‘Most Improved’

The chefs of glasnost have served up quite a spread at this year’s Moscow Book Fair. Now that every major Soviet event--and the book fair is a big deal in Moscow--is seen as a test for General Secretary Mikahil S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, the book fair will get high marks for improvement over past efforts. Reports are that unprecedented numbers of previously banned books are now on display. Members of the international publishing community and Soviet citizens at large can thumb through books by Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova--writers whose names, let alone works, were once stricken from public record. And topics once considered beyond the limits of political tolerance, like AIDS, are on open display. All in all, Moscow’s 1987 Book Fair looks more like a real book fair than has any other Soviet effort in recent memory.

But the fair still has a long way to go. Though we can label this book fair “most improved,” there was, and still is, ample room for improvement. Censorship disgraced previous Moscow Book Fairs. This year the censor’s scalpel leaves a smaller but equally ugly scar on the biennial event. Indiscriminate censorship now is discreet. In this, critics see encouraging signs from the Soviet publishing Establishment. But some books still are either summarily seized on arrival or rejected out of hand on submission. The works likely wind up on the censor’s sagging bookshelves.

This time Bill Cosby has made it to Moscow as an author, as have E. L. Doctorow and Dr. Suess. And increasing numbers of Soviet works are finally returning from literary exile. Yet there is a sad irony in all this. Few Soviets go to the book fair, or even to their local bookstore, to buy the Soviet books that they want most to read. Bookstore title selection is improving, but Soviets routinely escape the censor by turning to the underground press, and to book smugglers, to read about their country’s shrouded past. Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago,” for example, is printed in the West in a miniaturized version expressly for smuggling.

Soviets do, however, flock to the book fair to help satisfy their voracious appetites for foreign culture. Its exhibits present rare access to foreign societies that the Soviets cannot explore through travel or the media. Happily, their expectations are better met this year. So, to some extent, the Soviets seem more comfortable in showing the outside world to their citizens. We await the day when they are equally at ease with their own society.