Photo from Russia Beyond

After reading “New Beginning or Dead End” by Ardaky Ostrovsky, one important question came to my mind: can freedom of expression in media coexist with socialism? In the context of the Soviet Union, it seemed that no matter how hard Gorbachev sought to reign in the people following the continuation of perestroika in the 1980s, the unfavorable consequences of this political reform were not amendable and the decline of socialism was inevitable.

According to Ostrovsky’s narrative of history, perestroika was essentially a double-edged sword that advocated the freedom of expression through glasnost, or the “opening up of media” (64), and simultaneously restricted expression in ideological terms. Gorbachev believed that glasnost was “the true socialism,” in which Ostrovsky explains:

Glasnost did not mean a removal of censorship and a sudden burst of free speech. Nor was it meant to be all-embracing. It was a limited license issued to a select few who could target the social groups that were most receptive to perestroika—students, young professionals and the urban intelligentsia. Its purpose, as Gorbachev understood it, was to inject vitality into socialism. Its consequence, as [Alexander] Yakovlev saw it, was to change the country. (64)

The problem with this definition of glasnost for me was precisely its dichotomous nature. How can freedom of expression truly exist if it is 1) restricted, and 2) used to revive a 70-year-old political system (socialism) that no longer finds relevance in the modern day, and what is the point of even suggesting this “freedom” when it is in fact a restriction? In the 1980s, what remains of socialism is only its abstract ideology and its glorious history, in which “socialism” has become merely an empty word that must be substantiated with modern thought in order to allow the Soviet system to persist at all.

Because the significance of socialist ideology resided in this long-gone past, Gorbachev largely excavated past stories to enliven the contemporary, “true socialism.” During the late 1950s, perestroika reformers “were obsessed with the idea of history as a tape that could be rewound to the point where the country took a wrong turn. In 1986 they called the country back to 1968 and even further back to Lenin’s New Economic Policy” (72). This history of past information essentially led to unrest and uneasiness about the state of information transmission during the 1980s. Thus, Soviet media content during this period was merely a revised form of propaganda, for while expression was expanded, the content was still based in socialist ideology rather than facts.

Following off the official Soviet media tradition of concealing rather than revealing the facts (62) before Gorbachev’s initiation of glasnost, the ultimate restrictions place upon the freedom of expression also led to a limited access of information both for the people and for Gorbachev himself, which Gorbachev eventually realized through the Chernobyl incident. Even after this realization and the start of glasnost, “[f]act-based material was still forbidden,” in which “news was not gathered by the newspaper [Moskovskie novosti] but was distributed through the Soviet telegraphic agency TASS” (65). Glasnost didn’t really change the role of media in regulating and conveying socialist thought. Ostrovsky mentions that the “early perestroika press was not about reporting, it was about opinion and essay writing, and each one of those pieces was a milestone by which people measured the changes in the country” (65). What I have come to realize about media in Russia during a period of “freedom” of expression is either 1) socialism will persist and media must contain information mediated by socialist ideologies or 2) socialism will decline and media may truly pursue a freedom of expression stripped of ideological expectations.

More importantly during the period of perestroika, the people knew that news was not facts but more so a reflection of the Soviet government’s political reform and direction. According to Ostrovsky:

Discerning readers deduced facts from what newspapers did not say rather than what they did: omissions were more informative than inclusions. If the media said something did not happen, people understood it to mean the opposite. In later years television would play the role of a universal plug that kept the facts from leaking out into the open. (63)

Two points are significant here: first, because the state media does not provide “news,” the people can only follow suite by considering this information as insight into the contemporary state of Soviet politics; second, the people no longer have faith in the system for they are already naturally inclined to think opposite of what the state media gives them. This attitude is detrimental to the state, for the purpose of propaganda in the first place is to effectively educate and influence the masses; otherwise, there is no purpose in having it in the first place. Despite Gorbachev’s efforts to clean up the mess he had started, it was too late.

What was especially dangerous about perestroika was the Soviet Union’s potential to move towards democracy and capitalism, given its “pursuit” of the freedom of expression. Ostrovsky claims that “socialism with a human face” was compatible with democracy since the Prague Spring intervention in 1968 (56). However, this “socialism with a human face” is, again, necessarily a facade for actual freedom in expression because it is inseparable from mediation by socialist politics.

Through Alexander Yakovlev’s criticism of the contemporary state of the Soviet Union, we are further convinced that freedom of expression cannot coexist with socialism, and because Yakovlev believes the former was necessary, then the latter was doomed to fail. In December 1985, Yakovlev wrote a radical, secret memo, stating that “Marxism is nothing but a neo-religion, subjected to the interests and whims of the absolute power…Political conclusions of Marxism are unacceptable for civilization” (59-60). In other words, socialism is the wrong political system to uptake for the people, for it serves the self-interests of the rulers rather than the ruled. Yakovlev stresses that what society needed was a “normal exchange of information, which was possible only in a democracy” (60). At the core of Yakovlev’s political opinions is his affirmation that in order for the Soviet Union to overcome economic deterioration, it must uptake “a free market and private ownership” (60) unique to a capitalistic society:

Socialism has cut itself off from a way forward and started moving backward toward feudalism and in some places…descended into slavery…For thousands of years we have been ruled by people and not by laws…What we are talking about is not the dismantling of Stalinism but a replacement of a thousand-year-old model of statehood. (60)

Yakovlev ultimately suggests that socialism has regressed into a terrible, historical condition and cannot live up to the expectations of the freedom of expression. The problem is the “model of statehood,” which, for the Soviet Union, must be based in political ideology. Socialism shaped the country’s model of statehood for nearly 70 years, and it would take a long time for the country to deconstruct the traditions and practices inherent within the system to form a “new” socialism. No wonder state media still portrays ideological information that is not yet “news,” and no wonder Gorbachev takes pains to emphasize a significant socialist past.

Work Cited

• Ostrovsky, Arkady. “New Beginning or Dead End.” The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News. Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 54-90.