For much of the first half of the Soviet “experiment,” journalism in the USSR differed in radical ways from that of other industrial societies. According to Simon Huxtable, Soviet journalists produced aspirational reportage that balanced the diktat of party propaganda with mobilizational commentary focusing on what was right with the USSR and wrong with the rest of the world. After Iosif Stalin's death in 1953, these journalists espoused a somewhat more critical line, adopting something akin to the nineteenth-century notion of the “conscience of the nation.” Still later, many correspondents—particularly those associated with Komsomol΄skaia pravda, the USSR's third largest paper—embraced the idealistic line of the Thaw and in so doing produced a remarkably dynamic model of newspaper reportage.
Huxtable narrates this story in News from Moscow in six thematic chapters organized in chronological order and grouped into three overlapping sections. The first part of the book, “Ritual Socialism,” outlines the ossified world of postwar Stalin-era journalism, which embodied the stiflingly ritualistic and doctrinaire formality of the pre-1953 order. While generally affirming the findings of earlier studies of Soviet journalism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Huxtable also identifies in the first chapter of his book tendencies that anticipated elements of the Thaw's more humanist values. Chap. 2 complements this analysis, noting that even as these new values took shape after 1953, other aspects of the Stalin period's uncritical boosterism lived on. It was not until Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous 1956 Secret Speech that the USSR's leading youth newspaper was able to more fully free itself of the rigid ideological strictures that had held it so fast during preceding decades. Even then, clear limits were placed on the level of overt criticism allowed in its newspaper reportage.
News from Moscow argues that amid Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, journalists in the USSR sought to bolster the Soviet “experiment” with idealistic elements of “romantic socialism” that dated back to the 1920s. Attention shifted from commentary focused on domestic self-criticism to highlight examples of individual heroism that was to supply the role models needed to inspire Cold War Soviet society. Huxtable's Chap. 4 outlines one of the most important templates that Komsomol΄skaia pravda offered during these years—that of the activist “Communard movement”—in order to help realize these new goals.
The final section of News from Moscow—“Reforming Socialism”—examines how the party leadership and its correspondents attempted to promote their new style of aspirational journalism during the early-to-mid 1960s. Of particular interest is the attention that Huxtable casts toward Komsomol΄skaia pravda's Department of Propaganda and its Institute of Public Opinion. This chapter demonstrates that Khrushchev-era executives were not only unusually interested in their audiences, but they were also more ready to harness modern social science in order to better understand them. Ultimately, Huxtable notes, this increasingly subtle approach to gauging public opinion came into conflict with the original mobilizational imperative of journalism in the USSR. Soviet newspapers, after all, were supposed to lead rather than to follow.
News from Moscow concludes with the heartbreak that Soviet journalists experienced during the post-Khrushchev crackdown on the intelligentsia after the mid-1960s and particularly in the wake of the USSR's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Efforts were made during this time to reorient the Soviet readership toward a different sort of aspirational subject—topics concerning technological advances and more prosaic improvements related to consumerism and consumption. But Huxtable suggests that the crushing of the Prague Spring should be seen as marking the end of “romantic socialism” and a return to a more programmatic style of journalism characterized by obedience to the party line and an aversion to innovation and risk taking. Although not a total retreat to Stalin-era journalism, the stultified commentary that followed became the stuff of late Soviet jokes lampooning the country's premier newspapers. “What's the difference between Pravda [The Truth] and Izvestiia [The News]?” Soviet jokesters would ask one another. “In Pravda, there's no news and in Izvestiia there's no truth.”
News from Moscow is beautifully written in efficient but lively prose. It makes excellent use of archival documentation, despite the fact that Komsomol΄skaia pravda's in-house archive was destroyed in a 2006 fire. With any luck, studies like this will inspire similar work on the provincial press and newspapers in the former Soviet republics. In the meantime, Huxtable's book could be profitably read alongside studies that tell earlier chapters of the story, such as Matthew Lenoe's Closer to the Masses (2004) and Jeffrey Brooks's Thank You Comrade Stalin! (1999).
