Newspapers Under Communism

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28284, 23 May 1957, Page 12

Newspapers Under Communism

The official Soviet newspaper, “ Pravda ”, must have surprised Communist journalists in Russia by its plea for more interesting newspapers—a demand, in effect, for newspapers which dealt in subjects of human interest and were not filled with dry-as-dust official statistics. As anyone knows who has ever read official statements issued by the Russian Legation, the Russians have a positive flair for making statistics appear duller than they are.. Apparently “ Pravda ”, which, on cabled extracts translated and sent to New Zealand, can itself occasionally be very dull in the official manner, is now leading a campaign for brighter newspapers. It may well be that many Russians who have visited the capitalist West, or who have been stationed outside Russia in Soviet armies of occupation, have made the inevitable contrast between reading* matter at home and abroad, and that their views are receiving official notice. As with other aspects of the process known as “de-Stalin- “ isation ”, the liberalisation of newspapers, the attempt to make them reflect the lives of the people rather than the official views of the Ministries,is fraught with considerable dangers to the regime. In other circumstances and in other countries it has been said that it is difficult to let a tiger out of a cage gradually. The example of the newspapers in Poland since the Gomulka regime came to power might cause even the editorial board of “ Pravda ” to think very carefully before turning the columns of their newspaper over to stories of everyday life. Only a few months ago the Polish press began to report court cases and accidents. Previously these had been passed over in silence, as unworthy of comment in a people’s State where officially everything went like clockwork. Now that they are being published—especially the court cases—it may be more difficult for the authorities to persuade the people that life is as idyllic as the Communist bureaucrats said it was. According to Alexander Bregman, a Polish journalist writing in the New York “Herald- “ Tribune ”, Polish newspapers have now begun to report as news not only court cases and accidents, but the existence of such social problems as prostitution, and such economic ones as widespread and chronic unemployment. Such subjects may make more readable news in the newspapers, but they may have an effect on public opinion and private thinking which is not quite what the bureaucrats would wish. In Poland, some freedom has been restored to radio stations as well as to news-

papers. But it must be embarrassing to the authorities when the radio stations quote, as Bregman lists, letters from listeners complaining about the conditions in which they live under communism. A boy of 17 wrote to the Warsaw Radio, which broadcast his letter, saying that he had been vainly looking for work for two years, and found nothing left for him but to learn how to steal. A girl of the same age asked why a young girl must die of hunger because there is no work. If the process of liberalising newspapers and radio extends to Russia itself, the results might be just as embarrassing as they have been to Poland’s Communists. For this reason, most observers will think that the suggested brightening of newspapers advocated by “ Pravda ” will, if it comes at all, still be subject to the qualification that editors had better be very careful indeed that nothing they publish reflects in any way on the obvious advantages of living in such a workers' paradise as modern Moscow.