘Western imports’, such as rock music and sex education on the Russian culture. They warned that Gorbachev’s policies would cause the destruction of Russian culture and criticised the anti-Russian nature of Ogonyok and other progressive publications for their Western imports.160 The frequent accusations towards Ogonyok in the Writer’s Union’s meetings, Kolosov’s letter in Ogonyok and the response to it in Pravda show that Ogonyok was fulfilling a large role in the struggle that was taking place in the Soviet Union. Thus, it seems that Ogonyok’s new role in the Soviet Union was increasing the ongoing division in the Soviet Union between liberalists and conservatives. On the one hand, Ogonyok and other reformist publications were stimulating Soviet citizens to express their frustrations and needs to the Soviet government. Ogonyok in particular was able to strengthen the support for the liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki, the generation of which Korotich was part. The increase of the support for the liberal ideology provoked a ‘conservative counter-offensive’, which Ligachev led with the help of the Union of Writers. The Union of Writers attempted to strengthen the position of Russian nationalists to the disadvantage of reformist publications. The conservative side obtained support from the military, specifically former war veterans, causing an even sharper and more aggressive division within Soviet

157 Cosgrove, Russian Nationalism, 116. 158 Mikhail Kolosov, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo Yuriyu Bondarevu’, Ogonyok (1989) No. 1, pp. 8-9. 159 Brudny, Reinventing Russia, 214. 160 Ibidem, 211.

37 society. Moreover, the extreme right-wing concentrated its attacks and demonstrations towards Ogonyok and Korotich.

3. The image of Ogonyok in the United States

The introduction of glasnost has been widely spoken about in both East and West. According to Nick Lampert, scholar in Russian studies, the introduction of it in the public discourses of the Soviet Union and the United States caused both countries to rethink socialism.161 In the United States, public discourse was of a different order than in the Soviet Union. The introduction of glasnost had a considerable impact on the open flow of information in the Soviet Union, causing Soviet leaders to lose control over public discourse. The space for public discourse in the United States, on the contrary, was one of the greatest, if not the leading example for the rest of the world.162 The developments in the Soviet Union were applauded by American public opinion. With the arrival of Gorbachev as General Secretary in 1985, the American view of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ slightly decreased. After decades of unfavourable Soviet leaders, Gorbachev impressed the American public. He was regarded to open up the Soviet system.163 Ogonyok was soon gaining fame in the United States as one of the magazines that Gorbachev selected to promote perestroika. In early 1987, The New York Times headlined about Ogonyok: ‘Moscow magazine is leader in openness’.164 Daily newspapers regularly filled their pages with news about Ogonyok’s revelations. Korotich became a frequently interview guest by American journals and television shows. Similar to the supporters of the liberal ideology in the Soviet Union, the American people seemed pleased with the news that Ogonyok brought into the open. The absorption of the magazine in American public discourse took a large part in the overall discourse about Soviet liberalisations. Examining how Ogonyok was perceived in the Soviet Union will illustrate the American image of the Soviet Union at the time of glasnost. It will give more insight into the influence of Gorbachev’s glasnost on the rethinking of socialism in the United States and the role of Ogonyok in the changing Soviet-American relations that caused the Cold War to end.

3.1 Ogonyok in the American newspapers The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times

From 1987, Ogonyok’s revelations became regularly present in the American news. The New York Times described the magazine in March of that year as ‘bare-knuckled bravery’165, after it quoted two

161 Lampert, The Dilemmas, 48, 58-60. 162 Calloway-Thomas and Lucaites, Martin Luther King Jr., 88. 163 R. W. Apple Jr., ‘Gorbachev a hit with the American public’, The Washington Post (4 December 1987). 164 Barringer, Moscow magazine. 165 Barringer, Moscow magazine.

39 contrasting statements of Felix Kuznetsov, First Secretary of the Moscow Writers Organisation. Within the time span of three months, Kuznetsov expressed twice his opinion about novelist Vladimir Nakakov, once criticizing and once glorifying. After that, the article gives more examples of what Ogonyok was able to publish because of the new openness such as an article that exposed the tortures carried out by police forces in the city of Petrozavodsk, parts of Anatoly Rybakov’s once-forbidden Children of the Arbat and the life of war veterans in Afghanistan. According to The New York Times, Kuznetsov’s juxtaposition and the other given examples confirm Ogonyok’s reputation as the advance guard of Gorbachev’s new openness. The author of the article emphasizes that it is Korotich who is responsible for the direction of the magazine: ‘The feisty tone of the magazine reflects Mr. Korotich's personal style. […] he belongs to a generation whose early years coincided with Khrushchev's thaw’. The Los Angeles Times reports in a similar way about the revelations of Ogonyok in 1987. The newspaper names some of Ogonyok’s daring publications and recent changes: the articles on prostitution and vagrancy, police brutality, the life of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, Stalin and Stalinism and the removal of the Order of Lenin from the cover of Ogonyok. Then, the newspaper highlights the reason why Ogonyok could initiate the publications and changes. Of course, glasnost is one condition, but most of the article dedicates to the personality of Korotich and the generation he represents:

These are men in their 50s and early 60s who came to political maturity in a period of liberalization initiated by Nikita S. Khrushchev, who took power after Stalin's death in 1953 and ruled until he was deposed in 1964 by Leonid I. Brezhnev. They were too young to suffer personally from Stalin's purges of the 1930s, but most had relatives who did. And they were disillusioned when Brezhnev reversed many of Khrushchev's policies.166

Similar to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times points towards the liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki. Because of the new openness, the generation that grew up in the relatively liberal decades of the 1950s and 1960s could finally express its liberal ideals. The newspaper emphasizes that most of these men ‘have lived through five of six perestroikas’ and that Korotich is on the right track to make it this time the last perestroika.167 It suggests that the newspaper supports the strengthening of the progressive side in the Soviet Union and that they consider Korotich's actions as a call for governmental changes.

166 Dan Fisher, ‘Editor on Cutting Edge of Glasnost Sees “Chance for My Generation”. Remaking the Revolution. Glasnost: Third in a series’, The Los Angeles Times (3 November 1987). 167 Fisher, Editor on Cutting Edge.

In February 1988, The New York Times reports about the return of war veterans who were based in Afghanistan. The author quotes Ogonyok to exemplify how Soviet media recently received the opportunity to report about the situation in Afghanistan and the life of Soviet soldiers after they returned to their home country. Similar to the other articles, the author acknowledges that Ogonyok and other media have been able to publish about the life of Soviet veterans because of the new openness: ‘glasnost has slightly lowered the wall of propaganda and secrecy surrounding the war, the hurt that Afghanistan has inflicted on Soviet society has become more evident’. He criticizes Soviet media for having romanticised the life of the Soviet war veterans before, for emphasising ‘the moral superiority of Soviet troops’ with ‘heroic paeans to Soviet soldiers’. On the contrary, he values Ogonyok for finally bringing forward the devastating subtext of the war:

The most gripping accounts have been written by Artyom Borovik, a young journalist for Ogonyok, a popular weekly magazine. Borovik's stories of war-weary soldiers playing Rod Stewart tapes as they prepare for battle in a strange land, of bewildered troops confronting ambushes and mine fields, bear a striking resemblance to his favorite Vietnam book, Michael Herr's ''Dispatches,'' and they have made him a celebrity among veterans.168

Michael Herr’s Dispatches has often been praised because it represents the Vietnam War from the eye of a bystander, displaying the raw reality of the war without romanticising or idealising combat. The comparison between the book and Borovik’s reportages indicates that the author was impressed by the journalist’s raw reflections of reality. It may even reflect the author’s thought that Bovorik was following an American style of journalism. Dispatches was a typical example of New Journalism, the style of reporting that became predominant in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in which intensive reportage and the reporter were put central.169 In July 1988, The New York Times reported about the revelations General Tsagolov made in his open letter in Ogonyok. Tsagalov revealed that communism was not appealing to the Afghan population, that the Afghan Communist Party was preoccupied with internal struggles and that Islamic fundamentalism was growing. In the Soviet Union, some party officials responded that the censorship on military cases had been violated, but public opinion was shocked by the content of the letter.170 In the United States, the opposite happened. Although The New York Times writes about the content of Tsagalov’s letter in Ogonyok, most attention goes to the fact that it is the first major analysis a Soviet

168 Bill Keller, ‘Home from Afghanistan; Russia’s Decisive War’, The New York Times (14 February 1988). 169 Maggie Gordon, ‘Appropriation of Generic Convention: Film as Paradigm in Michael Herr's "Dispatches"’, Literature/Film Quarterly Vol. 28 (2000) 1, pp. 16-29, 16 and 17. 170 Nataliya Danilova, The Politics of War Commemoration in the UK and Russia (London 2015) 128-132.

41 medium is publishing openly: ‘Although other Soviet analysts have criticized the decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979, previous articles have avoided criticizing Moscow's clients, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or suggesting that the Afghan Army could not carry on the fight itself’.171 It makes sense that the American attention mainly focused on violation of the censorship. American media had reported about the situation in Afghanistan and the losses of the Soviet Union many times before. Thus, the content was not revealing for American public opinion. According to the contemporary historiography, Soviet leaders began looking for a way to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan soon after they were introduced in 1979. The war dragged on because Moscow was afraid to lose its status as the leader of the communist world if its failure in Afghanistan would go public.172 The New York Times speculated that ‘the decision to permit publication of the interview [Tsagalov’s letter] in a widely circulated magazine may represent an effort to brace the Soviet public for the prospect of Kabul's collapse’.173 The different perception of the event in both countries is due to their differences in openness. While in the Soviet Union the event was perceived as a step towards more knowledge and involvement into state affairs, the event was perceived in the United States as a sign that the communist state was crumbling. Americans perceived the situation in the Soviet Union from their own context. As I described in the second chapter, many Western scholars have wrongly described the development in the Soviet Union as ‘pro-American’ and ‘pro-capitalistic’.174 According to sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, the American perception of the events was based on their own experiences with the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement ran parallel to the period in which the shestidesyatnik generation formed its worldviews, both taking shape in the post-war period during relative prosperity. They shared the same ideals, objectives and common sources. However, the New Left was anti-Soviet, while the shestidesyatniki advocated for the idea that the Soviet system should not be overthrown, but reformed from within.175 This difference was often overlooked in the United States. Journalists presented the reforms in terms of socialists finally seeing the light and Soviet citizens longing to the capitalist free market, sometimes even comparing the events to the ‘Soviet New Left’.176

171 Bill Keller, ‘Soviet General Declares Kabul Could Collapse’, The New York Times (24 July 1988). 172 Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye, 3. 173 Keller, Soviet General. 174 Kotz and Weir, Revolution from Above, 65 175 Kargarlitsky, 1960s East and West, 97 and 98. 176 Patrick Flaherty, ‘Perestroika radicals: the origins and ideology of the Soviet New Left’, Monthly Review Vol. 40 (1988) 4, pp. 19-33, 19 and 20.

From 1989, the American newspapers also start to report about the ongoing division between the liberals and conservatives in the Soviet Union and the role which Ogonyok is playing in this development. The Los Angeles Times reports in January about the open letter of the conservative writers in Pravda that attacked Korotich for distorting the historical truth and reassessing people’s social achievements. The author of the article emphasizes that the open letter in Pravda is written by conservatives, who have been opposing perestroika and the liberal media in general.177 He also discusses how members of Pamyat disrupted the gathering for the local election in Moscow and demanded Korotich to leave, shouting anti-Semitic slogans. He emphasizes that Korotich is not Jewish, but that the extreme right-wing often used anti-Semitic references for ‘anyone considered liberal or "cosmopolitan"’. Also The New York Times reports in February about the increasing division between the right-wing conservatives and liberals. Similar to The Los Angeles Times, the article discusses how Soviet conservatives recently have acted increasingly aggressive against the liberal policies of Gorbachev, specifically against the liberal media and Korotich in particular during the local elections in Moscow.178 Also the American news does not discuss Korotich’s own extremist views as expressed in his Litso nenavisti. The reporting style of The News York Times and The Los Angeles Times is generally descriptive. The events in the Soviet Union are closely monitored and the importance that is given to the subjects discussed seems to correspond with the importance given in the Soviet Union. The new direction of Ogonyok is blamed to glasnost and to Korotich taking office, who as a result of the introduced openness is able to express his liberal worldviews and mobilise others to support the shestidesyatnik ideology. Different from the Soviet Union, the American newspapers focus on the weakening control of the Soviet government instead of the content of Ogonyok’s revelations. The different focus is due to the different climate and context in the United States. The content was experienced as less shocking and generalised the liberal ideology in the Soviet Union with the New Left. In a single case, comparisons are made with an American publication and style of journalism. The newspapers reflect the changing American perspective of the Soviet Union, but do not seem to obtain a different perspective because of Ogonyok’s publications.

177 Dan Fisher, ‘Soviet Magazine Called “Kind of Scum”: Pravda Article Attacks Pro-Gorbachev Editor’, The New York Times (19 January 1989). 178 Esther B. Fein, ‘Soviet Conservatives Try to Turn Back the Clock on Gorbachev's Policies’, The New York Times (27 February 1989).

3.2 The emergence of Korotich as a public figure and the personification of Ogonyok

In a six-page long article and interview in the Journal of International Affairs, Korotich is praised in 1989 as ‘one of the principal exponents of the metamorphosis in the Soviet press’.179 Ogonyok had been discussed before by the academic journal Nature because of the ongoing censorship of Nature and Science in the Soviet Union180, but it was the first time that Korotich was the centre of attention in an American academic journal. American media wrote about Korotich, but only when discussing Ogonyok’s role in the Soviet Union. Newspapers discussed his background and worldviews as part of the Sixties generation. In a document of the CIA about leading Soviet commentators and officials of the late 1980s, Korotich is described as an ‘outspoken reformer who is frequently interviewed’.181 His presence in American public discourse seems to gradually increase from 1988. Instead of being solely discussed in the background, Korotich is increasingly becoming the centre of attention. Antony Gardner, the author of the article in the Journal of International Affairs, explains Korotich’s background as a member of the 1960s generation and explains that after ‘the reimposition of strict conservative leadership in the late 1960s and the crackdown of Ukrainian national culture in the early 1970s […], Korotich clearly chose at that time to work “within the system” and became a prominent publicist for the Brezhnev regime’.182 The description reflects the change of which is spoken in the declassified documents of the CIA of the 1960s. Korotich’s contacts in Kiev, Ukrainian nationalists, turned their back on him after he decided to become a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. The agency’s source even warned that Korotich ‘had betrayed his friends and therefore one should be very careful with him’.183 Although his contacts perceived this stepover as a betrayal, Gardner explains it as a logical step and typical for his generation at the time.184 Nevertheless, Gardner expresses some criticism about Korotich being a critic of the West during the decades prior to perestroika. In the interview, he asks Korotich about Litso nenavisti: ‘Several years ago you published a book called The Face of Hatred which was sharply critical of the United States. Would you choose to be as critical if you had to write the book from scratch today?’.185 Korotich answers

179 Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 357. 180 Author unknown, Censorship makes headlines, 784. 181 CIA Electronic Reading Room, ‘Special Memorandum. Leading Soviet Commentators and Midlevel Officials’, General CIA Records (May 1987). 182 Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 357. 183 CIA Electronic Reading Room, Subject: Korotych, 7. 184 Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 357-359. 185 Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 358.

44 that he wrote the book ‘out of love for the United States’. In a surprising way, Korotich turns the book into something positive:

Although I have many American friends, I was struck by the insanity of the place. My friends were scared to meet me. […] My friends told me to call them collect from street phones rather than from my apartment. My book was about how hatred destroys a people from within. Today I am happy to note that both our governments failed in their efforts to fuel hatred between Americans and Soviets. So much money was spent on Red Dawn, America, Rambo II and Rocky IV! But when Gorbachev visited the United States and when Reagan visited the Soviet Union it became clear that our people understood and loved each other. My book was a bestseller for years because many people had only been able to read negative things about the United States. I am friends with Hendrick Smith, Bill Kaiser and others who have written books about the Soviet Union. They are not enemies of the Soviet Union; they have simply sought to paint a picture of this country. I believe they love the USSR in their own fashion.186

Korotich’s own vision of the book does not seem to match with the general impression the book leaves behind at its readers. Litso nenavisti describes how American foreign policy is hostile towards socialist states and aims to unleash a nuclear war. According to Korotich, American Zionists with their critical opinion of the Soviet Union are responsible for the aggressive foreign policy. The book also describes the American lifestyle with contempt and how Soviet immigrants are longing to return to their home country, but are retained by the American government.187 Vladimir Shlapentokh described Litso nenavisti as ‘a rude, propagandistic book aimed at America’. The Soviet-born American sociologist tried to illustrate how the shestidesyatniki, despite their liberal worldviews, adjusted to the Brezhnev regime and wrote ‘very nasty books’.188 Gardner leaves it to Korotich’s answer and does not continue with the topic. Neither in the Soviet Union nor in the United States people questioned Korotich’s changing ideas. Very few people commented on Korotich’s on his expressed visions in the past and no one on the contradictory character of Korotich being the target of Pamyat’s anti-Semitic demonstrations. After the First and Second World War, many people emigrated from the Soviet Union. Political émigrés spread around Western-Europe, but even more immigrated to North America. Soviet émigrés in the United States were enthusiastic about reformist publications such as Ogonyok, but felt that further meaningful steps would have to be taken in order to achieve democratization.189 The Ukrainian émigrés were a large part of this group in the United States.190 Gardner subscribes the idea that Ukrainian

186 Ibidem, 358 and 359. 187 Vitaly Korotich, Litso nenavisti (Moscow 1983). 188 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, 263. 189 Aron Katsenelinboigen, The Soviet Union: Empire, Nation, and System (New York 1991) 105. 190 A.V. Zav’yalov, Sotsial’naya adaptatsiya Ukrainskikh immigrantov. Monografiya (Irkutsk 2017) 179.

Americans were more critical towards the events in the Soviet Union. They were of the opinion that the current liberalisations were not enough. In order to achieve democratization, they had to be pushed through. According to Gardner, also Korotich was criticized by the Ukrainians for being not bold enough: ‘Some of his fellow Ukrainians […] suspect that Korotich may not fully exploit Ogonek’s potential for fear of jeopardizing his own success’.191 The opinion of Ukrainian émigrés about Korotich and Ogonyok is also visible in another example. In July 1987, Myron Kuropas, editor at The Ukrainian Weekly, discusses in his column Korotich’s performance on American television. The Ukrainian Weekly was an important weekly journal that was founded by Ukrainian émigrés in the United States and Canada. The reinforcement of Ukrainian settlements in North America after the Second World War had led to the establishment of different Ukrainian organisations. The journal served as a vehicle for communication to the Ukrainian population in North America and often reported about the ongoing liberalisations in the Soviet Union. According to Kuropas, Korotich was picked for the television interview because the American news channel CBS found Korotich the only credible person. He starts to tell that he remembers Korotich from the 1960s, when Korotich was visiting the United States: ‘I remember Mr. Korotych from the 1960's in Chicago when he was pushing Khrushchev's peaceful co-existence. He read his poems to a packed ODUM Hal on Division Street and he was very, very credible. His poetry spoke directly to our hearts and his flawless Ukrainian left us all in awe. He had us all right where he wanted us […]’.192 Kuropas was clearly impressed by Korotich’s performance in the 1960s, but his positive description quickly turns to criticism when he continues with the column. He criticizes Korotich for not pushing the liberalisations harder through: ‘[…] a few song birds are not enough. I want to see green grass, flowers, and feel the warmth of the sun before I believe spring has come to Ukraine’.193 Besides that, his criticism focuses on Korotich’s worldviews. He criticizes Korotich of pretending to be a Ukrainian nationalist, while he denounced Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism in one of his books. According to Kuropas, Korotich is a ‘Communist to the core’, who had no sense of why Ukrainians immigrated to the United States.194 In contrast to the other American authors who wrote about Korotich, Kuropas comments on the contradictions in Korotich’s worldviews and questions his reliability of being the figurehead of the liberalisations. The different perception that Kuropas and other Ukrainian

191 Gardner and Korotich, Interview, 357. 192 Myron B. Kuropas, ‘Faces and Places. You’ve come a long way, Vitaliy!’, The Ukrainian Weekly (19 July 1987) p. 6. 193 Kuropas, Faces and Places, 6. 194 Ibidem, 6.

émigrés have of Korotich is probably due to their Ukrainian background. They were familiar with Korotich since the 1960s when he became a well-known writer in Ukraine and directly experienced his movement away from Ukrainian nationalism and his hard-line communist publications that followed.195 Some Ukrainians, such as Nekrasov, already discussed this development.196 The Ukrainian émigrés were simply better informed about Korotich’s changing personality than other Americans.

Figure 3. Vitaly Korotich, represented in the publication Small Fires.

195 CIA Electronic Reading Room, Subject: Korotych, 7. 196 Nekrasov, Litso nenavisti V.K., 172-174.

The criticism expressed by Ukrainian émigrés did not become influential for the way Ogonyok and Korotich were generally perceived by other Americans. In 1990, two American authors collected the letters of Ogonyok’s readers column and published them in the book Small Fires. In the introduction of the book, Korotich’s role is considered to be decisive for Ogonyok’s direction and for the liberalisations in the Soviet Union. The authors give credit to Korotich for using the magazine ‘to test the limits of the newly declared policy of glasnost’. They describe his decisions as courageous: ‘It must be remembered that they had no guarantee they would be spared should Gorbachev’s reforms fail’.197 The introduction is illustrated with the photo in figure three. Korotich is sitting in an active position with his sleeves rolled up and his tie hanging a bit crooked. The photo represents the description of Korotich’s bravery. The modern look reflects his progressive identity and opposition against conservative worldviews. By 1991, Korotich was regularly invited to the United States to talk as an expert about the situation in the Soviet Union. In August 1991, he participated in a live television programme on the channel C-SPAN while he visited The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. His role as editor-in-chief of Ogonyok is only briefly discussed. Most attention is given to his role as a critic of the Kremlin and his visions on the future of the Soviet Union. In the footage, Americans call the studio to ask Korotich questions about his opinion on a variety of subject, differing from serious questions about the Soviet state system and the incompetence of Russian politicians to light-hearted questions about Gorbachev’s knowledge of the English language.198 Korotich’s editorship of Ogonyok became superfluous for a career in the United States. After his departure from Ogonyok, Korotich moved to the United States where he worked at Boston University until the late 1990s. His popularity in the United States reflects how the schismatic issues of the past are increasing considered to be irrelevant. Thus, Korotich’s emergence in the United States as a public figure gradually took over the image of Ogonyok as the figurehead of glasnost and ongoing liberalisations. Most Americans perceived his role positively. They were of the opinion that Korotich fulfilled a courageous role with his radical and bold publications and personal style. Some journalists were aware of Korotich’s contradicting views at the time of the Brezhnev regime, but consider them to be due to the strict conservative censorship of those decades and the need to hide his liberal views. Ukrainian émigrés in the United States are more critical towards Korotich. They viewed the liberalisations in the Soviet Union as something positive, but to achieve true democratization further steps had to be taken. Some Ukrainians accused Korotich of holding back too much afraid of jeopardizing his own success. Unlike the average American, the Ukrainian émigrés criticized Korotich for his contradicting worldviews. They were well-known with Korotich since the 1960s and were therefore better informed about his changing personality than the

197 Cerf and Albee, Small Fires, 7. 198 Interview with Vitaly Korotich on C-SPAN (5 August 1991). Website: https://www.c-span.org/video/?20107- 1/journalism-soviet-union (consulted 9 December 2017).

48 average American. Although the emergence of Korotich as a frequently interviewed guest does not appears to specifically influence the American rethinking of socialism, it reflects how the overall American image of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ decreased.

Conclusion

It was my aim in this thesis to offer more insight into the role of Ogonyok in Soviet and American public discourse and how it influenced the image of the Soviet society in both countries. The perceptions of each other contributed to the transformation of Soviet-American relations that ultimately led to the end of the Cold War. Transnational influences of Soviet media have before been neglected. Historians have pleaded for decades to take transnational influences into account in historical research. Nevertheless, the historiography about Soviet media in the late 1980s has mainly been approached from the classical perspective and focuses on the role of Soviet media to exercise pressure on the Soviet government. The presence of Ogonyok in Soviet and American public discourse reflects the larger development of how perestroika and glasnost caused both East and West to rethink socialism in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the magazine played a large part in the growing division between liberalists and conservatives. In some cases, it even seems to have accelerated the changing Soviet society. In the United States, the perception of Ogonyok reflects the larger development of how the negative view of the Soviet Union decreased. Ogonyok has been described by the secondary literature as the flagship magazine of glasnost, which under the editorship of Vitaly Korotich from 1986 started to promote Gorbachev’s perestroika and to mobilise the Soviet intelligentsia. The magazine is considered to have played a distinct social function in the Soviet Union. Because of its ability to both mobilize and be a forum of intellectual debate, the medium was leading the growing interest articulation in the Soviet Union: the development of Soviet society to increasingly express their needs and frustrations to the government. The magazine became a great success during the perestroika years. With Korotich as editor-in-chief, the Ogonyok lost its dull image and became the most popular magazine in the Soviet Union. Its circulation increased from one million in 1985 to almost five million in 1991. The sudden change that is often described by the secondary literature actually appears to have developed more gradually. Korotich’s editorship seems to have been decisive for Ogonyok’s direction in the second half of the 1980s. He made a whole new magazine of Ogonyok and implemented content characterized by radicalism and boldness, but handled a strategy that carefully adapted to the evolving climate in the Soviet Union. Korotich was of the opinion that Ogonyok was able to stretch the limits of glasnost, but with time and from within the system. Patience was necessary. In the first few years of his editorship, Ogonyok slowly became more involved in the discussion of once-banned topics and spoke out against Stalinism and anti-Semitism. Some criticism was expressed towards foreign and military

50 policy, but it stayed largely focused on the domestic policy. By 1990, the criticism towards Soviet politics became a recurring subject and increased in intensity. In the Soviet Union, Ogonyok’s new direction was soon recognized by Soviet society. Similar to other reformist publications, Ogonyok was stimulating the people of society to express their frustrations and needs about the socialist government. Korotich was part of the shestidesyatniki, also known as the Sixties’ generation in the Soviet Union that developed liberal worldviews during the Krushchev Thaw. Due to the strict conservative leadership of the Brezhnev regime, the shestidesyatniki were obliged to hide these liberal worldviews. Some of them became part of dissident groups, but most, such as Korotich, decided to work from within the system. It was this liberal ideology that Korotich and his staff were implementing in Ogonyok’s content. The magazine was able to strengthen the support for the liberal ideology mobilized others to stand up for more liberalisations. However, the support that Ogonyok was spreading for the liberal ideology also provoked a ‘conservative counter-offensive’. Conservatives saw the support for the liberalists growing. Similar to the liberal side, they used the new openness to express their own conservative and more extremist ideas. There are some indications that the new direction of Ogonyok provoked the extreme right-wing to rise. From the end of 1988, nationalist organisation Pamyat picked Ogonyok and Korotich as the main targets of its protests and demonstrations. In 1989, Pamyat succeeded in forcing Korotich off the ballot of local elections in Moscow. Korotich decided to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow’s Sverdlovsk district, but after Pamyat’s aggressive and anti-Semitic demonstrations persisted he decided to pull back. Besides that, the conservative Soviet politician Yegor Ligachev started a plan to decrease the influence of reformist publications such as Ogonyok. With the help of the Union of Writers, he attempted to strengthen the position of Russian nationalists to the disadvantage of reformist publications. Ogonyok was among the reformist publications most discussed in the meetings of the Union of Writers, leading nationalist and military publications to regularly target Ogonyok in their articles. In the United States, the overall perception of Ogonyok was positive. The reporting style of the newspapers is generally descriptive. Ogonyok’s revelations are explained and its direction blamed to Korotich, who as a result of the new openness is able to express his liberal worldviews. The American news tends to focus on the weakening control of the Soviet government and connects Ogonyok’s revelations with the ongoing liberalisations in the Soviet Union. Unlike the media in the Soviet Union, American media focus less on the content of Ogonyok’s revelations. The different focus is probably due to the different climate and context in the United States. Because of the existing open climate in the

United States, Ogonyok’s revelations were experienced as less shocking. Besides that, Americans generalised liberal ideology of the shestidesyatniki with the ideology of the New Left. They perceived Ogonyok’s revelations and the Soviet liberalisations in general as events that reflected anti-Soviet and anti-communist ideas, while in reality they were ideas to reform socialism. Korotich gradually took over the image as the figurehead of glasnost from Ogonyok. Instead of being solely interviewed as Ogonyok’s editor-in-chief, he became the personification of the ongoing liberalisations in the Soviet Union. Most Americans perceived his role for the liberalisations positively. They were in a few cases aware of his former critical opinion of the United States and his conservative worldviews, but blamed these to restrictive conservative censorship of the Brezhnev regime. A small part of American public discourse was less positive about Ogonyok’s new direction. Ukrainian émigrés, who immigrated to the United States after the First and Second World War, were of the opinion that Korotich’s current efforts were not enough to achieve true democratization. They criticized Korotich for not putting through the liberalisations, accusing him of being afraid to jeopardize his own career. They also criticized him for his contradicting worldviews. Unlike the average American, the Ukrainian émigrés in the United States were well-known with Korotich since the 1960s. While the average American was accepting Korotich’s decision to work from within the system during the Brezhnev regime, the Ukrainian émigrés were less forgiving. Ogonyok was in Soviet public discourse more influential than in American public discourse. There are several indications that Ogonyok had a mobilizing function in the Soviet Union. The magazine encouraged the growing interest articulation in the Soviet Union. Because of Ogonyok, people of Soviet society were increasingly expressing their needs and frustrations to Soviet government. These events mobilized the conservative and extremist right-wing to stand up against the reformist publications. In the conservative counter-offensive, conservatives and extremist right-wing organisations regularly targeted Ogonyok. The American perception of Ogonyok reflects the larger development in the United States of how the ‘evil empire’-image of the Soviet Union decreased. The Soviet liberalisations caused the negative American image of the Soviet Union to change into a more moderate one. Ogonyok contributed to this new American image of the Soviet Union, which played part in the improving Soviet- American relations that ultimately led to the end of the Cold War.

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