is a cultural event when new books appear on a library shelf. When books disappear from the shelves—this, too, can be an important cultural event. But the main thing is to know what will be put there instead.
I got a call from the library where I used to lecture about the theatre: “Tomorrow Brezhnev’s works will go into the shredder. If you want them, you’d better hurry.”
I went and stared at the shelves. Hundreds of heavy volumes—the majority being red. The paper was high-grade, the covers were excellent, and the minimum printed copy runs were 100,000. But what was most remarkable were the titles. For about an hour I rummaged through them, getting pretty dusty in the process.
Brezhnev, On Internationalism and Friendship of the People—150,000 copies. Brezhnev, The Virgin Lands—3,250,000 copies. Brezhnev, Rebirth— 3,250,000 copies. Brezhnev, Following Lenin’s Course in nine volumes—each 300,000 copies. Brezhnev, Matters of Topical Interest in the CPSU Ideological Work, in two volumes, 1978—100,000. Brezhnev, Matters of Topical Interest in the CPSU Ideological Work, 1979, in two volumes, second edition, enlarged, 1979 (the only change is the Fourth Star of the Hero in the portrait)—300,000.
On Lenin and Leninism—100,000 copies. Guarding Peace and Socialism— 100,000. It Is for the Young to Build Communism. The Party and the Government’s Concern About the People’s Well-Being, book two. The Party and the Government’s Concern About the People’s Well-Being, book three, part two. Ponomaryov, Selected Works. Romanov, Selected Works. Ustinov, Selected Works. Andropov, Selected Works. Grishin, Selected Works. Kunayev, Selected Works. Shcherbitsky, To Master the Leninist Style of Work. Chernenko, The People and the Party Are United.
For the people, about the people, with the people, but, alas, the ungrateful ignoramuses didn’t appreciate it. The books are six, 10, 15, 20 years old and none of them have ever been opened. The jackets are brand-new. The cards are clean with no names of any readers in them. And this, although ours is the country with the biggest number of readers.
I collected books weighing more than 100 kilograms. Not to change for Dumas, no. I shall put them in my house, admire them, give them to friends as presents on May 1, November 7.1 wanted to take a taxi but it was impossible. I caught an off-duty truck. We threw all this into it and hauled it to my apartment. Kids were playing in the yard—they rushed to help me. They dragged and panted: “Oh, uncle, where did you buy so much?” No, kids, I didn’t purchase this. This is a present to the people. This is priceless. These turn thousands of square kilometres of fine forests into useless paper. This is our damned past. This is us.
I couldn’t find Rashidov. Apparently, he came along a bit late. So much garbage! The paper is white, the covers are red and my hands are black. Only with great difficulty did I manage to get them clean.
“One of our biggest problems,” Sergei Volovets told me, “is that we can’t get enough paper to print on. There is a crisis of newsprint. To fill our needs we would have to buy paper from Finland for hard currency and…” He made a gesture to show the difficulty of that alternative. The Soviet Union had no newspaper recycling plants, but the Austrians and Finns sold to third parties the newsprint they recycled from Soviet sources. Space for news in the paper was further restricted by Soviet journalism’s discovery of advertising—mostly for foreign airlines, to judge by the Moscow News. “But our advertising revenues will only be $150,000 this year, and the biggest part of that goes back to the government in taxes.”
Two Western journalists, one American and the other British, had recently published a long article in The New York Review of Books entitled “How Free Is the Soviet Press?” based on a couple of weeks’ travel and talking to people. Quite high up in the piece they identified Yegor Yakovlev, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow News, as “an associate of Gorbachev.” It is precisely because of its opposition to Gorbachev, for supposedly being insufficiently committed to speedy reform, that the News was so popular and so important.
To find out about the pace and the twists in Gorbachev’s plans, one was more likely to turn not to Pravda or Izvestia but to a magazine called Ogonyok, whose masthead used to proclaim that it was a journal of the Central Committee, a statement that had been dropped. Ogonyok was edited by Vitali Korotich, who kept making and then cancelling appointments with me as he tried to determine just what the status of my visit was. The day of the last scheduled meeting, word came down that he had been called away to the Central Committee on urgent business; I made a mental note of the phrase so that I could use it myself on those occasions when “a slight indisposition” is simply not a good enough excuse.
Korotich is a well-known poet and nonfiction writer from the Ukraine, but most assuredly not part of the stereotypical Ukrainian right wing. His literary life has permitted him a lot of travel to the West, including several trips to Canada, and he once spent six months at the United Nations, resulting in a book about the United States whose title could be translated as The Ugly Face; he has also written about France and about the life of Siberian oilfield workers. Early on he saw in the still-young Gorbachev a latent streak of liberalism, and formed an alliance. It was said, no doubt with a little exaggeration, that they spoke on the telephone daily.
When Korotich got involved in it, Ogonyok was a small general interest and cultural monthly with a circulation of 50,000 or 75,000. Now it had 3.3 million readers, lured to it by endless exposes about bureaucrats and the “mafia” and also by its hints about Gorbachev’s current thinking and the delicate state of perestroika. It was in Ogonyok, for example, that the first sign of the anti-radical backlash in the army appeared.
So how free was the Soviet press? The Communist Party and the government still appointed the top editors, still imposed circulation ceilings, and still installed censors who sat in editorial offices—though admittedly the censors had little to do in the present mood of freedom. When I was in Moscow, the controversial Press Bill, the first in Soviet history, was meandering its way towards law in a few months’ time. Its main provision was to permit individuals or collections of individuals to found and publish newspapers or periodicals of their own, without sanction by, or hindrance from, the party or the state.
If the press was in a state of flux, changing and growing according to no discernible plan beyond whatever tomorrow might bring, so too were the arts—but for some additional reasons. When liberalism is in the ascendant, art and culture always tend to flourish, as the energy pent up in more restrictive times is given an appreciative outlet, with results that are variously youthful, contagious, and self-intoxicating. The sexual revolution that was sputtering to a regressive and ignoble conclusion in the West, as AIDS and other factors ended the long holiday of public sensuality, was just beginning in the Soviet Union. Sex and nudity were now almost de rigueur in Soviet feature films and especially on the stage, “even in pieces from Chekhov and scenes from Shakespeare,” I was told. But this also had to do with the depoliticization of art and the concurrent rise of the free market in culture and everything else. Public art, sanctioned art, subsidized art—it still had to be justified by what I more than once heard called conjuncture, or theoretical grounding in the social here-and-now for reasons of national pride. But partly this was force of habit. Soviet readers, for example, liked novels about politics, old ones and new ones, indigenous or foreign. Yet the demands that art be used to laud and justify the achievements of socialism—the basis for social realism in art—was already way in the past, and much of the job of simply promoting politics and community had been taken over by the newly free press. The bureaucracy
