Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin by Thomas C. s> Wolfe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I65 Mawdsley'sconclusion is, in essence, that the Soviet victorywas inevitable. Germany, he says, 'could not have won the war' (p. I88). Operation Barbarossawas fatally flawed, the entire concept resting on wildly overoptimistic assessments of Soviet weakness. For this, as for later strategic errors, Mawdsley blames the German generals every bit as much as Adolf Hitler. They were partners in crime, destroyed by their own arrogance. Germany lacked the resources to defeat the USSR in one quick campaign in I94I. Thereafter, the conflict became a war of attrition.Had it just been a case of Germany versus the USSR, the former might have prevailed. But from 1942 onwards, Germany was increasinglyfightinga two-frontwar, which it simply lacked the industrialcapacity to win. Even if war production had been much more efficientlymanaged, Germany could never have matched the output of the USSR, USA and British Empire combined. Mawdsley argues this case most effectively,and putting the war in the East in its broadercontext in this manner is surely the correct approach. If Mawdsley is quite rightly tough on the German high command, he is slightlymore forgivingof the Soviet leadership,despitethe enormousblunders made by Stalin and others in I94I and 1942. The difference is that the Soviets learntfrom their mistakes,and had the good fortuneto have the geographical space and industrialresourcesto gain the time to do so. The Germansdid not have that luxury. Once it became clear that their cause had taken a wrong turn, the allianceagainstthem was too strongfor correctiveaction to have any hope of success. There is little in Thunder in theEastwhich will surprise;the story is too well known, the path too well trodden, for anythingstartlinglynew to emerge. But the conclusionswill undoubtedlyprovoke some discussion,and the book succeeds admirablyin achieving its aim of presenting the history of the Eastern Front in one volume. For this, Evan Mawdsley is to be congratulated. School ofPolitical Studies P. F. ROBINSON University of Ottawa Wolfe, Thomas C. Governing Soviet Journalism: ThePressandtheSocialist Person after Stalin.Indiana UniversityPress,Bloomington and Indianapolis,2005. xxi + 240 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography.Index. $39.95. THOMAS WOLFE sets himself the task of trying to examine how Communism moved to post-Communism in terms of practices of informationrather than in terms of ideas or ideologies. He offers a historical overview of the Soviet press, looks at the Soviet press in the post-Stalin period, surveys the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods and from there moves on to Gorbachev, perestroikaand glasnost'. Governing Soviet Journalism contains detailed analysis of the ideas of Anatolii Agranovskii, an Izvestiiaessayist, Aleksei Adzhubei, formereditor-in-chiefof Izvestiia and the thoughts of AleksandrChakovskiion the state of the Soviet media and why it was losing the battle of ideas. The authorhas made good use of archivalmaterialand publishedsources,offering a very detailed picture of Soviet journalism, especially from the I96os onwards. i66 SEER, 85, I, 2007 The detailed analysisof the contributionsmade by Agranovskiiet al. tends to obscure more fundamentalquestions about the nature of the Soviet state. We might startwith the title. Was Sovietjournalismgoverned?Sovietjournalistswere trusted,ideologicalfunctionarieswho operatedwithin the framework of the latest party line on any given matter. Wolfe makes much of what he regards as Agranovskii'sand Adzhubei's contributions to Soviet journalism which, whateverthey had to say, stillhad to pass musterwith the censors.The longevity of the Soviet censorship from Lenin's banning of the free press in 1917 to 1990 makesa mockeryof the notionthat Sovietjournalismwas 'governed'. Like all Soviet institutions it was ruthlessly controlled by a centralized bureaucracy. An idea, one that gathereda lot of supportersfrom the mid-ig6os onwards, was that the Soviet Union and the Western liberal democracies and their institutions were more or less the same. Wolfe seems to accept thispremise. Of the Soviet press he notes: 'People read papers in the metro, on park benches, at home after dinner; they looked in papers for weather reports and sportsscores. In other words, the press and the practice of its production appearbroadlycomparableto the Westernpressin that it fit into the rhythms of life of any "typical"20th-centuryindustrializedsociety'(p.5). Soviet citizens surelydid read papers in the sortsof places in which they are commonly read in the West and looked for the sortsof things that Western readerswished...