few people about, and the Ferris wheel and other amusements were silent.
“The press is at the leading edge of the idea of a free market,” he said. “Consider the case of Pravda” The official party newspaper was by no means the juggernaut it formerly had been (and perhaps remains in the heads of most Westerners who have occasion to consider the subject at all). Officials, and journalists who followed developments in the Central Committee, still consumed it and tried to decipher its levels of suggestion and implication, but millions of ordinary readers had dropped away. “As soon as a person realizes that there is something better, he changes his habits,” Alexey said. Any publication that professed to throw light into the dark corners of societal administration, or even to chronicle the fresh evidence of change all around, was the beneficiary. The most remarkable success story, though remarkable is scarcely an adequate word, was an eight-page tabloid weekly whose name, translatable as Arguments and Facts, was a fair description of its method as well as its content. Four years after it was founded, its circulation stood at 34 million, the largest periodical in the world. In addition, there were some underground papers, so called even though they had ceased to be samizdat ventures, produced clandestinely and distributed furtively hand to hand.
“I was curious about how many there are, and so one day recently I asked the librarian at our agency how many of these we subscribe to,” Alexey said. “It seems that we buy 210 of them. By no means all of these are from Moscow, of course, but no doubt there are many others we do not receive.” One of the better-known examples riveted attention on itself by publishing an irreverent investigation of Mrs. Raisa Gorbachev’s personal spending habits. (One day I looked out the window and saw an articulated lorry carrying rolls of newsprint and was reminded that this was another of the commodities included in the embargo against the Lithuanians.)
Some publications not previously considered radical began to take on a patina of radicalism. Nedelya, the weekly supplement of the decidedly middle-of-the-road Izvestia, is the obvious example. Only a thoroughgoing cynic, however, would suggest that they had done so solely in an attempt to lure readers by catering to fashion. Yet there was no doubt at least as to which were the true radical journals. They are the weekly newspaper Moscow News and the weekly magazine Ogonyok. I was counting on the freemasonry of journalists to gain me admittance to both places.
The News was founded in 1930 and owned jointly by Novosti and an organization called the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Accordingly there were editions in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Estonian, and Arabic, with an aggregate circulation of 300,000, as compared with 500,000 copies of the Russian-language original. The offices were situated on one of the most advantageous pieces of real estate in Moscow. On a bright moderate day, too warm for a coat, too cool for just a pullover, I decided to walk there, a distance of several kilometres, rather than add to my knowledge of Moscow’s extraordinarily ornate metro stations.
Gorky Street begins within easy sight of the Kremlin and runs north-west. Near the foot is the National Hotel, built at the turn of the century and once the U.S. embassy, before the Revolution forced its move to the present building in Tchaikovsky Street (and of course before the attempted new one, which the Americans discovered was riddled with hidden listening devices and so was razed even before they had finished constructing it). Farther up was the headquarters of TASS, the telegraph agency and news service. Its corner building is recognizable instantly by the huge globe over the entrance; the globe is supposed to revolve, but it had stopped working 20 some years ago and was never repaired. But mostly this wide and orderly boulevard, with some architecture going back to Napoleonic times, is lined with the city’s, and the country’s, finest shops; mews and side streets contain hidden parks and luxury flats. Many buildings are marked with commemorative tablets, each with a portrait relief, showing some historical figure who once lived there, and it seems clear that there will be a cause for more such plaques in future generations, for this is the haunt of the famous and the well rewarded. One richly decorated white building, I was told, is full mainly of ballet stars. My informant told me the flats have particularly high ceilings; I replied that this is probably best in the circumstances.
More than any other district, Gorky Street shows the extraordinary old European city that underlies our preconceived notions about Moscow, showing it to be the poor sister of London or Paris but a full sibling when it comes to complexity, age, size, style, and even grandeur. Which made it all the more significant that the Moscow News should occupy one corner of Gorky Street and Pushkin Square, the most Westernized place in this Westernized boulevard. Across the way, for example, is the world’s largest and by no means most unpleasant McDonald’s, owned by George Cohon of Toronto and employing 600 Muscovites. On opening day they faced a crowd of 30,000 customers and, as one of my new acquaintances put it, “ascended quickly to the record book of Guinness.” Whenever I passed by during my stay, hundreds of people were queuing to get in—queuing eagerly, it seemed to me, without the resignation that always appears to mark the faces of those passing their time in the constant lineups for staple goods. But kitty-corner, outside the News, there was a large crowd hungry for something more nourishing. When the paper first came out each Tuesday, its 16 pages were pinned up in display cases running along the side of the building, and citizens jostled one another for the chance to read the news. That side of Pushkin Square is a traditional spot for such anticipation, and a perplexing variety of newspapers is vended there.
Many Soviet papers organized their physical plants on the German plan, with one composing room and one stand of presses working round the clock on a cooperative basis to produce newspapers of different sorts and allegiances, each of which maintained only its editorial shop as a separate operation apart from the rest. The Moscow News was different, though. It had its own exclusive plant, which was located some distance from the editorial rooms in Pushkin Square. The arrangement was made all the more awkward because the News, like virtually all the Soviet press, had not yet progressed to computerized production.
Two months before my visit, the offices were gutted by a fire, and I found the staff holed up in temporary quarters in an adjoining building whose lobby still smelled strongly of smoke. “There was no suggestion of arson,” explained Sergei Volovets, one of the editors and the paper’s former London correspondent, when I located him at the end of a slot-like room, perhaps two metres wide and six metres deep. “It was an accident. But the fire was several storeys up, and the fire brigade poured so much water on the blaze that the floors below were ruined, too.” Hundreds of readers from many countries contributed to a relief fund. “We hope to get permission from city council to start rebuilding soon,” he said. “The climate here makes it difficult to begin work of this sort except in the summer, and we must be finished before the cold comes, because the building we are in now has no heat.” City Hall had bandied about the phrase “two months.”
The News was the sort of newspaper that you wanted to hug or applaud. It was quick to attack the Chinese for the outrage at Tiananmen Square and was critical of Li Peng during his visit. It had been hard on both Gorbachev and Ligachev on point after point, sometimes even recklessly so, to judge by the English-language edition I read, but there was a consistent logical voice from behind the formidable amount of information it provided, information, it would seem, that was often available nowhere else. One of its memorable scoops dealt with two former prosecutors who became members of the Supreme Soviet only to discover organized corruption in the highest echelons of that chamber; the pair narrowly avoided being charged by the attorney general after the News began printing their revelations. Similarly it was the News that finally proved that the wartime massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, an event the Soviet Union had always attributed to the Nazis, was in fact the work of Stalin’s henchmen, just as the Poles had suspected for 50 years. “And our stand on Lithuania differs from the official line in a number of respects,” Volovets said with a smile of understatement. The paper was too extreme for the Cubans and at one point was banned even in Hungary.
What struck me most in the issues I read was a certain trenchancy, even down to the back pages devoted
