Glasnost: Daylight Skirmish

The letter published in the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia a few days ago purportedly came from a librarian in the Crimea who complained that public libraries in major cities have been told to get rid of history and economics books published before March, 1985, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power. The writer asked whether this sweeping literary purge wasn’t a contradiction of Gorbachev’s policy of fostering more openness and freer discussion. The Culture Ministry, which oversees libraries and which is, of course, part of the same government that Izvestia represents, offered a quick and indignant response. Not only was the charge untrue, the ministry said, but the Crimean library system does not employ any “I. Zavgorodnyaya”--the name signed to the letter. Izvestia’s publication of the letter constituted “an incomprehensible mistake.”

Well, mistakes do happen, even in the best run of newspapers and governments, but if this really was a mistake it took a lot of doing for it to see the light of day.

For one thing, Izvestia admits that it had in hand the Culture Ministry’s denial before it ran the critical letter, but because of alleged space limitations it failed to publish the refutation. It further acknowledges that, contrary to standing practice, its 75-person staff of letter readers and verifiers made no effort to get in touch with or even confirm the existence of “I. Zavgorodnyaya” before the letter was printed. It’s hard to believe that these lapses were the product of oversight or accident. What they seem strongly to suggest is that someone was determined to have Izvestia publish the charge that, true or not, could only embarrass Gorbachev and his policies.

So what’s going on here? What seems to be going on is another skirmish in the continuing guerrilla war between those who want to press ahead with political, economic and cultural reforms and those who fear the consequences of loosening the Communist Party’s traditional controls over Soviet life. Gorbachev, confronting economic stagnation and public cynicism, sees the practical value of allowing average Russians the chance for somewhat freer discussion, including access to information once forbidden or heavily sanitized. This alarms party conservatives; among other things, they see it as threatening one of the major means by which they retain their monopoly on power. They can readily see the value to their side of trying to discredit Gorbachev with public implications that he is a hypocrite who, even as he says that he believes in greater intellectual freedom, imposes new censorship on libraries.

Here is a case, though, where Gorbachev’s enemies may not be too wide of the mark. Denials notwithstanding, it’s quite plausible that library shelves are being quietly stripped of some pre- glasnost books, not necessarily for cynical or sinister reasons but because those books cheat their readers by not dealing accurately or completely with the issues that they address. Something along these lines has already happened, and quite overtly, with secondary-school history textbooks, which were withdrawn a few months ago because the versions of events that they gave students were recognized as being less than full and factual.

What conservatives may gleefully point to as censorship may instead be only an overdue revisionism. Texts that are rewritten to depict events with greater honesty, books that reveal at least some of what had long been officially suppressed or denied or distorted, can only be welcomed as contributing to a more open intellectual climate.It has been apparent since the start of glasnost that openness has its entrenched enemies. Sometimes they fight in the shadows. Sometimes they emerge into the daylight, using the pages of Izvestia.