andersen-ottaway lecture

1991 Andersen Lecture
Vitaly Korotich
Chairman of the Soviet Weekly literary and political review Ogonyok

Putsch, Perestroika, And The Press: Recipes for Change

Thank you. Thank you, dear ladies and gentlemen, and thank you, Ms. Ambassador, and thank you, Mr. Marks. Maybe I will start from the very beginning. You said that it is important now that this is the fifth lecture. The first was Nicholas Daniloff. That is really great because Nicholas came here from a Soviet prison. I was number 58 on the list to be arrested after the August 1991 putsch, but nobody was arrested. Times change, which is very nice.

Now it was said here that we produce more history than we can consume. It is a tragic situation because we produce more history than we can understand and, I think, than you can understand. It has started to be a real problem for us, and, maybe it was a good idea when Russian Minister of Information Poltoranin said that we were trying to make a clinically dead system organically dead. But at the same time, our house is full of the dead. Dead Lenin’s body is in the middle of our country, and when a dead body is still present in your house nothing good is in the house. It is necessary to bury our dead first, and then to start something new. I will try to tell you about my experiences, and it is very important to start from the very beginning. But for this I have to stray a little from looking exclusively at the mass media.

You must imagine our country. Once upon a time there was a superpower, and in this superpower, everything was programmed for isolation. What is the difference between an American and a Soviet journalist? American journalists hunt for news. Soviet journalists always receive news. We always received news from the top and were told what was possible to publish and what was impossible to publish. It was not so bad because to edit a newspaper or magazine in those circumstances was very easy work. Before perestroika we had maybe 10 times more liberals than now because it was possible for journalists to tell each other, "You are a genius. I am a genius. We prepared something great, but those people on the top forbid publishing it."

Now, when free publication is not forbidden, we start to have fewer liberals because it is possible to publish and to write, so it is not as easy to be a liberal without doing something. In this way, our country has started to change. In this way we are trying to move toward mankind, toward humanity, and you must try to understand us once more.

We are a country that never saw a human being walking on the surface of the moon. When Neil Armstrong was there, it was not transmitted by Soviet television, and only a few short lines of news appeared in the official Soviet newspapers. We never saw Chaplin’s movies. Nobody knew Fred Astaire. There are a lot of things you know that we don’t know. Your cultural circles, your circles for information are sometimes quite different from ours. This is because the Russian Revolution started as the beginning of a world revolution. It was the beginning of a big process - a revolution without national boarders - but it destroyed our lives quite concretely. We pretended to change life around us; it was after Stalin had announced his idea about the possibility of building socialism in a single country. It was a kind of salvation for everybody because Stalin announced that we will not build socialism in our country, only there, and we will be happy ourselves and separated from everybody else.

Now people are joking that the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church wrote his doctoral dissertation on how it is possible to have the end of the world in one separate country. But nobody knows the answer. Our press never was a source of information. For many years it was a source of separation, a source of ideological education - nothing more. Sometimes people imagine that it is possible to have a free press as just a part of life. Never. A free press is a part of general freedom. In Stalin’s time we definitely understood this. It is impossible to be partly free. It is necessary to have all freedoms together.

When they tried in China to build economic freedoms without free minds or a free press, they received Tiananmen Square. When we tried in the Soviet Union to build glasnost, it was great. But we opened our mouths and we had nothing to put in because the economic system was terrible. The economic system was destroyed, and without a free economy the government was able to stop us many times. It still is doing this now, after August, after all the new press laws. Even after censorship was ended, we still had economic and political pressure. When our magazine dissolved its Communist Party organization last year, when we announced our independence in the following months, the government immediately raised the price on our magazine by two-and-a-half times. It was announced that the workers who print the magazine must be paid better. And imagine the New York Times costing not 40 cents, but one dollar an issue; quite different readers will be paying this price. We were cut off from the democratic readers - students, poor intellectuals. For our magazine these demands were very dangerous, but people tried to help us in their own way. They started to subscribe collecting two or three families together, because one family alone cannot afford such an expensive magazine.

Our country never was in real freedom. Ten days after the August 1991 revolution, all known Communist publications were forbidden. Then they were allowed back but the government announced subsidies to the most loyal publications. Only now are we trying to understand what it means to have a free press. We do not know yet what it means to have free minds.

We never had a free political system, and even for Mikhail Gorbachev for many years "opposition" and "enemy" were synonymous. Until now, we have been unable to produce a real political opposition. Now we do not have dissidents or an unofficial human rights movement - it is dangerous for us to allow free minds. We never had a real press.

I am a member of the Soviet Parliament. I think something is wrong: sitting in Parliament is not the best position for a journalist, and voting for laws, when I do not know about many laws or how to prepare them is not good either. Our Parliament has many journalists and writers because for many years our literature, our press, was a ministry, a council of everything. And when people want to change life, they still write letters to us, not to the government. I personally received five or six letters a day. At Ogonyok, when we changed in 1987, instead of receiving 20 letters a day as we had in 1985, we were receiving around 1,000 letters a day. One thousand letters every day, and those letters were not about literature and something nice. They were letters about the hard conditions of life, about bad roofs, unemployment, and ill children. People did not want to write to the government because they did not believe the government. People were writing to us.

The role of journalists in the Soviet Union is a strange one, and I want to repeat what I said in the very beginning - a free press must be part of freedom in general, and one must never imagine that a free press simply exists. It never has and doesn’t now. At the beginning of this year when we announced our free press in the Soviet Union, we had 1,773 publications officially published in Moscow and the surrounding area, without publications from the republic. Immediately a new problem was created because all printing facilities and everything to do with publication belonged to the government, including paper. It was only this August that the Russian republic and all other republics started to privatize all printing facilities.

No longer being in an active editorial position but instead the leader of Ogonyok’s executive board, I was invited here. Ogonyok’s new editor in chief came to me to tell me what is going on - that now maybe 30 percent of the new publications will die in the beginning of next year because of the costs; people at Ogonyok are fighting not to die themselves. Your U.S. kind of press is starting to develop. We are beginning to have more and more tabloids. People are tired. After finding nothing to buy in our stores, they don’t want to read articles about the bad Soviet economy. I am afraid that now people need a Soviet Kitty Kelley more than real open Soviet journalists, deep and interesting analysts.

We are coming closer and closer to mankind, having all the positive and negative sides of this move. Now, it is important to understand that the people who built those changes, the people who tried to bring about the changes are still part of the same system. In this system, it was not so easy to change the possibilities and to change the press without changing the basis of the system. Maybe in the question period, I will tell you more about the press, but now in this half an hour, I want to tell you about what is the most important for me.

I prepared a speech with detailed figures on the Soviet mass media, but increasingly I feel it is necessary to speak now about the general situation. I think you cannot understand, or maybe you can understand but you do not always show that you do know how serious the situation now is. The Soviet Union is moving, but nobody knows where. The situation is dangerous. The republics are starting to be independent, but they are only trying to understand such things as the process of the dissolution of an impossibly big state full of nuclear warheads with a huge army. I want to tell you - I want to emphasize - that the situation is dangerous now and not only for us. It is possible to compare what is going on in the Soviet Union and its seriousness with Europe after World War II, the situation in 1945, and the process of denazification. In the Soviet Union, we have never had a middle class. Even journalists, with few exceptions were party officials sent into the press. I was a writer and having a good name I moved through literary publishing, not through journalistic education. Many times I was elected as secretary of the Writers Union by secret balloting but never was really free - I only tried to be.

In the Soviet Union, we never had a group within the population that was like the U.S. middle class on whose shoulders all of America sits. We never had such a group to bring about change. Bourgeois revolution in France was done by the petit bourgeois. Burghers in Germany brought about their revolution. Who would do it in the Soviet Union? Only corrupt Communist Party officials, who are still in power, and some of the creative intellectuals, especially in the national republics. I want simply to tell you how strange it was for me when Leonid Kravchuk, who is president of Ukraine now, came here to Washington. And it was the same time that many greeted him in the White House as the guest of honor and that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was being tortured close to the White House.

Kravchuk was the chief of the ideological department in the Ukrainian Communist Party and the man who invited me. Many times he told me, "If you publish this capitalist writer once more, I will fire you forever." I tried to imagine Europe after World War II. Would the denazification of Germany have been done by former Nazis? Now, Communists are practically in power in Bulgaria and Romania and many East European countries; even Polish elections show that the Communists are the second party there. In the Soviet Union they [Communists] never were out of power. It is great to have your help, but help without conditions simply supports many of the Communists in power.

I think that now, for perhaps another two or three months, it will be possible to say, "You will receive this aid, but nuclear warheads must be located in that corner." And if you give aid to peasants until March or make currency convertible until May, you’ll have our help. We can waste any amount of money, without real knowledge about changes, as our history shows. It is really important to help us. The two former strong totalitarian states - Japan and Germany - were changed and rebuilt as democratic societies only after all the world around them helped them, showed what could be done.

A third totalitarian structure - the Soviet Union - is dying, and it is necessary to understand that instead of it there will be two, three, or four states with nuclear warheads. These new states have really big armies right in the middle of Europe. Muslim populations of 70 million are moving in the Soviet Union, and it is not so easy to predict the directions of their moves. Just now, you saw what happened in Chechen republic when their general president said that he is ready to blow up a few nuclear power stations near Moscow or that they are ready to announce Muslim war against Russia if they don’t get what they want. Then immediately they received everything and still what they hear is "Fine, fine, fine, please do not blow." A year ago Saddam Hussein promised the same to the United States of America, but the result was quite different. We are only waiting for the government to be really strong and ruling.

To return to the press question, you must understand that our press is trying to do something. We are trying to publish our newspapers and magazines. We are changing the generation of editors. Now, new people, a new generation, youngsters are coming into power, and I am happy. But, we still have no independent printing facilities and no independent sources of paper. To shut up this free press is not such a hard task.

In the three days of the coup, it was practically possible to shut down the press. Yes, we had a few computers and a few Xeroxes. It was possible to make something, but not for long. Now it may be possible for us to have a system with something like a big conference on a high-enough level of post-Communist Europe, because we are coming into a very dangerous period. What is now going on in the former Soviet Union is in the very beginning. Workers and peasants have not been participating in perestroika until now. Masses - millions of people - are still sitting at home, waiting. They are still angry and starting to be more and more angry. Our kind of Weimar republic is dangerous not only for itself but for you, too. Now it is possible to build a real new order about which President Bush has spoken a few times, and it is really important. Also, it is possible to provide democratic changes. In a few months after World War II, more than a thousand German bureaucrats were in the United States for re-education; you invited students and helped to organize a new mass media.

More than 60 American centers were opened in the U.S. zone of occupation alone. I do not want to compare it exactly to today’s events, but in World War II, fascism, not the German people, was defeated. Everything was done to save the German people. Now, communism has been defeated, especially in the days of the coup, and now to help people and to stop the revival of communism, it is necessary to do something together. Regarding this, our press really is hard at work.

We have been trying to do something, but with the kind of center we have now - and this center is practically nonexistent - we cannot control the way credits and help are distributed. When we produce the coupon system in Russia, then everything must go to the center and the center decides. I give to you, and to you - says the center (as before) - and nothing to you because you are a bad guy. The center decides who receives. To change it fast is really impossible but necessary.

This century has been a century of hatred: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, then fascism, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, all of those wars, wars, wars. So the big apparatus of hatred was built. Sometimes we cannot even imagine how big the apparatus is. The military industrial complex in the former Soviet Union controls about half of its industry. The military industrial complex produces 100 percent of the TV sets as a side product of missile production. The military industrial complex in the Soviet Union controls 11 million of the best workers and engineers. It is not so easy to change this production because the only level on which we are really good is military industry; for example, the independent Ukraine proposed weapons as the main export they now have.

This year is 50 years from Pearl Harbor, 50 years from the participation of the Soviet Union in the World War II, 50 years from the Holocaust, 50 years from some very important events. This is the best time to discuss the experience of this hatred, what it is possible to do using that experience, and what to do if you do not want to repeat it. Now in and around Russia, more and more small leaders will start pushing us over into a fascist coup. Big masses of people - multi-millions - are still not participating in the process. In preparing our magazine and being a deputy from a workers’ district, I saw those people, I saw the tens of thousands of workers who are still waiting and still more and more desperately angry. The press is better, but subscriber rates are going down because of what we have told people. They need a new press, they are waiting for better publications, for more honest and independent mass media.

We are still fighting against communism on an emotional level, and the archives of the former Soviet Union are still closed. They cannot show you real files of people killed in the years of silent terror, mainly because those files are out of our reach. In discussing what is going on with our press, I know that the press cannot find many materials and there are no laws to help those attempts. I was a member of the commission in the Soviet Parliament on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. We voted that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia became a part of the Soviet Union illegally. It wasn’t so easy. But, the hardest part of our work was finding documents to prove it, and it was announced that there were not many of them in the Soviet Union. We did not even have the text of the agreement between Stalin and Hitler - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. We did not have the original to it. We received many documents from the German Bundestag, and we used their documents because even we of the high parliamentary commission could not have the documents, because what kind of answer was "We do not know" or "Maybe" or "We cannot read them in the archives of our own foreign ministry"? Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of the government of former West Germany, helped us.

I speak of this because our press only now is trying to build legal constructions, but under conditions of impossible economic decline and in the condition when we were only borning a multiparty system. Without new parties, it is impossible to have alternative leaders. In the national republics, the press is growing, but national independence is not always liberalism. In Georgia, Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia forbids the distribution of all newspapers that criticize him and arrests all opposition. In the national republics, sometimes change is not as liberal as when former Communist leaders are coming into this power, trying to save themselves in this power, and not fighting for such an abstract idea as freedom for all. Sometimes I even have the impression that democracy is something for well-fed people because in my country, when people are hungry and I ask them whether they want good newspapers or good sausages, I am afraid that many of them would answer that they prefer sausages even though the press is working hard.

When I came to Ogonyok, we had 20 letters a day and subscriptions of around 250 thousand. In three years we had 4.5 million subscribers and a thousand letters a day. I understand that the time of the writer-editor such as I is going, and now we need manager-editors, and still we need help. Although I am not a supporter of this kind of publisher, we do need Soviet Murdochs and Maxwells because our press is starting to be a part of the free market. We are fighting for our survival and are starting to count money as never before. We must understand how you do this. Teach us, because we never had this kind of press. I never had a bookkeeper on my magazine. Now, I have five, six, seven, eight. More and more. I do not know how to do this. It was a tragedy because, before his death, Robert Maxwell discussed with us a question about shares for our magazine and how to buy controlled packages of those shares.

We are not prepared to discuss these questions. A free press is great. In the process of liberalization - the process of freeing minds - we changed all the Communist ideas. We destroyed them, and we did a lot to help communism die.

But now, it is necessary to move on - to go into a free economy. Now it is necessary to understand all of the connections and to survive. I joke here asking what is the difference between an aquarium and fish soup. It is possible to boil an aquarium and have fish soup. But to make a living aquarium from fish soup is not so easy. Nowhere in Eastern Europe was there an easy revival of democracy.

I am afraid that the process will not be easy. Now that this epoch is finished, we must understand that post-Communist Europe is part of this life and we must organize it together. It is our common work, and you have real support in the Soviet Union for helping us. The situation is now really dangerous, but also really interesting. We will survive. We will build the democratic society, but it is necessary to do it without blood.

I have only touched on these very important questions superficially. I have used up the half hour that I had for my main report. It was a great privilege to be here, and I will be happy to answer your questions.