Andersen-ottaway lecture

1987 Andersen Lecture
Nicholas Daniloff
Moscow correspondent, U.S. News & World Report

Media Developments in the Soviet Union

I thank the directors of CSIS for inviting me to come. I also thank Leonard Marks, who has been an important figure in press freedom in this country and throughout the world, and, of course, I thank the Andersens.

I think all of you are very brave. I have been invited to come here and talk about current media developments in the Soviet Union when, in fact, I have been living in Vermont for the last year, and I am probably better informed on current media developments in Vermont. All of which makes me think of something that a prominent Soviet official, Fyodor Burlatsky, once told me. He had been an adviser to Nikita Khrushchev and one day much later he received a British diplomat in his office. After a very pleasant conversation, the British diplomat said to Burlatsky, "Did you know that General Secretary Andropov died this afternoon?" And Burlatsky replied, "Well, no, I didn’t know that he died. Anyway, it’s up to you Westerners to know all the latest facts. I am informed only upon the tendencies." So, in speaking about the Soviet Union, what I can say is that I probably do not know the latest facts, but I do know something about the tendencies.

I have been asked to talk a bit about media developments in the Soviet Union, about Mikhail Gorbachev, and about glasnost (openness). I will be pleased to do that, and I will be very happy to answer questions on that subject or on the Zakharov-Daniloff affair or on anything else that you think I might be able to comment on.

There are two aspects of the Soviet media that have traditionally concerned U.S. observers. The first is, How good a reflector of Soviet reality is the Soviet press? And second, How well does the Soviet press portray the United States to the Soviet people?

In the past - say 10 or 20 years ago, when I first went to Moscow - we Moscow correspondents relied to a great extent on what the Soviet press published and, specifically, what TASS published. And so, it is legitimate to question whether the Soviet press is, in fact, providing Western journalists with an accurate picture of what is going on. The Soviet press in the past - although not as true today - was less than a mirror of the surrounding world. I think part of this is because Lenin viewed the press as one of the tools of government. The role of the press was to be a handmaiden in constructing socialism and, eventually, communism. Believing that people would be demoralized, the Soviet press did not attempt to report that accidents had happened, that there had been an earthquake, that a ship had sunk and many people had died. Rather, the press tried to give a very bright and rosy picture of the world.

The problem with that approach is that ordinary citizens could see very clearly that what the Soviet press was portraying often was not really accurate. And over the course of many years, an enormous credibility gap arose. One of the things Gorbachev is addressing these days is that credibility gap.

During the time I worked in Moscow, three general secretaries - Andropov, Brezhnev, Chernenko - died. Yuri Andropov, who was one of the most promising of those general secretaries, received a delegation of U.S. senators in August of 1983 and then suddenly disappeared. We all began wondering, particularly after experiencing Leonid Brezhnev’s demise, whether Andropov had become ill. At that point, nothing much happened. August went by; September went by; October went by; and, finally, at the end of October, Leonid Zamyatin announced that Andropov had a cold and could not receive a group of visiting doctors. Well, that was probably the most serious cold that world history has ever known, because within a few months Andropov was dead. Zamyatin’s personal reputation as a spokesman of Soviet reality went way, way down. He also left a rather negative legacy for his successors.

The kind of disrepute into which Soviet journalism has fallen and the skepticism about what is being portrayed in the Soviet media has found its way into a number of jokes currently told among Soviet citizens. Radio Armenia is one of those jocular, mythical radio stations in the Soviet Union that accepts questions from its listeners and gives witty answers.

One question: Which is more useful, newspapers or TV?

Answer: Newspapers, of course, because at least you can wrap your garbage in them.

Another question: Can you wrap a bus in a newspaper?

Answer: Yes, if the newspaper has just published a lengthy speech of the general secretary.

Question concerning foreign affairs: How do we find out what’s going on in the world?

Answer: We believe the opposite of what TASS is denying.

The most famous joke, plays on the words "Ivestia" and "Pravda." Pravda means "truth" and Ivestia means "news," and both are the names of prominent newspapers. The joke is, "There’s no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia."

This gives you an idea of how the Soviets viewed their press and held it askance. In other words, the Soviet press was not, and has not been, a very good reflector of current reality - until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

On the other topic - how well the United States is portrayed in the Soviet press - I would say that in bad times the United States has gotten very bad press in the Soviet Union. The United States is portrayed as an unjust society with a few very rich people and a lot of very poor people. The poor people have no chance; they have no future; everything is bleak; and, furthermore, the United States is bent on military superiority and essentially wants to crush the Soviet Union.

In good times - that is, in times of détente or in the period that we seem to be entering now - you might think that the image of the United States would improve, but here a paradox occurs. When relations between the United States and the Soviet Union get better, people loosen up in the Soviet Union, and their natural curiosity about the West makes them very receptive to what is happening abroad, in fact, too receptive, from the Soviet leadership’s point of view. So again, the Soviet press, even in good times, tends to paint a rather negative picture of the United States. The United States is portrayed as a country trying to take advantage of the new openness in the Soviet Union, to undermine the Soviet Union by infiltrating subversive microbes. It is a country that is locked in a long struggle for power with the Soviet Union.

These, then, are my two starting points - the Soviet media has not been a good reflector of Soviet reality and the Soviet press does not favorably portray the United States to its citizens. I will now meander a little bit through my memories of my experience in Moscow and come back to these two points at the end.

When I went to Moscow in 1981 as a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, I found considerable disillusionment. If any of you have been reading Mikhail Gorbachev’s new book, you will see that he describes this stagnation, this falling behind, this demoralization that was afflicting the Soviet Union in the later years of Leonid Brezhnev. Again, a joke illustrates the current sentiment at the time that I was leaving the Soviet Union. Although the joke was a little premature, it is now very topical. The joke is about Gorbachev’s forthcoming meeting with President Reagan in the Oval Office.

Mr. Reagan, anxious to impress Mr. Gorbachev, decided he would call up the devil because, as you know, the United States is in league with the devil. He wanted to convince Mr. Gorbachev of the great technological superiority of the United States in being able to telephone Lucifer.

He asked one of his aides to call the number. The aide gets the devil on the line, hands the telephone to Mr. Reagan, who talks to the devil for 15 minutes and hangs up.

Gorbachev is suitably impressed. An aide comes in and says, "Mr. Reagan, you spoke for 15 minutes, that will cost the American taxpayer $1,500."

Well, Gorbachev thought this was a fascinating experience. He went back to Moscow, and said to his aides, "Get me the devil on the telephone. If the United States can do it, the Soviet Union can do it."

And so the aide got the devil on the line and handed the telephone to Mr. Gorbachev, who spoke for about 15 minutes. He hung up, and Gorbachev looked at the aide and said, "Well now, how much did that cost?" The aide replied, "Well, that cost two kopeks."

And Gorbachev said, "What? Two kopeks? You mean about five cents? The Americans paid $1,500, and we’re only paying five cents?"

And the aide said, "Yeah, you have to understand, that when you call the devil from Moscow, it’s a local call. When you call from Washington, it’s long distance."

That joke reflects the sort of negative attitude that existed in Moscow. Another example is the play that was put on in 1982. It was called "Tak Pobedim" ("Thus Shall We Win") and centers on Lenin’s last days. Originally it was thought to be a good play for the Twenty-sixth Party Congress. The playwright, Mikhail Shatrov, thought it would be fascinating to write because Lenin’s last days reflected a man who was losing his power - a similarity to Leonid Brezhnev. Lenin clearly saw, by the way, that Stalin was an evil influence on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He had been rude to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, and Lenin had written, in what has been known as his testament, words to the effect that after my death, Stalin should not be allowed to become the general secretary. He is too rude, he doesn’t know how to handle the comrades properly; he doesn’t take account of all the different points of view.

It was very difficult to get this play on the stage. Plays, as well as books, go through a type of censorship before they are shown to the public. In this particular case, a report on the play was sent to the Marxism-Leninism Institute, and the report came back that this play should not be shown under any circumstances. The objections were that Lenin was shown as a dying man, mortal, and about to disappear - all negative aspects. In the play, Lenin says of one of his colleagues, "And Martov is also dying." Behind the scenes there was great objection to this phrase, because it emphasized Lenin’s mortality.

Finally, Mikhail Suslov, then the number-two man in the Politburo and the ideological czar, got wind of the play and canceled it. Only after Suslov’s death did a movement arise to get the play back on stage. And, here again, a new struggle began. Could you put on this play at a time when a leader like Leonid Brezhnev was actually dying? Brezhnev’s aides came to see the play, then other important party figures saw it, and finally they agreed that the play could go on. Apparently the play was permitted for two reasons: First, it showed Lenin as a more human person, as a real individual, not as God - as he is often looked upon in ordinary Soviet propaganda. Lenin was presented as an individual who had to face different points of view from his colleagues and who had to make decisions by persuading. Second, like Brezhnev, Lenin was leaving the political scene. In those days of 1982, many rumors were circulating that Brezhnev could not really govern anymore. So for the whole Politburo to show up at the play, along with Brezhnev, was a provocative, oblique way of telling the world that Brezhnev had not left the political scene, that he was there and governing.

This story gives you a sense of some of the intellectual ferment going on below the surface. The intellectuals wanted to put on something about Lenin more truthful than had been permitted in the past, and they had to struggle very hard to accomplish it.

Shifting from that particular example of ferment to several years later, I had an interview with Roy Medvedev, a very interesting and unusual Soviet historian, who styles himself as a dissident Marxist historian. He is somebody who has not wanted to leave the Soviet Union; he feels rooted there. (His twin brother, incidentally, did leave and lives in England today.) In the interview, Medvedev told me something very interesting and very applicable to the situation Gorbachev faces today. Medvedev said, "The Communist Party does not have to share power, but it must allow an opposition. It could be an opposition within the party, or there could be opposing factions. There should be an open, political debate." He went on to say, "In almost 70 years, we have not developed personnel capable of working in such an environment - neither at the highest political levels nor at the lowest. The party has turned into a bureaucratic organism. It cannot and does not want to live in an environment of free speech and democracy."

These are interesting statements because, for one thing, this is not what the Communist Party wanted the world to hear in 1985. Yet, as you examine Gorbachev’s actions, he seems to be considering Medvedev’s point of view in his policies of glasnost: an opening up, allowing many different views to come to the surface.

Let me just say a word about Gorbachev and his perspective on glasnost. Mikhail Gorbachev, of course, is the new generation, following three decrepit leaders who dies in office: Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Gorbachev represents new dynamism. Among recent Soviet leaders, he is one of the best educated and has traveled a fair amount abroad. Although we did not know it until very recently, Gorbachev made a private trip to France in 1966, in which he traveled all over the country in a car by himself. Later, he traveled to Great Britain and to Canada. He is a man who has seen and appreciated how productive the Western world is. It seems to me that he understands that free circulation of ideas is absolutely crucial to the development of any industrialized society, and he has initiated a policy of greater openness, greater truthfulness, in public discourse in the Soviet Union for some very specific reasons.

First, it is important for the creative process to have this free discussion. Second, Gorbachev wants very much to bring Soviet intellectuals to his side. He wants the intelligentsia to back him. He wants them to be a counterweight to a 20-million-strong bureaucracy, which is extraordinarily picayune and protective of its own privileges. Third, Gorbachev wants to get Soviet intellectuals to identify problems in the Soviet economy; and, finally, he wants to get them to suggest constructive solutions.

These, it seems to me, are the aims of Gorbachev’s glasnost. The aim of glasnost is not, however, to bring about the kind of democratic reform that would make the Soviet Union similar to the United States or another Western country. It is an effort to get the intellectual resources of the Soviet Union working to improve Soviet socialism and, in the end, Soviet communism.

Glasnost has arrived in a rather uneven way, as you might expect, because there are people who do not support glasnost nearly as much as Gorbachev does. The following few examples show the evolution of this policy.

Shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary, in March 1985, he made a trip to Leningrad where he spoke at the former Smolny Institute, which was Lenin’s headquarters during the revolution. Choosing that forum for his first appearance was not accidental. By making that choice Gorbachev was saying that he was the true inheritor of Lenin’s mantle, and he buttressed this notion extraordinarily by speaking openly about the shortcomings of Soviet industry. His words were quite dramatic and shocking at the time and inspired a lot of enthusiasm among people whom I call the "colonels" - people in mid-career, with a future to look forward to, who were depressed at the demoralization and stagnation in the Soviet Union in recent years.

At the same time, Gorbachev’s speech was a rather depressing statement for the people whom I call the "generals" - those who had found a niche in Soviet society, had won their privileges, and didn’t want to see those privileges undermined by some young whippersnapper who had become general secretary.

After his remarks in Leningrad, Gorbachev began traveling to other parts of the Soviet Union where he spoke more openly; he walked the streets of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people confronted him, airing their complaints in a very direct fashion. Then, in the summer of 1985, an event occurred that demonstrated the fragility of glasnost.

The event was the defection to the United States of Vitalii Yurchenko and his return to the Soviet Union. It was a mysterious affair. The United States maintained that Yurchenko had voluntarily come to the United States. The Soviet Union portrayed it as quite another matter. The Soviet version of the Yurchenko affair was that he had been kidnapped while on an assignment in Rome, that Yurchenko had been brought against his will to the United States, and then, finally, through his own ingenuity he managed to get out of clutches of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from a restaurant in Georgetown and make his way to the Soviet embassy. I was at Yurchenko’s press conference in Moscow when he came back and told his tale in great detail. I would like to quote to you some of what he said, describing his abduction. He recalled he had been in Rome on an assignment: he was sitting on a park bench, he was drinking some boiled water out of a Coca-Cola bottle when, all of a sudden,

I was reaching to put the top back on, when I felt something like liquid splashed on me, a feeling as if I had been plunged in water. Everything went dark, and I felt like I was falling...then someone grabbed me.

When I came back to the United States, I did some research on the book that I am writing and in the course of this research I came across an affidavit submitted by a Department of Justice official to the Walker-Whitworth trial. In that affidavit, John Martin, chief of the internal security section of the Department of Justice, says, and I quote from the affidavit, "Vitalii Yurchenko defected by voluntarily walking into the U.S. embassy in Rome, Italy, in July 1985."

There are two totally different versions of Yurchenko’s defection. I think you know which version I believe. Sworn documents submitted to a U.S. court are more likely to hold the truth than statements by Yurchenko at a press conference supervised by the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Let me add that the man who presided over that press conference was Vladimir Borisovich Lomeyko, who was then head of the Soviet press department of the Foreign Ministry - a man whom I respect. Lomeyko subsequently left his post, and I think that he did so because he found that being chief of the press department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry required him, on occasion, to sanction bold-faced lies.

A very important moment in bringing the policy of glasnost into existence was the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Someday, when we have the minutes of the Politburo debate on that subject, I believe you will find that Gorbachev argued strenuously for full disclosure. The fact could not be hidden because radiation had gone across international borders. You will also find a group of people who argued strenuously against disclosure, probably making the argument that it would undercut the Soviet Union by harming its image.

Although today we have a more open press policy in the Soviet Union than we have ever had before - except possibly in the 1920s - clearly there are forces in Moscow that would like to limit that openness. Those limitations are evident in the political process, for example, which still remains extraordinarily hidden. The Politburo meets, it is true, every Thursday and issues a communiqué, but that communiqué is merely an agenda of items discussed. It never explains who took what position or how a decision was resolved.

The ouster of Boris N. Yeltsin is another very interesting and, at the same time, rather depressing development. Yeltsin was found to be unacceptable. By whom he was found to be unacceptable is not totally clear. Why he was found to be unacceptable has not really been revealed. His speech to the Central Committee - which was found to be unacceptable - has not been published. Yet, Yeltsin was made to stand up and say that he was arrogant, to grovel abjectly before those people who were about to dismiss him, apparently so he could then get another job - a responsible, but not politically prominent job.

I am reminded in the Yeltsin affair of a joke that I heard in Moscow as I was sitting in the Lefortovo "Hotel." In the joke, an interrogator was putting questions to Ivan Ivanovich for holding views that were not really acceptable to the topmost leadership of the Soviet Union.

Interrogator: "Ivan Ivanovich, what do you think of Soviet-American affairs?"

Ivan Ivanovich: "Well, I think what Pravda writes about it. What Pravda says is what I believe."

Interrogator: "Ivan Ivanovich, what do you think about relations with China?"

Ivan Ivanovich: "Well, what Izvestia says about relations with China totally reflects what I believe."

Interrogator: "And what do you think about President Reagan?"

Ivan Ivanovich: "Well, what TASS put out on its wire yesterday is exactly what I think about President Reagan."

Interrogator: "Ivan Ivanovich, don’t you have any ideas of your own?"

Ivan Ivanovich: "I do, but I don’t agree with them."

Forcing a person who is critical of you or who has different views than yours into a position where he has to abjectly grovel is the sort of thing that happened with Yeltsin. It is not an inspiring example of political freedom. Furthermore, top Soviet leaders seem to voice criticisms of their own toward the policy of glasnost.

Mr. V.M. Chebrikov, the head of the KGB, sees an increased threat to Soviet security from glasnost. He says, "Needless to say, in the Soviet Union there is no, and cannot be any, class base that the adversaries of socialism could regard as a springboard for conducting subversive activity. At the same time, and this must be said bluntly, we do have some bearers of ideas and views that are alien and even openly hostile to socialism. Some of them are embarking on a path of committing antistate and antisocial activity."

Alexander N. Yakovlev, another member of the Politburo and adviser to Gorbachev, says, "Certainly, the more we open to the West, the stronger walls we will erect against things like pornography and movies in which violence is rampant."

In a speech July 14, 1987, Gorbachev seemed to take a view that is more liberal than those just quoted. He says, in his remarkable address in Moscow, "We are now, as it were, going through a school of democracy afresh. We are learning. Our political culture is still inadequate. Our standard of debate of inadequate. We are an emotional people, but we shall doubtless get over it; we shall grow up...I have no reason for any great political reproaches. If extremes have made their appearance anywhere - and incidentally, they have, and we have seen them - this nevertheless happened in the context of the struggle for socialism and the struggle to improve it."

The point I am getting at is there is a new policy of media management called glasnost. It is a policy of being more truthful and more open about events inside the Soviet Union. At the same time, there are forces within the Soviet Union that are concerned that glasnost might go too far. In closing, I would like to comment on the two points that I began with: How good a reflector is the Soviet press today of the current reality in the Soviet Union? and What kind of an image does the United States today have in the Soviet Union?

On the first point, there has been a sea change in the way the Soviet press describes what happens in the Soviet Union. There are articles today about the seamy side of Soviet life, the sorts of things that were never written about before - drug-taking, prostitution, and police abuse of power. There are also articles about Afghan veterans who are not acknowledged when they come back to the Soviet Union, although many of them have been maimed and others have given their lives in what, from Moscow’s point of view, is a legitimate activity in support of the Soviet Union.

Those who have been in the Soviet Union recently tell me that the picture of the United States still has not markedly improved. There are still enormously descriptive pictures of the injustices of American society - homeless people generally merit one photograph on the front page, or inside, of a Soviet newspaper every day. It has a very dramatic effect.

In regard to the Soviet portrayal of the United States, some developments should be recognized and perhaps cheered. For example, the Soviet television program, "International Panorama," recently ran a rather informative description of the U.S. presidential candidates without a lot of ideological interpretation.

Under Gorbachev’s glasnost there have been many more American appearances in the Soviet media, even by those individuals, such as Richard Pipes of Harvard University, who are quite critical of the Soviet Union.

Finally, there have been the "space bridges" in which groups of Americans have conversed with groups of Soviet citizens through television hookups. These space bridges leave something to be desired. Sometimes one feels that the Soviet participants perhaps are not being as truthful as they might be, and the U.S. side is sometimes a bit naïve and badly informed. Nevertheless, this kind of dialogue is quite unusual and is something we should be pleased to see happening.