An Unexpected Outbreak of Candor

The Soviet government's astonishingly blunt report on Chernobyl is but one of a number of examples of Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness. In recent months Soviet officials and journalists have been discussing the difficulties and shortcomings of their society with unprecedented candor, and newspaper and magazine editors have been publishing more and more critical letters from readers.

A spate of such letters has apparently influenced decisions to abandon a project to reverse the course of several rivers in the northern part of the country and to scale back a widely criticized plan for a war memorial. The huge monument, if built, would have obliterated the top of the Poklannaya Hill, which gives visitors a panoramic view of Moscow from the west. The projected war memorial was denounced by letter writers as "shameful," "monstrous" and an example of "gigantomania." Such public censure of projects already approved by the top leadership would never have been tolerated under previous Soviet regimes. But the Kremlin seemingly agreed with at least some of the criticism, and is now holding a competition for a new design for the monument.

More surprising still was an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta by Vladimir Tsvetov, a Soviet television commentator and former Tokyo correspondent. Tsvetov criticized the Soviet media's coverage of capitalist countries, which are almost always depicted as hotbeds of strikes, protests, poverty and police violence, as if those countries were on the verge of the proletarian revolutions that Karl Marx predicted 136 years ago. Privately, some Soviet officials are critical of -- and even embarrassed by -- that kind of coverage, and would like to see more discussion of the positive aspects of the capitalist world, especially advances in science and technology. Other officials are concerned that the Soviet public has become jaded with the usual hackneyed coverage, does not believe it and is losing interest in watching news reports or reading them. In his article, Tsvetov told of the intense curiosity of Soviet audiences in asking him what Japan and its people were really like. He confessed that in his own reporting from Tokyo, a one-hour work stoppage on a suburban rail line would become "a class battle," while a concert by a group of Soviet amateur musicians would be portrayed as a "triumph of Soviet art that shook Japan." Tsvetov concluded by calling on Soviet journalists to rid themselves of the "stereotyped mentality that forces them to describe news events only in black or white." He urged his colleagues to rely more on their audience's ability "to distinguish between good and bad."

The new candor goes well beyond the public media. Earlier this year Boris Yeltsin, the Gorbachev-appointed party boss for Moscow, surprised a meeting of propagandists with a blistering denunciation of the past administration of the city. Yeltsin described Moscow's well-known but seldom mentioned urban woes in painful detail. A million Muscovites still live in communal apartments where they share cooking and toilet facilities with other families, Yeltsin pointed out, while in the past decade the city has slipped from second place in the Soviet Union to 58th in new-housing construction. Drunkenness, he continued, has not diminished as a problem but has simply been driven indoors by Gorbachev's antidrinking campaign, while drug abuse is "widespread" and thievery in retail stores is rife. "We dig and dig," he reportedly said, "and still we don't get to the bottom of the filthy well." Though Yeltsin ruffled some party feathers, his frank speech seemed a harbinger of more glasnost to come.