Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter
Issue 33-34
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law November, 1996
Glasnost and Soviet Television
Book Review
Glasnost and Soviet Television is a little classic about
the history of state and press, particularly in the period leading up to
the breakup of the Soviet Union. Reino Passilinna, formerly a vice
president of the EBU, director-general of the Finnish Broadcasting Company
and now a European Parliamentarian, has taken advantage of numerous trips
to Moscow, an empathy with the society, and close ties to significant observers
of the shift in policy during the relevant years.
Quite suitably, the book opens with a complex linguistic
and etymological interpretation of the term. Glasnost is a cabinet
for a collection of useful concepts: “to make something public,” or in
Habermasian terms, “open to public discussion and control.” The connection
between glasnost and perestroika is made by Paasilinna as follows: “glasnost
is the sine qua non of society’s democratization, while perestroika—the
qualitative reconstruction and reform of the state—is a strategic goal.”
Glasnost not only means access to information, it implies a society that
actively uses that information and does so to have an impact on decision-making.
It is a hallmark of political belief, of commitment
to the Socialist cause, that there ever was the symbiotic relationship
between people, Party and state that glasnost, in its purest form, embodied,
not only as a concept, but as an operative philosophy of the press.
Paasilinna traces the ups and downs of adherence to glasnost, but certainly
accepts that it had significance both in terms of openness and in terms
of notion of control.
The book is organized in two parts. Part I, Glasnost
and the Soviet Mass Media, provides a useful history, complementing, though
certainly not replacing Brian McNair’s fine Glasnost, Perestroika, and
the Soviet Media (1991) or John Murray’s The Russian Press From Brezhnev
to Yeltsin: Behind the Paper Curtain (1994). Like them, she provides
important insight on Lenin’s particular understanding of the relationship
of the state to the press. Glasnost has its idealistic side: complete
and truthful coverage of all areas of life and for all (with the Party)
determining, as it turns out, what constitutes objective truth; a comparison
of the results of work from all sectors (with, again, the Party determining
what comparisons should reflect what results); and most important, and
perhaps most questionable, glasnost “as a continuous means of control by
those in the press of the work of the administration.” This first
part is a rapid survey, through the 20th Party Congress, the Khrushchev
Era and the Brezhnev years. It includes a discussion of the influence
of the Communist Party in controlling information and the measures taken
to restrict glasnost.
Part II focuses on television in Soviet era. It
is a useful history, helpful as a backdrop to the rapid developments that
have occurred since 1991. It is essential to understand the role
of Central Television, of Gostelradio, and of the very active role that
President Gorbachev played in reorganizing and shaping the institutions
that were so important in altering public opinion.
My own feeling, reading both Paasalinna and McNair is
that Russian television is a s much a continuation of Soviet television
as it is a rupture from it. Only with a sense of history can one
understand expectations of government officials as to the way in which
truth or history should be fashioned to match the sense of objectivity
that the nomenklatura itself has of events. Only with a knowledge
of the relationship of central television to the nationality issue can
one understand the present disputes over Russian television’s importance
to the “near abroad” and its continuing imperial role.
Much of the rhetoric of modification, privatization,
introduction of capital and free enterprise still has the ring and reminder
of the past. Glasnost, in the Soviet times, sought truth and openness.
A free press along Western lines, with its marketplace of ideas, also is
supposed, through openness, to produce truth. Truth in the socialist
perspective is scientifically and objectively to be ascertainable.
Truth, at least in the First Amendment sense, is supposed to be the outcome
of the contest of the argument. Of course, the Western truth may
be different from the Socialist truth, but what is common is the idea that
some organization of press and its relationship to society produces it.
While it has not been so explicit, there is another
element of similarity. A free press is presumed to be of the party
of freedom; part of the infrastructure to support a political system which
is democratic along Western lines. It is difficult to state explicitly
that a free press is in place precisely to support the continuation of
a system in which its very independence is guaranteed; but one can argue
that the efforts by the United States, the United Kingdom and others to
foster a free press in Russia and in other post-Soviet societies is based
on this assumption. And, certainly, in the wake of the 1996 Presidential
elections, it could be said that the free press acted in the anticipated
way and became an advocate for continued reform.
It is in that narrow sense, and only in that narrow
sense that the emerging structure of independence in the press has a similarity
to the role of the Party press in the ancien regime, namely as a supporter
of a method of government, of a model of society. The independent
press of today, by definition, is not subject to the harsh punishments
and demeaning rewards of old adherence, but it is to be a champion of a
system.
Another carryover, of course, is that the nature of
openness, the content of reflection—so important, as Paasalinna shows,
to glasnost in the Soviet era (early or late) is reflected in the deliberate
concern over content by government officials today. The War in Chechnya,
the state of Yeltsin’s health, accounts of General Lebed—all these have
been areas where government influence on what counts as truth has been
quite marked.
What’s remarkable to me, reading the book, is the absence
of law in regulating the relationship between government and the press.
Of course this should not be worthy of remark, since the media was, as
Paasilinna demonstrates, always an instrument of the Party, not something
which was supposed to be in any way independent, in the sense that the
zone of independence would be protected by legal institutions.
Media policy was not the prescription of written policy
that could be usefully appealed to with some forum where, in an objective
way, disputes could be resolved. Of course, media policy was what
existed at the end of a telephone, if not at the end of a gun, or the end
of a job or the end of exile. Of course, Gorbachev’s policies were
“better” than those of many of his predecessors, but they were his policy,
not law, not law in the sense that they could be separated from the person,
immune from corruption, protected by institutions with a commitment to
neutrality.
But reading Paasilinna, the question is not whether
there has been substantial change, but how to characterize it, how permanent
is, whether institutions have altered or just practices, whether law—not
the wishes of the government—have binding, or something like binding, sway.
Monroe E. Price
Professor of Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
New York, New York