Recent trends in Soviet policy towards non-Russian media
by Roman Szporluk
PART II
Media policies
Sometime in 1975, one of the highest decision-making bodies of the Soviet Union, very probably the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, decided on a major change in policy regarding the dissemination of periodicals within the USSR. Until then, Soviet newspapers and journals, both "central" - i.e., those published mainly in Moscow (and a few published in Leningrad and other cities but enjoying "all-union" status) - and some of the "local" - i.e., those of union-republic or autonomous-republic status - were, in principle, available throughout the USSR to all those willing to subscribe to them.
There was only one condition: the periodical in question had to be listed in the all-union subscription catalogue. By and large, however, all major non-Russian periodicals, both newspapers and journals, were included, along with the "central" journals and newspapers. (The latter were almost without exception published in Russian or in foreign languages, such as German or English, but not in the other languages of the USSR.)
Those periodicals not included in the central catalogue could be ordered only in the area corresponding to their territorial-administrative ranking. A Ukrainian "republic-rank" journal could, for example, be obtained in all of Ukraine, but a Kiev "oblast-rank" newspaper, only in the Kiev Oblast; Vechernyaya Moskva could at that time be subscribed to only in the city of Moscow, etc.
While certain periodicals enjoying an especially high demand that could not be met were allocated quotas from year to year (with portions of these over-all quotas then assigned to different regions and republics) and while on the whole the Russian journals and newspapers seem to have been treated more generously in those allocations than the Ukrainian (or other non-Russian) periodicals were, the authorities encouraged the growth of the press in all languages of the Soviet Union. Quotas were regarded as something undesirable but necessary in order to allow sharing scarce newsprint among many competing claimants.
Each year, during the customary "subscription campaign," branches of Soyuzpechat and individual employees of the agency were praised for winning new subscribers and scorned for failures in their work, such as a loss or only a small gain in the number of subscribers. There is evidence that the performance of the agency was judged in particular by its success in selling "central" - i.e., Russian-language - periodicals, but in principle the Moscow press was simply to be disseminated along with the other publications.
It went without saying that the party strongly encouraged the widest possible distribution of certain publications (such as Pravda, Politicheskoe samoobrazovanie, etc.), but even this did not prevent a rise in the circulation of other, less consciously promoted periodicals if there was sufficient demand for them on the part of readers.
It was this general policy that was abandoned in 1975. The first indication - known to this writer - that a new policy was in effect appeared in the Ukrainian-language Komsomol daily, Molod Ukrainy, in October 1975. The deputy chief of Ukrainian Soyuzpechat, M. Zdorenko, stated that the subscription campaign of 1976, then in progress, had a novel feature: "The circulations of all newspapers and journals in 1976 must not exceed the levels of 1975."_2_
The official statement on the new policy as it applied to the entire USSR did not, however, appear until a year later, in September 1976, in the aforementioned official journal Rasprostranenie pechati. The issue of this journal for September 1976 contained a report on the all-union conference of union-republic and RSFSR regional head of subscription agencies that was held in Moscow in August. Those participating in the conference included I. I. Simdiankin and V. I. Aristarkhov, CPSU Central Committee instructors; representatives of a number of union republic party central committees, as well as of party kraikoms and obkoms, "in charge of problems of press dissemination"; leading officials of the Ministry of Communications and of the Central Committee of the Trade Union of Communication Workers. The conference was addressed by the deputy minister of communication, D.I. Mangeldin, and by the head of a sector in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, M. N. Yablokov.
In his speech, the chief of GURP, L. D. Barashenkov, urged the heads of administrations and agencies of Soyuzpechat "to fulfill the decisions of the directive organs and the requirements of the order of the Ministry of Communications, USSR, [and] not to repeat the errors of the previous years." There had been instances of "a lack of discipline" in 1975, said Mr. Barashenkov, when certain branches of Soyuzpechat exceeded the circulation set for some periodicals.
He reported that the kollegia of the ministry had adopted a resolution on this subject warning the ministers of communications in the union republics and their counterparts in the RSFSR "of their personal responsibility in carrying out subscription work for newspapers and journals" and drawing their attention to the "inadmissibility" in the future of violations such as those that occurred in 1975.
The same issue of Rasprostranenie pechati also published an abridged version of the speech by Mr. Mangeldin. According to the deputy minister, "Order No. 375" of the USSR Ministry of Communications, dated August 17, 1976, and defining the rules of the subscription campaign for 1977, was based on "a decision of the directive organs."
It was essential that the errors of the previous years would not be repeated: while the circulations of 1976 were kept on the level of 1975 in a majority of the union republics, there were also violations. (The violators were those who had accepted more subscriptions than allowed.) They included Soyuzpechat in Ukraine; Byelorussia; Uzbekistan; the Chuvash, Bashkir and Tatar ASSRs; Krasnodar Krai; and the Smolensk, Omsk and Kursk oblasts. The heads of Soyuzpechat (named by Mr. Mangeldin) in these regions had thus shown "a lack of discipline in the realization of decisions of the directive organs."
Even before the meeting in Moscow in 1976 a conference was held in Kiev at which the Ukrainian republic's distributors of the press heard themselves taken to task for pushing subscriptions for Ukrainian periodicals too energetically. "Circulation discipline" was the expression frequently used. The Kiev meeting was also attended by Mr. Barashenkov, who was accompanied by some of his aides from GURP. Also represented was the propaganda department of the Ukrainian Party Central Committee. Besides Soyuzpechat operatives, criticism was directed at editors of several oblast newspapers for their zeal in trying to win new readers._3_
The new policy was also in effect in 1977, during the "subscription campaign" for 1978, when, according to Mr. Barashenkov, subscriptions for 1978 were to "remain on the level of 1977." The same goal was also prominently featured in 1978, during the campaign for 1979. In a lead editorial titled "An Important Political Campaign," Rasprostranenie pechati referred to the Ministry's "Order No. 355" of August 18, 1978, and explained that in it:
"The terms and manner of conducting the subscriptions for central newspapers and journals (basically without restrictions, with one small exception) are specified, and directions are given that the circulations of local (republican, krai, oblast, city and raion) publications should be retained on the level of 1978."
Subsequently, in its issue for October 1978, the journal Rasprostranenie pechati published an article by M. Shuvayeva titled "We Shall Justify Trust," in which a speech by the USSR minister of communications, N. V. Talyzin, was quoted. Mr. Talyzin made the speech at the pre-subscription campaign meeting in Moscow. In it he paid special attention to "shortcomings in the organization of subscription" during the three years the new policy had been in effect. He singled out Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as especially guilty of violating the rule that subscriptions must not exceed those of the previous year. By contrast, subscriptions for "central" periodicals were to be unlimited, with the exception of those included in "Appendix No. 1."
Another major theme stressed during the campaign of 1979 (but also mentioned during other years) was the need to reduce official subscriptions for offices, enterprises, libraries, etc., that were paid for from those organizations' budgets. The editorial in Rasprostranenie pechati quoted above also stated that in 1979 the volume of this kind of official subscription was to be "no more than 70 percent of the level attained in 1978." (The editorial mentioned "literary-artistic journals" as those that should be eliminated.)
It is probably not unfair to surmise that periodicals in the non-Russian languages were high on the list of those to be discarded in implementing this directive. While for reasons of space a complete survey of those non-Russian periodicals that suffered especially heavy losses after 1975 was omitted from the first part of this essay, an official order for a reduction of subscriptions for libraries, schools, etc., may be an explanation for the decline in subscriptions that was noted by Mr. Kocaoglu. There is evidence that Ukrainian scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities have also suffered enormous losses in recent decades. These are publications typically taken by libraries rather than by individual subscribers.
While there continued to be cases in which local "disseminators of the press" violated "subscription discipline" and were duly castigated in their official journal, Rasprostranenie pechati, by 1980 "the directive organs" had reason to feel satisfied with the effects of their orders. In that year, the circulation of an overwhelming majority of non-Russian newspapers and journals either declined in absolute terms from the levels of 1975 or, if not, grew at a rate slower than that of Russian-language newspapers and journals. (See the third columns of Tables 5 and 6 for evidence.)
The conspicuous expansion of the Russian-language press was stimulated by a gradual abolition of quotas in those few cases where it still applied. Mr. Barashenkov, who besides being the head of GURP is a prolific author (he published at least four major articles in Rasprostranenie pechati in 1979), happily reported that for 1979, in accordance with Order No. 355, the subscription for "local" periodicals had been accepted "up to the level of subscription circulations of 1978"; subscription for central periodicals was conducted without restriction, with very few exceptions (certain literary and popular-science titles).
Several months later, Mr. Barashenkov was even more specific: out of 800 "central" newspapers and journals, 762 titles would be available without any limitations for 1980. At the same time, to avoid any misunderstanding about the real purpose of the formula that the non-Russian periodicals were "to remain at the level of the previous year," he left nothing to the imagination: this formula, he said was not to be interpreted as a requirement "to attain the level of the preceding year." To put it simply, the less you got, the better.
This message was not limited to tactful hints. A number of articles in Rasprostranenie pechati identified subscription violators. In an article characteristically titled "First and Foremost - Problems of Improving the Quality of Subscriptions," an official of GURP, N. Kosivtsova, singled out the agencies of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, the Tatar ASSR and Krasnodar Krai for "serious violations of circulation discipline" that took the form of "accepting subscriptions for literary-artistic journals above the level of 1979."
Mr. Barashenkov also mentioned employees of Soyuzpechat in Byelorussia, Ukraine, and the Smolensk and Ryazan oblasts as being guilty of accepting subscriptions above the planned level, and a provincial official from Dnipropetrovske (Ukrainian SSR) had a similar confession to make for his region, where the policy of not exceeding the previous year's level had in fact been violated.
There were a number of articles in this vein, but one of them in particular deserves special attention because it sheds some light on the puzzling ups and downs in the statistics for the Tatar press (see Tables 5 and 6) as well as on some questions raised by Mr. Kocaoglu. Summing up the results of the campaign of 1981 in the Russian republic, L. Korotchenko, deputy head of the RSFSR GURP, focused on failures in the work of the Tatar ASSR Soyuzpechat. Specifically, he pointed out that the Kazan comrades had accepted too many orders for Chaian, the Tatar journal of humor. (These orders had come from 66 regional agencies of Soyuzpechat, including 22 in the RSFSR alone.) To be precise, they exceeded the level of 1980 - which, as noted above, they were told they had better not attain - by 100,000 copies.
This was to be explained, said Mr. Korotchenko, "by the complete lack of control" over the course of subscription work on the part of the Tatar ASSR Soyuzpechat. Mr. Korotchenko also noted that in a number of cases, editorial offices of periodicals exercised pressure on Soyuzpechat and that publishers' representatives conducted "agitatsiya" in favor of their publications. For example, he said, Kazan utlary, No. 7 for 1980, published an advertisement in which it claimed that the publication was available without restrictions, while in fact "subscription for local publications beyond the boundaries of regions in which they are published should not exceed the level of 1980."_4_
Unlike Mr. Korotchenko the Tatar press distributors and editors apparently did not understand that jokes told in Tatar in Chaian - a journal, after all, of merely autonomous-republic rank were ipso facto less funny than those to be found in Krokodil - a journal of "all-union" importance and thus obviously much wittier. For this reason, the latter was available to all Soviet citizens anywhere in the country, without any restrictions whatsoever, while the reading of the former was to be discreetly and gradually (from year to year) restricted.
Rasprostranenie pechati displayed no inhibition in celebrating subscription triumphs of the Russian press, though. The prolific Mr. Barashenkov proudly reported that "the demand of working people in our country has been fully met for a majority of mass circulation periodicals," including Pravda, Izvestia, Selskaya zhizn, Rabotnitsa, Zdorovie, Krestianka, Partiynaya zhizn, Politicheskoye samoobrazovanie, Pioner, Ogonek, Murzilka and "many others."
Ms. Kosivtsova, Mr. Barashenkov's subordinate as head of the Department of Organization of Subscription at GURP and herself an occasional contributor to Rasprostranenie pechati, thought that the subscription work of 1979 had been carried out in "an organized manner," as evidenced by an increase in the readership of children's and young people's publications, such as Pioner, Yunyi technik and Yunyi naturalist.
She was especially happy that the magazine for pre-schoolers and children in the lower grades, Veselye kartinki, was being received by about 8 million "tots" and that Murzilka, another children's magazine (needless to say, like all the others she mentioned, published in Russian), had 5.8 million subscribers. By 1981, the circulation of Veselye kartinki, no doubt owing to the organizational efforts of Ms. Kosivtsova, had reached 10 million copies per issue. Reporting this, its editor-in-chief noted that in 1956-59, Veselye kartinki had printed 300,000 copies per issue.
In order to gain a proper appreciation of the import of these figures - to which more examples of the extraordinary growth of Russian children's and youth magazines might easily be added - it is useful to bear in mind that the Russians are noted as being among the peoples of the USSR with the lowest birth rates, with families of one child common among them, while the Muslim peoples are noted for having the highest birth rates, with families of five children not atypical among them.
How did the magazines that are published for children in the languages of the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus fare between 1975 and 1980? From the following tabulation, it is clear that either the preferences of a rising number of Muslim children (or of their parents) suddenly shifted in the second half of the 1970s away from their native languages - or that the Barashenkovs and Kosivtsovas have done a really good job in imposing "circulation discipline" on the Central Asians and the Azeris.
It should be possible by now to form an opinion of the meaning of the new course inaugurated with regard to the printed media in 1975 and on its initial impact. After launching a policy of gradual restriction of the non-Russian press and all-out promotion of the Russian press, however, the authorities modified the rules of subscription in several ways. First, beginning in 1979, in the Far East and Siberia and in rural settlements of the Non-Black Earth Zone of RSFSR, all Soviet periodicals were to be available to subscribers. This presumably included both those few Russian journals that still remained under limitations, as well as all the non-Russian journals and newspapers that were restricted everywhere else. (When Soviet sources speak about "all" periodicals, it must always be remembered that "all" means "all those that are included in the all-union subscription catalogue.")
Second, effective in 1983, "the free subscription area" (so to speak) was broadened to include the rural settlements of the entire USSR, which, according to Deputy Minister Mangeldin, made it possible for 105 million Soviet citizens to subscribe to all Soviet periodicals without restrictions. Finally, in the same year it became possible for residents of the union and autonomous republics to take out subscriptions for periodicals in languages of those republics for delivery to persons living outside those republics._5_
Under this latest rule, it has become possible for parents or friends to arrange delivery of periodicals from their ethnic homelands to, say, Uzbek or Byelorussian servicemen in the Soviet Army or to workers in the Non-Black Earth Zone of the RSFSR, who might find it hard to arrange this themselves. This is understandable, considering the lack of special catalogues distributed throughout the USSR that contain descriptions of non-Russian periodicals for the benefit of press disseminators and their customers. Such descriptive catalogues of "central" periodicals are published annually, as are "republican" catalogues for use in their respective republics._6_
The recent decision to liberalize subscription rules for non-Russian publications was no doubt related to the increase in the number of workers sent from non-Russian republics to Russia proper. An article titled "Internationalism in Action" disclosed that in the Smolensk region, farm workers from Byelorussia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Central Asia and Transcaucasia were employed and that for all those people newspapers, magazines and journals in their native languages were available through subscription. The Byelorussian women's magazine, for example, had about 3,000 subscribers in the Smolensk area in 1982.
Also, publications from autonomous republics of the RSFSR were being received in the Smolensk region - among them, over 200 copies of the Tatar journal of humor, Chaian.
The author of the article foresaw that there would be an increase in the number of such publications in 1983 since, beginning in 1983, newspapers of republics in nationality languages could be sent "to any corner of the land." Thus, as of 1984, the non-Russian periodicals had again become freely accessible to subscribers living in rural areas, while they continued to be subject to the rule of "no more than last year" in the cities and towns. This meant that they were not accessible to the majority of the population, which, according to Soviet statistics, is urban.
For 1985 there has been a further change in the rules. Local newspapers - that is, those of republic, oblast and city rank, as well as local radio and TV program guides - remain subject to previous restrictions: they may be subscribed to within the levels attained in 1984. The newspapers of the lowest rank among those considered "local" - that is, raion and city-raion newspapers - are however, now available without restrictions.
Also available without restriction are "almost all local journals." (It should be remembered that current Soviet usage places in the latter category union-republic publications.) Among other changes is the inclusion of teachers and other instructional personnel of vocational schools among the people who may enter subscriptions without restriction. The other category so privileged is long-distance sailors.
Informing his subordinates about all these matters, Mr. Barashenkov did not fail to point out again that "permission to keep circulation at the level of the preceding year must not be understood as an obligatory task for new subscription." In an earlier article, Mr. Barashenkov declared that subscription without any limitations for all newspapers and magazines published in the USSR is a matter for "the long term."
2. What preserving the status quo of 1975 meant for some parts of Ukraine may be seen from the following figures given in Zdorenko's article: subscriptions in the Donetske oblast, he wrote, had already exceeded 200,000 copies for Pravda and had reached 177,000 for Izvestia and 76,000 for Trud, while all the newspapers of the Ukrainian republic ordered in the Donetske oblast amounted to 73,000 copies. [Back to Text]
3. Conforming to the new line, O. K. Melnyk, head of Ukraine's Soyuzpechat, admitted in a newspaper interview that for the coming year (1977) the circulations of Ukrainian republic newspapers and magazines would remain on the level of 1976. [Back to Text]
4. In fact, it should not exceed the level of the preceding year anywhere not only outside the region of publication: here Mr. Korotchenko appears to have interpreted the rules too narrowly, without any basis in the official Moscow pronouncements for doing so. [Back to Text]
5. This is a bit puzzling because according to an official source, all republican periodicals could be subscribed to from any address to be delivered to any other address in the USSR, as long as they were included in the central catalogue. Mangeldin's statement, therefore, means one of two things: either the rules of 1977 were tacitly changed thereafter and then restored in 1982-83, or the latter rule applies also to those republican periodicals that were not included in the "central catalogue." On the latter kind of periodical, the Spravochnik was quite clear: they could not be sent outside the area in which they were published. It cited the example of Vechernyaya Moskva, which could be subscribed to only by "residents of the capital." It should be stressed, however, that beginning in the mid-1950s major periodicals of the union republics and of the ASSRs have been available by subscription throughout the USSR. In 1972 for instance, 111,000 copies of Ukrainian newspapers and some 700,000 copies of Ukrainian journals were being received by subscribers outside Ukraine but in the USSR. [Back to Text]
6. In Rasprostranenie pechati, the complaint was voiced that the last such general catalogue of union- and autonomous-republic periodicals was issued in 1965. Mr. Barashenkov replied that no new catalogue was planned for the foreseeable future. (This type of catalogue should not be confused with the single all-union catalogue that contains basic data about periodicals such as name, frequency, price, etc.) [Back to Text]
Dr. Roman Szporluk is a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
| Title and Language | Circulation (in thousands) | |
1975 |
1980 | |
| Kejerchin, Azeri | 206-215 |
152-156 |
| Funcha, Uzbek | 548-560 |
487-493 |
| Gulkhan, Uzbek | 604-614 |
504-512 |
| Pioner, Turkmen | 40-48 |
41 |
| Pioner, Azeri | 115-119 |
119-120 |
| Baldyrgan, Kazakh | 195-199 |
200-201 |
| Mashial, Tajik | 152-159 |
103-108 |
| Zhash leninchi, Kirghiz | 53-54 |
54-55 |
| Source: Letopis periodicheskikh izdanii SSSR, 1971-1975, Zhurnaly,
Moscow, 1977, and Letopis periodicheskikh izdanii SSSR, 1976-1980, Zhurnaly, Moscow, 1983. Note: Totals rounded to nearest thousand. Titles transcribed from Russian. | ||
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 30, 1984, No. 53, Vol. LII
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