In 1976 Hedrick Smith, the New York Times’s Russia correspondent, discussed a perceived lack of news in the Soviet press. In his best-selling book The Russians, he claimed that for Soviet journalists ‘news in our sense was not their primary concern’.Footnote 1 Smith was one of many US post-war journalists and scholars to conclude that news was alien to the communist world view.Footnote 2 Such viewpoints were influenced by the Cold War desire to split the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, but even contemporary research into Soviet journalism claims that ‘news . . . was almost absent in communist media systems’.Footnote 3 These conclusions are not, on the surface, without foundation. Soviet sources, too, imply a mismatch between the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘news’, with regular denunciations of ‘news’ as a vulgar ‘bourgeois’ phenomenon (until the mid-1960s, the preferred term was ‘information’ [informatsiia]). One critique of the US media refused even to use the word ‘news’ (novosti), preferring the ungainly transliteration n'ius.Footnote 4
But if news was ‘absent’ from the Soviet media, why did journalists, editors and officials spend so much of the 1950s and 1960s talking about it? Drawing on archival research into the youth newspaper Komsomol Truth (Komsomol'skaia pravda) and Central Television (Tsentral'noe televidenie), alongside articles printed in professional publications, this article shows how news coverage became a crucial subject of debate for journalists and officials. While these discussions do not necessarily imply Soviet acceptance of news ‘in the western sense’, they provide clear evidence of the growing importance of news reporting within the journalistic milieu. Working across press, radio and television, and focusing on dialogue among journalists and media officials about the future of journalism, this article shows how post-Stalin debates about news shaped journalists’ burgeoning professional identity, offering an insight into the vicissitudes of social and cultural reform more broadly.
This article began as an investigation into the evolution of Soviet print news, and the balance of the sources reflect this. But as the article evolved it became clear how far print news was intertwined with radio and television. As I argue, broadcast media, because of their reliance on voice and image and the speed with which they could transmit information, offered new possibilities for disseminating news. They disrupted the print-oriented hierarchy of news media and changed existing perceptions of the print media's role in disseminating information. Recent studies of Soviet radio and television history, which describe the growing importance of news after the Second World War, demonstrate the importance of broadcast media to the history of Soviet news.Footnote 5 Both Kristin Roth-Ey and Christine Evans identify a tension between the ‘Soviet’ and the ‘foreign’, and between the tempo of modern broadcast technology and Soviet media's self-inflicted sluggishness. In their accounts, news and Sovietness were an awkward combination, with broadcasters struggling to find a form of information that accorded with Soviet values while gaining audiences’ approval. Broadcast technology, Cold War rivalry and speed are the dominant themes explored in this strand of scholarship, and this article builds on these ideas by highlighting a crucial factor – journalistic professionalism – that has hitherto been neglected. By focusing on broader shifts in journalistic identities across the 1950s and 1960s, I show how the development of news owed much to journalists’ perceptions of professional excellence. To do so the article draws on a number of recent studies which have examined the development of Soviet journalism under Khrushchev and beyond. As Thomas C. Wolfe and Natalia Roudakova's anthropological accounts suggest, an alternative moral economy developed in which defending individuals from bureaucratic malfeasance was more important than disseminating objective information.Footnote 6 Mary-Catherine French's recent historical account of the post-Stalinist creation of the Union of Journalists offers further evidence, showing how it emerged out of a combination of internal professional debates and the party's desire to prove that Soviet journalism could compete with its Cold War rivals.Footnote 7
This article engages with these two strands of scholarship – one on news, and one on professionalism – but also challenges them. While media historical accounts of Soviet news offer far-reaching analyses of a number of aspects of the phenomenon, they tend not to discuss journalists in a systematic way. And while accounts of professionalism do much to broaden understanding of the Soviet journalistic milieu, they perpetuate the view, either explicitly or by ignoring the subject altogether, that news was remote from Soviet journalists’ professional concerns. By placing the question of Soviet news within the history of journalistic professionalism, and the question of journalistic professionalism within the narrative history of Soviet news, the article offers a new way of thinking about the remaking of Soviet media after 1953. Debates among Soviet journalists and media professionals help us understand why journalists were resistant to the charms of news for so long, and why news practices developed as they did. To illustrate this argument I draw on a number of sources that demonstrate the growing professionalism of Soviet journalism – internal editorial discussions (letuchki), debates at the Union of Journalists, as well articles from publications for print (Soviet Press) and broadcast professionals (Soviet Radio and Television). These publications were used as a means of agenda setting; they allowed journalists, editors and officials to enforce ideological norms but also to challenge those norms. In other words they were part of what Lorenz Bichler has called a ‘limited-public sphere’: a space for a specialised public to discuss intellectual issues.Footnote 8 By combining these sources with archival research into the day-to-day world of the Soviet journalist, the article foregrounds the wide-ranging forces acting upon Soviet news, showing that news is not simply content but a cultural category embodied in a range of practices and appearing across a variety of spaces.
By uncovering the wide range of practices and agents that affected news, the article seeks to capture the world of Soviet journalism in motion. To do so I advance the notion of the ‘journalistic imaginary’, which builds on John Nerone's observation that normative conceptions of journalism have their roots in a particular kind of ‘fantasy’.Footnote 9 By focusing on this ‘imaginary’, which I define as a set of normative ideals about the right way to ‘do’ journalism, the article bridges scholarly accounts relying on journalism's practical logic, embodied by the everyday workings of journalists and reporters, and the normative logic of journalism, expressed both by formal rules and by journalists’ conceptions of what journalism is and what it should be. As I show, those normative conceptions changed significantly over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, to the point where the much-maligned activity of news reporting had become not only a site of creative discussion but also a tool for social democracy. Narrating the history of Soviet news becomes a means of understanding how and why the journalistic imaginary shifted in an era of new technological developments, Cold War rivalries and changing political realities.
To investigate these questions this article traces the history of Soviet news from the death of Stalin until the early-1970s. The first part of the article, which focuses largely on the situation at the time of Stalin's death, examines both the ‘practical’ and the ‘normative’ logics of Soviet news. It explores the formal ‘rules’ of Soviet journalism and also the ways that these rules were circumvented in practice. The next three parts offer a historical narrative which traces the relationship between ‘practical’ and ‘normative’ conceptions across two decades. The first examines the consequences of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and its effects on newspaper news coverage up to the early-1960s, the second looks at the problems broadcast professionals faced in developing radio and television news in the 1950s and the third focuses on the effects of Cold War rivalry and the crisis in Czechoslovakia on the journalistic imaginary in the 1960s. The conclusion discusses the tangled relationship between news, journalistic professionalism and civil society with reference to the Anglo-American and socialist contexts.
News Networks in the Soviet Media
As the introduction's references to ‘news’, ‘information’ and ‘n'ius’ suggest, defining Soviet news is difficult. However, Soviet journalists did employ terminology that makes the task easier. They differentiated between publitsistika, which included analytical or polemical content, and informatsiia, which included dispatches on recent events. The split between the two roughly cleaves to the Anglo-American distinction between comment and news. There also existed broader – often pedantically policed – divisions between different information genres: the 1965 edition of the Soviet Journalist's Handbook lists twelve.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, underlying these sub-divisions was a clear sense that media ‘information’ should concern recent events. In 1953 TASS Director Nikolai Pal'gunov's defined it as ‘a communication to the reader of a report on new events and about new occurrences of social, political, economic, cultural and scientific life’.Footnote 11 It is this definition, which is similar to contemporary US definitions of news, that this article will adopt.Footnote 12
Though Pal'gunov's definition was, in this regard at least, closely allied to Anglo-American notions of newsworthiness, the position of information within the professional economy of Soviet journalism was significantly different. In the Anglo-American constellation, professionalism was, and continues to be, allied to a notion of ‘objectivity’: a series of norms concerning the journalist's relationship to a story, treatment of sources and narration of an event.Footnote 13 By avoiding bias through the application of certain procedures of verification, journalists working in the Anglo-American tradition have sought to provide readers with tools to decide on their own interpretation of events. In this case, news reporting was allied to the overcoming of political partisanship in the service of the nation's civic life.Footnote 14 In the Soviet professional tradition, by contrast, objectivity was assigned only a limited role. While official texts proclaimed that the Soviet press, through its position as the mouthpiece of the working class, was the ‘most truthful, and most objective’, this was a partisan ‘objectivity’ stemming from the Communist Party's world-historical role.Footnote 15 Authoritative texts like the Journalist's Handbook stated explicitly that ‘information agitates through facts themselves’ and that it should involve a ‘deliberate, purposeful selection of those facts and events which inculcate a feeling of patriotism, vigilance, courage and selflessness’.Footnote 16 Discourses about the civic importance of information were conspicuously absent; instead, normative texts assigned news an agitational role consolidating party rule, instilling national pride and inspiring readers to construct the future.
These exhortations to journalists imply that reporters were expected to exercise their own judgement when reporting the news. How much freedom did they actually enjoy? Journalists operated within a political culture that saw the free flow of information as a potential danger to the country's security. During Stalin's rule reporters lived in constant fear of errors, with newspapers employing a vast army of correctors to avoid unpleasant consequences. It was an era in which censors sought to ‘abolish ambiguity’ and officials interpreted careless errors as deliberate subversion.Footnote 17 It is little surprise, then, that Stalin-era reporters focused on replicating existing propaganda codes rather than attempting original formulations: creativity was dangerous. However, the evidence points to a significant shift after Stalin's death, which left journalists with more leeway to report on current events. Such a conclusion may seem surprising. On paper, censorship remained ubiquitous. Newspaper editors were expected to conform to the notorious Index of state secrets – known in the trade as the ‘Talmud’ – and publications underwent additional levels of verification from Glavlit (the state censorship organ) as well as the NKVD and General Procurator. The Index contained sections on the armed forces, science and technology, economics and foreign policy, as well as a list of further restrictions on reporting subjects such as crime or prisons.Footnote 18 Multiple layers of censorship further limited the possibility of ‘errors’ – and the creative autonomy of reporters. Each media outlet was assigned a number of ‘duty censors’ from Glavlit, whose job it was to approve or reject content.Footnote 19 These censors, who often had their own office on the newspaper premises, would read the newspaper from beginning to end to ensure that no undesirable material reached the reader, and only then give their stamp of approval (vizirovanie).Footnote 20 Since newspapers could not be printed without Glavlit's approval, this sometimes meant a last-minute scramble to suitable replacement material – often to the detriment of readability.Footnote 21 For radio and television producers, working in an era before tape technology was widely available, approval of news items meant submitting scripts long in advance for verification; since broadcasts were supposed to adhere to the approved script, this inevitably affected the style – as well as the timeliness – of broadcast news.Footnote 22
Learning of these restrictions, the reader may be forgiven for thinking of a totalitarian system of controls that allowed the party to control the news that reached readers, and offered little or no freedom to reporters.Footnote 23 In practice, however, recourse to the censor appears to have been relatively rare, since journalists and editors were well aware of restrictions. Moreover, this system of verification was far more flexible than it might initially seem for a variety of reasons. Annoyed reports from the Central Committee's Agitprop department show that television and radio producers, working to tight schedules and wanting to overcome the tedium that came with having guests recite established scripts, frequently bypassed established censorship mechanisms or deviated from the script once on air.Footnote 24 The chaotic nature of live broadcasting often forced TV professionals to make in-the-moment decisions without prior approval.Footnote 25 In other instances reporters and censors accidentally allowed into print materials contained on the list of official secrets.Footnote 26 Furthermore, over the course of the Thaw period, censorship procedures became less rigid. Once trust had been established between editors, censors and politicians, the former could print material – albeit at their own ‘fear and risk’ – without prior approval.Footnote 27 Given the importance of personal contacts within ‘the system’Footnote 28, this development should come as little surprise, but it does offer a corrective to the totalitarian view of Soviet news. Thus, we can conclude that, even though Soviet authorities exerted close control, the news appearing in the Soviet press – whether by accident or by design – was never entirely congruent with the views of the party.
The importance of personal contacts makes it difficult to discern exact lines of control. Scant documentary evidence exists to confirm who signed off on what and at what time, but it is possible to advance some general rules. It was certainly the case that news was the most closely controlled aspect of media output. Media organisations remained embedded within the bureaucratic structures of the party and government, greatly limiting their freedom of activity. As the masthead of any Soviet title showed, Soviet newspapers were subordinated to particular organs or organisations – Komsomol'skaia pravda represented the Komsomol, Pravda was the organ of the party's Central Committee and Izvestiia the Supreme Soviet – so that, in principle, information flowed directly from party organs to the people. Representatives from these organisations played an important role in supervising and verifying the content of the media under their control, and these organs would often provide editors with information to be published or broadcast.Footnote 29 For audiences, signs of this subordination were everywhere, from the party resolutions published in all their tedious majesty to political speeches printed verbatim. Such articles required no journalistic skill, for they could not be altered; editors who tried were sanctioned.Footnote 30 Soviet authorities also controlled the news through the operation of long-term thematic plans, through which media outlets planned news stories for the next week, month and quarter were approved by officials.Footnote 31 These ‘planned’ stories allowed reporters limited space for creativity. Nevertheless, those schedules imposed a particular temporality on Soviet news media that heavily restricted its ability to respond to the latest events.
While party and Komsomol represented an important source of news, TASS (Telegrafnoe agentstvo Sovetskogo soiuza) constituted the most important node in the Soviet news network. As the country's only news agency, TASS possessed a broader network of reporters than any newspaper. A measure of its importance is shown by the fact that in a sample week it provided Komsomol'skaia pravda with anything from 30 per cent (1961) to 52 per cent (1971) of its news coverage.Footnote 32 However, archival documents suggest long-running dissatisfaction with the organisation. Whether at the height of the 1930s or in the middle of the media age of the 1970s the consensus within media circles was that TASS material was ‘barely readable and uninteresting’.Footnote 33 Editors were forbidden to alter its reports, so readers would find the same dispatch appearing word for word in every central newspaper, many local newspapers, as well as on radio and television.Footnote 34 Nor were these reports of a high standard. As a report sent to the Central Committee in 1955 noted, TASS foreign correspondents’ nose for a story – let alone their linguistic abilities – left much to be desired.Footnote 35 Local and national reports were little better. Put simply, for a large proportion of its news coverage Soviet newspapers were reliant on the activity of a news agency whose coverage was considered tedious and out-of-date.
TASS was not the only subject of journalists’ complaints, however. Networks of local correspondents (sobkor) were supposed to give national newspapers local variety, yet even here there existed an implicit hierarchy. Local correspondents were considered by Moscow colleagues as second-class journalists who, as one staff member put it, were ‘unable to collect facts, let alone write’.Footnote 36 Their criticisms were perhaps unfair: local correspondents were expected to cover vast geographical areas with limited resources. As a result they remained rooted to familiar locales: party and Komsomol meetings, factories and local collective farms, official celebrations and anniversaries.Footnote 37 Thus, the tedium of local correspondent material was partly the product of organisational constraints: correspondents tended to produce news about the routine and planned, rather than the unexpected and accidental.
It seems that Soviet journalists were inclined to blame everybody but themselves for the failures of news. And yet there is a sense in which the poverty of Soviet news coverage was something to which journalists themselves contributed. The process of news-gathering was supposed to be a matter for all editorial staff. Each journalist was expected to contribute a certain volume of stories for the common stockpile, either by following up leads or by rewriting material submitted by the general public (‘non-staff authors’). In practice, however, reporting was governed by status – or, in fact, a lack of it. Senior journalists performed news-gathering tasks perfunctorily, preferring to concentrate their energies on other, more prestigious, work. Among Soviet journalists, there existed a cult of fine writing, leading to the prizing of publitsistika over informatsiia.Footnote 38 Newspapers’ editorial practices reflected journalists’ literary predispositions: interesting stories on recent events were frequently pulled in favour of other, more ‘literary’ materials.Footnote 39 Given that news reporting was considered a mechanical and uncreative chore, it is unsurprising that senior journalists perceived news as a task best left to beginners. In turn, novices fiercely resisted such an assignment: ‘You must be joking! I didn't do all this training for that! No, I won't go to work on information (na informashki)!’ exclaimed one such beginner.Footnote 40
By the time of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the particular circumstances of news production in the Soviet Union had given rise to an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic, in which news reporters were considered to be outside the profession's mainstream. While news was not entirely controlled from above, journalists’ lack of freedom to report on many events created a professional environment where it could be ignored or disdained. Even if reporters had possessed greater creative freedom, the limited resources available to Soviet media outlets made it difficult for reporters to gather anything but the most routine information. It is scarcely surprising then that in the mid-1950s information occupied a peripheral position in the journalistic imaginary, and that young journalists perceived the role of reporter as a sign of failure. However, over the next three sections, we will see how news practices changed according to shifting political, technological and international circumstances and, as a result, how the widely disparaged activity of reporting became increasingly central within the journalistic imaginary.
Rethinking Press News after Stalin
In July 1956 a new newspaper, Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia), reached Soviet subscribers. The new title stood out against its rivals, not just for its novelty in a staid market, but also for its news reporting. In one edition, taken at random from its first month of existence, one could read the travel notes of one member of the State Circus who had travelled around Western Europe, a story about a Soviet expedition to the Antarctic, a news item about a parachuting competition and a report on a swindler who, having spent eight years in jail for theft of state funds, managed to scam another state enterprise within months of his release.Footnote 41 In the months that followed many newspapers emulated Sovetskaia Rossiia’s example – including Komsomol'skaia pravda, which, among other things, regaled readers with possible sightings of the Abominable Snowman in the Pamir Mountains.Footnote 42 Sovetskaia Rossiia’s news-centric model, which combined traditional missives about great industrial and agricultural achievements with human interest stories, was the child of debates over the future of Soviet news that came to a head in 1956, after the Twentieth Party Congress. As part of a wider process of reorienting the Soviet newspaper towards a popular audience, journalists debated how they could make news more interesting to their readers. As this section will show, this reassessment of news led journalists to advocate different paths: some journalists regarded traditional ‘positive’ stories about the country's march towards communism as a newspaper's bread and butter, others sought to grab readers’ attention by printing sensational stories about crime, others still advocated muckraking as a means of reforming the country after the excesses of Stalinism. By outlining the reasons that journalists and editors advocated these paths – and the reasons they opposed them – this section underlines the difficult choices faced by journalists and editors in remaking Soviet news.
Though discussions about ‘information’ had raged ever since Stalin's death, the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 spurred the first concerted discussion of news practices in decades. Khrushchev's ‘Secret Speech’, which overturned many established beliefs, forced journalists to reflect on the social impact of their work and encouraged them to rethink the press's civic role. The notion of ‘truth’ became central to their discussions. Komsomol'skaia pravda’s star satirical writer, Il'ia Shatunovskii, told colleagues that they needed to ‘educate youth in the spirit of truthfulness’ and that they would ‘no longer print material which embellishes reality’.Footnote 43 But the question of what it meant to be ‘truthful’ was difficult to resolve. Newspapers like Sovetskaia Rossiia published titillating reports on crimes and misdemeanours, while two young journalists from Komsomol'skaia pravda publicly argued for the necessity of news on everyday incidents such as accidents, emergency landings or other mishaps. Failure to do so, they claimed, led the public to distrust official news sources.Footnote 44 In private, journalists went even further, calling for ‘the boundary between what can and cannot be said in the newspaper’ to be ‘liquidated’ entirely.Footnote 45 Within these statements, though not expressed programmatically, we see an emergent notion of the public good: better information was seen to be the reader's ‘right’, the absence of which would lead to a loss of trust.Footnote 46
Over the course of 1956 newspapers like Komsomol'skaia pravda and Trud, the trade union daily, began to report on bureaucratic and judicial wrongdoing as a means of overturning traces of the ‘cult of personality’ in everyday life and regaining readers’ trust. Komsomol'skaia pravda printed a report about a student wrongfully imprisoned for spitting, an exposé of shoddy building work at the newly-constructed Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow and criticism of bureaucratic obstructionism in Kaluga oblast’, south-west of the capital.Footnote 47 While criticism had always played an important role in journalistic practice, these hard-hitting reports suggest that reporters were assuming a more activist post-party congress role. There remained, however, a problematic gap between traditional ideas of news as propaganda, on the one hand, and journalists’ desire to uncover expose social problems, on the other. While journalists might not have seen a contradiction between the two roles they sometimes clashed. In March 1956 Komsomol'skaia pravda’s editors asked young reporter Vladimir Chachin to rewrite a critical news item about hooliganism and crime in the Donbass region as a positive story. Faced with protests from angry colleagues, Deputy Editor Aleksei Adzhubei argued that the original story had not been rejected because of its negativity but because of its lack of ‘skill’. But, in light of the party's campaign to attract young volunteers to the Donbass region, another reason became apparent: ‘We are propagandist-agitators. There exists a campaign, a call to sign up, and at that time we need to write about shortcomings sensibly’.Footnote 48 Adzhubei was perhaps wise to err on the side of caution. Over the course of 1956 the party and Komsomol hierarchy also began to see the two roles – news as propaganda and news as critique – working against each other. By the beginning of 1957 the course taken by titles like Komsomol'skaia pravda and Sovetskaia Rossiia came under strong criticism from the Central Committee – for undermining the country's stability in the first instance, and for ‘sensationalism’ in the latter.Footnote 49
‘Sensationalism’ and social critique represented two powerful alternatives to the inertia of Soviet news. However, a number of journalists wanted to turn the clock back. In stories about the construction of factories and the sweat and toil of kolkhoz heroes, we can talk of an enduringly popular vision of news that set out a distinctive vision of the Soviet ‘brand’. While this form of heroic news, whose emergence can be dated back to the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), waned in popularity after the Second World War,Footnote 50 it saw a resurgence after 1956. Journalists urged their fellow reporters to look through old editions of Komsomol'skaia pravda from the 1920s and 1930s to find inspiration.Footnote 51 The main advantage of this socialist realist model was not just its illustrious revolutionary lineage but also its ability to make sense of the whirlwind of daily events. While Benedict Anderson has famously suggested that the newspaper is ‘a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot,’ in its Soviet variant Marxism-Leninism provided the master plot for knitting heterogeneous world events into a single narrative.Footnote 52 This ‘positive’ vision of news is illuminated by a series of Komsomol'skaia pravda special editions, printed in the spring and summer of 1956. Each edition used the backdrop of a single day to highlight progress being made in Soviet industry and agriculture. In an edition on the Five-Year Plan readers learned about new models of television, washing machines and watches, as well as a plan for the building of new, ultra-modern suburbs in Moscow, equipped with public transport, workplaces, shops and cultural facilities.Footnote 53 In this imagining of the Soviet future, everyday life was full of events which, though appearing minor on the surface, were transforming the country's landscape and advancing the nation towards the communist future. Here, the journalist's role was to discuss ‘positive’ events – not to report on the country's social ills.Footnote 54
While such news stories helped to give a concrete identity to the communist future, their excessive reliance on a narrow playbook of ‘typical’ events was a major drawback. Not only did this vision of news exclude negative stories (which were considered to be ‘private occurrence[s]’ and ‘isolated fact[s]’) but, contrary to the intentions of its enthusiasts, it contradicted the need for news to be novel.Footnote 55 Newspapers published positive stories that could have been printed last week or last month, or last year – and, for all readers knew, would be the same next week, next month, and next year. The paper's ‘Responsible Secretary’ Semyon Garbuzov, who oversaw the daily running of the paper, argued that Komsomol'skaia pravda’s special editions were out of date and claimed that the press should now focus on problems as well as successes: ‘the times have changed and so has our relationship to facts’.Footnote 56 A few years later editorial board member Andrei Davidiants – one of the most vocal advocates of a new, more accessible, form of news – expressed similar criticisms of the press's reliance on clichés: it's ‘either a new electric locomotive, a new combine harvester, a plough, a new book written by a worker or a book written by a cattle breeder’.Footnote 57
If sensationalism and social criticism were off limits, and ‘positive’ information constituted more of the same, what was the alternative? Aleksei Adzhubei, the editor of Komsomol'skaia pravda from 1957 to 1959, and of Izvestiia from 1959 to 1964, came closest to uniting the ‘sensational’ and the ‘positive’ strands in Soviet news. The son-in-law of premier Nikita Khrushchev, Adzhubei was a Soviet chauvinist in Westernising garb pioneering a ‘red’ form of ‘yellow’ journalism in which up-to-the-minute news and exclusives were the main currency.Footnote 58 As editor of Izvestiia, he was widely praised for his coverage of four naval officers who were marooned in the Pacific Ocean for several weeks when their craft became unmoored from a ship. Ignoring the misgivings of officials (who saw accidents as forbidden territory), Adzhubei made the story, so reminiscent of the mass journalism of the early 1930s, front page news for several days.Footnote 59 His closeness to Khrushchev also delivered him access to international exclusives, such as his interview with President Kennedy in 1961. However, there were many occasions when Adzhubei's breaching of official protocol led to criticisms – especially from the party's ideological chief Mikhail Suslov.Footnote 60 While journalists at other papers held a healthy respect for Adzhubei's innovations, they were also critical of his excesses. Alluding to his former colleague, Komsomol'skaia pravda’s conservative satirist Il'ia Shatunovskii railed against journalists’ attractions to suicides and other ‘fearful thing[s]’, which he called ‘rotten facts’. He suggested – in words that echoed criticisms of negative stories as ‘atypical’ – that newspapers needed to cast aside ‘one-sidedness’ and ‘observe the proportion of good and bad that one meets with in life’.Footnote 61
Such comments were symptomatic of the dilemmas facing journalists after 1956. Conservatives like Shatunovskii feared that by pandering to audiences Soviet news was moving too far from its core identity. Yet they struggled to offer a compelling alternative to the parade of combine harvesters and record-breaking milkmaids. But, it could be argued, so did reformists, whose eye-catching stories about ‘fearful things’ and muckraking exposés of bureaucratic wilfulness were neither to the taste of party officials nor journalists. Despite its criticisms, the lack of a guiding hand from the party is striking. Having renounced Stalin's methods party officials seemed reluctant or unable to offer direction to confused journalists, only belatedly retaking the stage after 1957.Footnote 62 The party's confusion was mirrored on the pages of the press, where journalists recognised the need to take a ‘third line’ beyond ‘bad sensationalism’ and ‘dry material’ but were unable to imagine what such news might look like.Footnote 63 As the next section will show, journalists working in radio and television faced similar questions – and reached subtly different answers.
Radio and Television News in the 1950s
In January 1955 Iurii Fokin, a commentator in the Department of Foreign Broadcasting for All-Union Radio, was asked to give the first ever live on-location report for television news. Having written, learned and submitted his script for verification, Fokin stood by at the famous Red October chocolate factory by the River Moskva to report to the nation. Greeting viewers with a cheery ‘Good Evening!’ (twice), Fokin found himself attacked by nerves, forgetting the name of his interviewee and, the lights having failed, unable to consult his notes. At this point, Fokin's ‘radio instinct’ kicked in, and he proceeded to recite his script – as well as the replies of the factory worker, who looked on in annoyance.Footnote 64 Fokin's report was a breakthrough in the history of Soviet broadcast news, but it also exposed its limitations. Fokin's recitation of a pre-approved script demonstrates broadcast media's continued reliance on written forms of address, and its technical failures illustrated the ‘wing-and-a-prayer’ aesthetic of early television news. But the report, tentative and amateurish though it was, gave a first glimpse of how television would reshape existing news hierarchies. While Pravda remained the flagship organ of news media, television – along with the more established medium of radio – not only offered new contexts for discovering the latest information but expanded its possibilities. As this section will show, the growing popularity of radio and television shifted the temporal preoccupations of news from processes to events. At the same time, the specificities of broadcast news created a demand for novel, more personalised genres of news, which served to legitimise the role of the reporter within the Soviet journalistic imaginary. In other words, as news media changed so did notions of professionalism.
Over the course of the late 1950s and 1960s the growing popularity of broadcast news changed audiences’ access to information. Ownership of radio receivers rose from 3.6 million in 1950 to 27.8 million a decade later, while ownership of television sets rose from 10,000 to 4.8 million over the same period.Footnote 65 However, this shift in media consumption took place in a climate where broadcast media were not utilised to their fullest. Television, in particular, remained Soviet news's poor relation throughout the decade, with a newsreader reciting TASS materials representing the limits of its ambition. What little visual material existed was pieced together from archive film footage – a time-consuming process which limited professionals’ ability to broadcast timely information.Footnote 66 Many journalists were unable to see the point of TV news: media scholar Burton Paulu recalled being told by one broadcaster in 1958 that there was ‘little need’ for it given the presence of radio bulletins.Footnote 67 This condescension was shared by officials, and it had material consequences. A meeting between Aleksei Adzhubei and senior TV officials in 1958 revealed that TV news producers lacked access to elementary technology, such as mobile broadcast units and telephone lines, and to even the most basic sources of information, such as TASS digests. In their absence, producers garnered material for the daily Latest News [Poslednie izvestiia] bulletin from the morning papers.Footnote 68 The situation on Soviet radio was somewhat less desperate, given that during the Second World War the reports of Iurii Levitan and colleagues had made radio and news synonymous.Footnote 69 Nevertheless, even for this well-established and better resourced medium there remained major problems with equipment and news gathering throughout the 1950s.Footnote 70
A lack of resources was not the only obstacle to better news. Both Kristin Roth-Ey and Nancy Condee have discussed what the latter calls the ‘logocentrism’ of Soviet culture – a hierarchy in which the written word enjoyed primacy.Footnote 71 This hierarchy was similarly imprinted on broadcasting, and it created a situation in which broadcast media took its cues from print.Footnote 72 The adoption of print forms sometimes took place by necessity: television, as we have seen, lacked the news gathering possibilities of newspapers. But even radio continued to use Pravda’s articles as a basis for news coverage well into the 1960s (indeed, it even had a department devoted to compiling press material).Footnote 73 This primacy of the written word extended to the verification stage of broadcasting where, as we saw with Fokin's 1955 news report, scripted material was considered safer than improvisation, even if this contradicted critics’ demands for a more conversational style.Footnote 74 In the years that followed broadcast journalists challenged these ingrained practices, but Glavlit's desire to approve materials days in advance meant that scripting material remained the accepted practice.Footnote 75
This ongoing preference for text over improvised speech, coupled with a continuing lack of resources, produced news broadcasts with neither spontaneity nor timeliness. Within the broadcasting hierarchy, this state of affairs was concerning. At the end of 1957 the State Committee for Radio and Television criticised the producers of the main radio bulletin, also called Latest News, for its ‘trivial, insignificant, and uninteresting information’ and concluded that the show needed to speed up.Footnote 76 The Committee's recommendations reflected the earlier diagnoses of Matvei Frolov, a well-known Leningrad radio journalist, who argued that radio should follow the lead of Pravda and Sovetskaia Rossiia by including ‘short, speedy (operativnye) reports about the most important events of domestic or international life, which took place a certain amount of minutes or hours ago’. In short, it should contain only ‘information about events’. Information about processes could be broadcast, but Frolov argued that it did not belong in a news bulletin.Footnote 77
This shift from processes to events contradicted the way media usually represented the country: as a communist society in the process of becoming.Footnote 78 What could be done to square the punctual temporality of events with the processual temporality of communism? The solution, professionals believed, could be found in the genre of reportage. As a form which offered a ‘graphic representation of an event through the direct perception of the journalist,’ reportage was ideally suited to the personality-fronted media of radio and television.Footnote 79 Reportage, so the rhetoric went, would turn bland dispatches about industry and agriculture into inspirational encounters with ordinary-but-exceptional individuals, ‘add[ing] emotional colour’ to the construction of communism.Footnote 80 Media professionals’ excitement about reportage is not difficult to understand. In a context where news lacked any sort of professional cachet, reportage offered a way of aligning news with broader intelligentsia discussions of the need for individual sincerity.Footnote 81 Presenters and reporters were called upon to speak and act in a more familiar (and therefore more ‘authentic’) manner on air and screen.Footnote 82 ‘If the heat of a reporter's soul reaches the viewer’, argued reporter Evgenii Riabchikov at the Union of Journalists in 1961, ‘then the reporter has been successful. If the reporter is cold, indifferent and only fulfilling an assignment, then the broadcast will be pointless’.Footnote 83 Although the full capabilities of broadcasting technologies were only slowly becoming apparent, by the turn of the decade media professionals had understood how its personalised forms of address might offer new possibilities for news coverage. This had clear implications for news's position within the Soviet journalistic imaginary: the emergence of reportage as a genre showed how news coverage could not only play a part in advancing intelligentsia demands for sincerity but also highlight the journalist's subjectivity. Through the figure of the reporter, news appeared as a legitimate journalistic undertaking within a profession that had long been reluctant to embrace it.
The Cold War Challenge: Soviet News in the 1960s
By the early 1960s journalists’ revised opinions on news were beginning to make themselves visible to audiences. The formerly reviled term ‘novosti’ began to appear more frequently: in the title of the main television bulletin (Televisionnye novosti, 1960), the name of Adzhubei's new press agency (Agentstvo pechati ‘Novosti’, 1961), in Komsomol'skaia pravda’s new ‘Department of News’ and its front-page ‘Novosti’ column. As newspapers devoted more and more column inches to ‘news’, radio and television similarly increased their volume of bulletins and the number of outside broadcasts – including live images of a parade in honour of cosmonaut Iurii Gagarin, which were transmitted across Europe.Footnote 84 In line with rising newspaper circulations and a growth in ownership of radio and television receivers, audience expectations were also growing. Sociological surveys conducted during the mid-1960s revealed a desire for improved and increased news coverage – especially information about international events.Footnote 85 Moreover, they suggested that a plurality of those surveyed considered radio, not the press, to be the primary news medium.Footnote 86 In 1960 the Central Committee made radio's supremacy explicit, placing it in first place in the queue for TASS reports and expressing the expectation that radio would transmit news before the press.Footnote 87 The press's increasing use of authoritative commentators like Iurii Zhukov, and an increase in the proportion of commentary and analysis on its pages, should be seen as print media's attempt to provide an alternative to radio's speed, as well as to popular TV reviews like News Relay (Estafeta novostei).
The 1960 resolution was an illustration of the Central Committee's growing attentiveness to information. What lay behind this renewed interest in news coverage? In the previous two sections I have suggested that changing political circumstances and the development of new media technologies served to inculcate a more positive attitude towards news among media professionals. In this section I consider another important factor that moulded the Soviet journalistic imaginary: the information Cold War. The story of the Soviet battle against foreign radio is a familiar one. As scholars have shown, the Soviet authorities struggled to combat the threat posed by foreign stations such as the BBC and Radio Free Europe which, despite the best efforts of Soviet jammers, could be heard almost anywhere in the country.Footnote 88 In this section, I want to build on this scholarship to show how the presence of the foreign ‘voices’ was not only a threat but also offered an opportunity for journalists and media officials to rethink the foundations of Soviet news and its position within the journalistic imaginary.
A first indication of how foreign news might challenge established Soviet methods of reporting came in late 1956. Responses to protests in Poland and the Hungarian uprising illustrate how officials’ ability to shape the news narrative was threatened by the BBC and Radio Free Europe. During both crises Soviet audiences were starved of domestically produced information. But citizens who wanted to go beyond the Soviet media's confusing reports now had alternatives. Those who could speak the language gleaned information from Polish newspapers sold at newsstands.Footnote 89 Most, however, tuned their dials to a variety of Western radio stations; journalists stationed in the regions at the time of the Hungarian uprising expressed their shock at finding the public listening to these stations openly.Footnote 90 There were good reasons for audiences to tune into foreign radio instead of confining themselves to Soviet media. While foreign radio's reports on Hungary were speedy and uninhibited – perhaps, scholars have suggested, overly so – Soviet reports were quite the opposite.Footnote 91 Its newspapers of record, Pravda and Izvestiia, were privileged recipients of the latest reports, but their stories offered little new information. Other media outlets, including radio and television, laboured under tight controls and were permitted to publish only a drip-feed of brief TASS reports. Events in Hungary exposed the inadequacies, omissions and sluggishness of Soviet information: Komsomol'skaia pravda’s ‘definitive’ account arrived only in December, some six weeks after the uprising.Footnote 92 Reading through a bad-tempered post mortem conducted by Komsomol'skaia pravda journalists, one's overwhelming impression is of anger and embarrassment. Only months before journalists at the paper had called for the paper to inculcate ‘truthfulness’. Now, they complained, it was being asked to print reports which were inaccurate and ‘intended only for stupid little children’.Footnote 93 These discussions lay bare the staff's growing belief that accurate information was the reader's ‘right,’ that they had their hands tied when it came to responding to ‘topical questions’ and that these restrictions on information constituted an attack on their ‘journalistic honour’.Footnote 94 Among other things, then, this first skirmish of the information Cold War gave journalists cause to reflect on the entangling of news's civic role (the reader's right) and its position within the professional imaginary (journalistic honour).
Officials within Agitprop and the Central Committee recognised the problems that the Hungary invasion had caused and changed their priorities accordingly. While Soviet authorities had hitherto been reluctant to offer guidance to media professionals, between 1959 and 1964 the Central Committee promulgated five resolutions on press, radio and television that, directly or indirectly, touched on the subject of news.Footnote 95 Having recognised that jamming was ineffective, expensive and unpopular, these resolutions identified a range of shortcomings in news coverage and demanded an improvement through smarter scheduling, greater financial resources and more powerful transmitters (much of the population could not receive Soviet radio signals).Footnote 96 These resolutions indicated clearly that journalists could no longer afford to ignore news – or the work of their foreign rivals. Particularly after the abandonment of jamming in 1963, the presence of foreign radio on Soviet soil offered both ideological officials and media professionals opportunities to learn from rivals.Footnote 97 In this sense, the Soviet Union's encounter with Western media constitutes what media historian Hanno Hochmuth has called ‘transfer through enmity’:Footnote 98 a creative process of learning from the ‘enemy’ and adapting its techniques for domestic use.
The prime-time First Channel radio broadcast Day of our Planet (Den’ nashei planety) provides a fascinating example of this process of cross-border transfer.Footnote 99 All but forgotten today, the programme was avowedly inspired by the examples of the BBC, the Voice of America and Radio France and employed a variety of genres, from reportage to telephone conversations with foreign correspondents.Footnote 100 The show's inventive format stemmed from the failure of a previous show, International Diary, a news review which suffered from the need to have material approved three days before broadcast. The producers of Day of Our Planet were granted considerably more freedom. A section entitled ‘Shortwave’ discussed material from foreign radio, while ‘At the Teletype Ribbon’ featured commentators improvising responses to the latest news stories. Whether or not these responses were genuinely improvised, the programme provides a telling symbol of the changing temporal horizons of Soviet news and of changing journalistic ideals. Reporters were expected to be able to speak without a script while responding in an ideologically correct fashion to breaking stories.Footnote 101 In this way the Soviet Union's rivalry with the capitalist West added improvisational skill to existing notions of news reporting and therefore broadened conceptions of journalistic professionalism. Professional publications provide further evidence of this shift, printing a range of articles that hint at a new-found admiration for the Soviet media's foreign rivals. Against the backdrop of a media campaign against stations like the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle,Footnote 102 professional publications seemed noticeably more complimentary. An article about BBC broadcasts to the Soviet Union, for instance, was remarkably positive about the corporation's professionalism, stature and resourcefulness.Footnote 103 Such articles may have condemned Western media ideologically, but they also presented the reporter's job as fast-paced, exciting and glamorous – even suggesting affinities between Soviet reporters and their capitalist ‘brothers’.Footnote 104 Ultimately, then, the encounter with Western news not only began to change the form and content of Soviet news but also played a crucial role in securing the position of the once-humble reporter within the journalistic imaginary.Footnote 105
However, two key – and interlinked – restrictions limited the extent of change: firstly, the rigidity of systems of verification; and secondly, constraints on the subject matter of news reports. Kristin Roth-Ey's account of the creation of the news-oriented Radio Maiak (‘Lighthouse’) in 1964 underlines the difficulties media professionals faced in countering the speed and candidness of foreign radio.Footnote 106 In the face of officials’ demands for pre-broadcast verification of content, only around 1.5 per cent of Radio Maiak's news stories had taken place in the previous few hours.Footnote 107 Such restrictions were born out of a fear that, left to their own devices, reporters would broadcast news that contradicted the party line, or reveal damaging information. By the mid-1960s a chorus of voices within the media and political establishment argued that foreign radio's popularity was the inevitable result of the Soviet media's squeamishness in the face of uncomfortable subjects.Footnote 108 In 1966, at a special meeting about news at the Union of Journalists, Ukrainian reporter Dmitri Priliuk echoed many others when he complained of reporters’ timidity in the face of ‘unpleasant’ events. He gave as an example a recent fire at a Kiev library about which Soviet stations had remained silent: ‘what else remained for the curious?’ he asked. ‘Nothing other than to tune their radios to the BBC or the Voice of America’.Footnote 109
Both on the question of pre-broadcast verification and reporting on accidents and disasters, Soviet officials’ reactions suggest that political controls were in flux. In April 1966 reporters received permission to travel to Tashkent to report on the aftermath of a powerful earthquake, marking a welcome change the usual prohibition on discussing disasters. Sources suggest that the decision was taken by General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself, who later argued that Soviet media needed to supply ‘fuller information’ on both domestic and international events.Footnote 110 That autumn a Central Committee resolution permitted print editors to broadcast or publish materials without prior approval, marking an important shift from the previous system of verification.Footnote 111 But though the Central Committee's resolution greatly expanded reporters’ freedom of action, it made little difference to radio and television: when Nikolai Mesiatsev, the head of Gosteleradio, the main state organ for broadcasting, tried to loosen the requirement for pre-broadcast verification of scripts, he was unable to assuage cautious officials’ concerns.Footnote 112 Even for print journalists, decades of caution had left them dependent on official approval. Celebrated Komsomol'skaia pravda journalist Vasilli Peskov, sent to report on the Tashkent earthquake, berated colleagues for waiting for Uzbek First Secretary Sharaf Radshidov to tell them ‘children, you can write’ when in reality there were no barriers in place.Footnote 113 For all the talk of the need for swift, event-focused information, coverage of the disaster only began after a few days of near-silence and remained embedded within the traditional narrative of Soviet progress.Footnote 114 Journalists had gained leeway to report on otherwise forbidden subjects, but their stories nevertheless required a good deal of ‘heroic’ padding.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the inertia of Soviet news was simply the product of political meddling. Not all journalists wanted to change the way media reported the news. The reader of Komsomol'skaia pravda’s new-fangled Novosti column in 1966 would find a series of stories that colleagues might have mocked even a decade ago: a triumphant visit of Soviet Antarctic explorers; a new edition of Maksim Gorky's collected works; a new train from Moscow to Rostov.Footnote 115 Such news stories were part of a professional culture in which many journalists sought to maintain the traditional emphases of Soviet news – emphases which allowed them to differentiate their work from ‘bourgeois’ n'ius. In the late-1960s young students in the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University were exposed to Western news models through clandestinely translated brochures but expected to conclude in their assignments that such models were alien to Soviet journalism – anything more positive would receive a fail.Footnote 116 In 1966 Komsomol'skaia pravda correspondent Ervand Grigoriants stood up at a ‘creative meeting’ of his colleagues and excoriated the ‘linguistic gibberish’ of Soviet news. He urged colleagues to learn from their American counterparts by applying the fundamental questions of US journalism, ‘Who? What? Why? When? and How?’, and structuring stories using the ‘inverted pyramid’ and the ‘lead’.Footnote 117 These practices, so fundamental to Anglo-American notions of journalistic professionalism, show the extent to which foreign ideas had penetrated the Soviet journalistic mindset.Footnote 118 Grigoriants’ colleagues were far from positive about his suggestions, however. The young reporter stood accused of wishing to ‘eradicate intellectualism’ from the newspaper and with it ‘the sketch as an artistic whole’ and ‘subtext’. One colleague added that he ‘would support [Grigoriants’] programme if [the] newspaper was like a Western information bulletin’. But, he continued, ‘happily, our press is not going down that path: we have both the fact and the interpretation of the fact, and emotion, and intellectualism.’Footnote 119 In this case, the adoption of Western forms in the press appears to have been rejected not because of political restrictions but because it threatened the traditional balance of the Soviet newspaper. Although the prominence of foreign information granted novosti a new-found prominence within the journalistic imaginary, ‘intellectual’ and ‘emotional’ publitsistika continued to rank higher than information. Professionalism would continue to be defined by non-news genres.
Nevertheless, Grigoriants’ radical ideas about press news provide an indication of the reformist ideas being discussed before the Czechoslovakian invasion of 1968. In the professional journal Sovetskaia pechat’ (renamed Zhurnalist in 1967), edited between 1966 and 1968 by the liberal Egor Iakovlev, conversations about news took on a socially transformative gloss, where news became an essential component of a civil society.Footnote 120 Contributors spoke of information as the reader's ‘right’ and as a civic necessity. One such article claimed that by printing a news column on political affairs local newspaper Taganrogskaia pravda had broken down the door from which a sign saying ‘no trespassing’ had previously hung.Footnote 121 ‘Openness, comprehensive and prompt information’, the article continued, ‘is an indispensable condition for the further democratisation [dal'neishei demokratizatsii] of the life of our society. Only a well-informed person, well-oriented in all problems, is capable of playing a fruitful part and taking initiative in social matters’.Footnote 122 In such articles the reporter appears as a contributor to the public good, granting citizens their right to information in difficult – sometimes dangerous – circumstances.Footnote 123 Once more, news's connection to Soviet civic life reared its head.
On the surface this provides powerful evidence of news's enhanced status within the Soviet journalistic imaginary. Once seen as an activity unbecoming of a young, ambitious professional, reporting was now described as a prerequisite for ‘democratisation’. But Iakovlev's Zhurnalist was a mouthpiece of the liberal intelligentsia, expressing the hopes and desires of reform-minded journalists and editors. It would require support from the party to become a reality. But by the time the article on Taganrogskaia pravda appeared, in April 1968, the idea of news as a force for democracy was out of step politically. With events in Prague progressing beyond the party's control, high profile reformist journalists and editors were removed from their positions – including Iakovlev.Footnote 124 Four months later the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia – and the return to jamming it prompted – marked an end to the Cold War of the airwaves, and with it seemingly any hope for any significant reform to Soviet news reporting in any medium.
By way of a brief epilogue, it is worth noting that the language of information as a public right did not disappear entirely after 1968. Its transformative agenda, however, was significantly neutered. In the 1970s journalists sought to demonstrate their professionalism not through reporting but through daring social critiques and dispatches in defence of the individual.Footnote 125 Information was no longer discussed as a component of civic culture but as a tool of effective top-down governance. Now, it was suggested, the press should print ‘concrete, useful [delovoi] information on the carrying-out of resolutions from the party, the government and local Soviet organs’.Footnote 126 Reading through journalists’ discussions in the 1970s, it sometimes feels that the clock has been turned back two decades, with reminders about the importance of positive information, a familiar litany of complaints about the dullness of news coverage, laments over the inadequacies of reporters – and of course ritual wailing about TASS.Footnote 127 Daily TV bulletin Time (Vremia), which once represented officials’ great hope for innovative ‘kaleidoscopic’ news coverage, was a symbol of Soviet media's malaise. By the mid-1970s the bulletin had become a monolith which, as much as Pravda editorials, embodied the ‘authoritative discourse’ of late socialism.Footnote 128 Watching those programmes today, with their trumpeting of achievements and parade of exemplary workers, we see how late socialist news professionals returned to their core ‘brand’ of positive information – even if audiences once again looked abroad for alternatives. Such a vision of news was surely ‘Soviet’, but it lacked the socially transformative effects that many media figures had hoped for after Stalin's death.
Conclusion
The fact that Soviet journalists’ grand hopes for news were scuppered after 1968 might suggest that this case study is of peripheral significance. Yet the very presence of those hopes makes this a story worth telling. It suggests that in the conditions of a liberalising, but far from democratic, Soviet Union, there existed new and far-reaching opportunities to rethink the nature of one's professional activity – even when that activity was closely connected to party organs. While the party, by placing renewed controls on news after the Czechoslovakian invasion, had the final say, this article has resisted the temptation to depict a fateful march towards 1968. By focusing on the journalists and media professionals who made the news, and the diverse conceptions of the journalistic imaginary they put forward, this article has emphasised heterogeneity rather than sameness.
One aim in writing this article has been to de-centre the dominant (in scholarship at least) Anglo-American news paradigm. The article has suggested that Soviet visions of news, and its conflicted place within the journalistic profession, differed radically from an Anglo-American context where news was intertwined with questions of objectivity and allied to civil society and democratic citizenship.Footnote 129 The Soviet case, in which a lively professional culture existed in the absence of liberal democratic values, supports Barbie Zelizer's assertion that although journalism is an essential attribute for democracy, democracy is not a necessary condition for journalism.Footnote 130 That said, Soviet journalists’ frequent references to audiences’ ‘right’ to information point to an alternative reading. In a Soviet society with few of the trappings of liberal democracy, signs of a nascent civic discourse can nonetheless be detected. Even if everyday news practices cleaved closer to the Agitprop model of news coverage than to the ideals printed on the pages of Zhurnalist, the emergence of this discourse is significant. While generalising on the basis of one case study is fraught with difficulties, the Soviet situation presents the possibility that the social function of news – that is, its aim of informing its audience – orients journalists towards a language of ‘democratisation’, either through contact with hegemonic Western models, or with reference to local political traditions of ‘people's democracy’.
One way of testing this hypothesis is to compare the Soviet case with other state socialist media systems. Despite limited research there is evidence that Soviet disdain for reporting was mirrored in other socialist contexts. In 1980s Poland the position of reporter was similarly maligned, with analytical and activist forms of journalism serving as a marker of professionalism.Footnote 131 In contemporary China, Yuezhi Zhao notes a comparable situation where an activist ideal of working ‘for the people’ exerts a stronger force on journalistic ideals than Anglo-American models of objective reporting.Footnote 132 Both examples suggest that in contexts where news reporting is marred by political restrictions, the prestige of news – and its ability to be integrated into normative conceptions of professionalism – remains limited. Journalism's capacity to agitate, enlighten, educate and ameliorate have tended to be more central components of the state socialist journalistic imaginary than its capacity to inform. But while the Polish and Chinese cases suggest intriguing parallels with the Soviet situation, the growing acceptance of reporting as a component of professionalism appears to be specific to the Soviet Union.
The emergence of a distinct professional identity within the Soviet journalistic milieu is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it illustrates how, in a climate where authorities renounced Stalinist violence in favour of persuasion, intellectuals were increasingly able to discuss priorities (and, to a more limited extent, put them into practice) in ways that deviated from the party's priorities. Secondly, this study suggests that to talk about ‘Soviet journalism’ in monolithic terms is misleading. Journalists’ views on news were founded on differing political convictions, competing conceptions of the social good and divergent visions of the media's role in advancing it. Reading their discussions, we see neither a coherent programme for change nor a process of reform stymied by party organs. Rather, the development of Soviet news in this period was marked by improvisation on the part of officials and news producers alike – a dynamic that suggests that journalism's post-1953 trajectory was characteristic of the broader cultural politics of the post-Stalin period.
Finally, the study has affirmed the position of the journalist within the Soviet intelligentsia. News appeared within journalists’ field of vision when it provided genuine possibilities to contribute to the civic good and to undertake fulfilling intellectual and artistic work. In that sense this article supports the work of scholars like Wolfe and Roudakova who contend that Soviet journalists were concerned above all with the transformation of Soviet society and the individual.Footnote 133 Yet, at the same time, this article has underlined the crucial importance of creative autonomy for media professionals. The position of news within the journalistic imaginary rose and fell in line with the opportunities it offered for creative activity. Once those opportunities disappeared at the end of the 1960s journalists increasingly turned their attentions to other, more personally meaningful, activities. Using the limited leeway afforded to them, in the 1970s they continued to advance a (limited) socially critical agenda – albeit in non-news genres.Footnote 134 But in the era of glasnost’ and perestroika, as the public's hunger for information intensified and the freedom and prestige accorded to reporters rose sharply, these two tendencies – news and criticism – coalesced, creating a critically-minded news media that took advantage of the party's call for ‘openness’ but in the process hastened the country's collapse.Footnote 135
