The Press: Coexistence: the Fashionable Disease

For Western journalists who happened to read it, the snarls they got in the monthly magazine Sovetskaya Pechat (Soviet Press) were hardly a surprise. The author was Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia and son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev. Beware your Western colleagues, said the suspicious editor. They preach the preposterous idea that there can be a peaceful coexistence of ideologies.

Never fear, Aleksei hastened to add, “the inoculation of Communist ideas guards us safely from this fashionable disease.” But does it? Aleksei, for one, seemed uncertain. The tongue-lashing he laid out for Soviet journalists was even more biting than he had managed for the West. Some of his reporters’ symptoms concerned him; he was worried that the disease of coexistence was sapping their energies.

The Russian press had indeed been digging into economic stories, he said, but without enough analysis or concrete suggestions for improving the system. After all, he reminded his readers, they had a perfect journalistic model to copy: father-in-law’s notes on farm specialization in Byelorussia.

The irate editor found even less to applaud in the coverage from abroad. Adzhubei ticked off his gripes: Russia’s foreign correspondents are poor in foreign languages; they produce meditations “bordering on bourgeois objectivity”; they are punk photographers; they spend all their time cribbing from the bourgeois press. “Where, as they say, is the burning information at first hand?”

Where indeed? With defects so glaring, it would seem a wonder that anyone in Russia reads the papers at all. But Adzhubei was satisfied that he could at least count on his readers. In Russia, the “Soviet people have immense trust in their press and respect it.”