Russians sound off about everything in newspapers

Press, 13 January 1987, Page 20

Russians sound off about everything in newspapers

MARTIN WALKER,

, the “Guardian’s” Moscow correspondent, on chasing scandals through the Soviet press.

When I arrived in Moscow to open the “Guardian” bureau, just over two years ago, a veteran colleague warned me glumly that the great problem would be to find anything to write about. “You’ll spend your days reading through ail the papers wondering what little news snippet you can find to make into something interesting,” he said. “It’s a way of passing the time between the deaths at the Kremlin.”

It has not quite been like that, because the biggest and most dramatic sign of change in my time in the Soviet Union has been the revolution which has taken place in the newspapers. The problem these days is choosing which of the endless stories that pour from the press I should investigate further. But every day, some corking stories just disappear into my files. Take just one day this week. We begin with a story in “Izvestia,” the evening paper, about a programme on the local TV station in Georgia. It is a televised auction of consumer goods for which there is no demand. The trick is that the goods go to the viewer who calls in with the lowest bid. This has been such a success in exposing shoddy and unwanted goods that the programme is now going to be screened on national TV. Then I turned to “Trud,” the trade union paper which has the largest circulation in the country — 18.6 million a day. This has been secured by the good old Fleet Street principle of sensation, in a staid Soviet style. But for the hot scoops on new miracle folk medicine cures, U.F.O.S and the discovery of Atlantis, “Thud” is the paper to bay. /There was a story about a new

“glasnost” telephone line open to the public in Vorkuta, a grim place in North Siberia which is notorious as the site of some of Stalin’s worst labour camps. Glasnost began as the word to define Mr Gorbachev’s encouragement of outspokenness in the media, but has now become a national catchphrase for the right to sound off about almost anything. In Vorkuta, you can now dial 70.707 and “express your views on any problem that is bothering you, ask for a situation to be explained.” Your call will be taken by "a qualified representative of the socio-psy-chological service.” On the next page of “Trud” was a story about the bribery network being run by the traffic police in Saratov on the Volga River. There was a nice account of a taxi-driver who was stopped by the traffic police, told he had committed an offence, and they were about to punch a hole in his driving licence. Three holes mean suspension. Instead, the police suggested, he might care to go to a nearby restaurant and bring back some shashlik. He did, but brought two witnesses as well, and then brought charges against the cops. At least this had stopped what the locals called the evening taxi parade, "Trud” commented, when at the end of the police shift, a long line of cabs would wait outside the police station to give the cops free rides home. On another page, was a tasty tale of enforced kickbacks in the Bolshoi orchestra. One of the violinists complained at having to donate part of his foreign currency allowance to an official — and found his job being advertised when they got back to Moscow. He had lost his n&ical

skills, went the official explanation.

Then “Socialist Industria” carried a good story about the corrupt police who ran a black market operation at a ball-bear-ing plant in Michurinsk. The police got local criminals to bully workers into stealing bearings, and when the goods were handed over, the cops would appear and demand a bribe.

In “Sovietskaya Kultura,” the film director Pavel Chukhrai had an angry piece about the way the country was losing its sense of respect for the dead. “At the Donskoi monastery, the graves of the heroes of the 1812 war against Napoleon are in danger — there are plans to dig them up. And now that they close down the Novodevichy monastery, except to those with a special pass, this no longer seems immoral to us. We have got used to such things... and so when I think of Chernobyl, of the Admiral Nakhimov shipping disaster, I have a feeling that this is a terrible revenge upon us all for our loss of moral sense, the coarseness of our souls.”

“Komsomolskaya Pravda” carries a long letter from one of luberi, the tough teenage gangs from the Moscow outskirts who invade the city to beat up the punks and heavy metal fans and the break dancers. “We find it disgusting to see the chains and badges they wear, their dyed hair, these people who put shame on our country.” All this was before I had even started to go through my favourite paper, “Sovietskaya Rossiya.” It is getting to the point where if there were another death in the Kremlin, it would take us a while to lift our heads from the papery and notice. • ' <