Izvestia Says a Light-Hearted Goodby to 1988

The newspaper Izvestia said goodby to 1988 with a good measure of humor Sunday, saying it hadn’t been hard to give up one-candidate elections, jammed radio programs and other former staples of Soviet life abolished last year.

The government newspaper toasted many changes made during 1988, including the improvement in supplies at liquor stores, which resulted from the Kremlin’s realization that its crackdown on alcohol had created a massive network of moonshine distillers.

“Let’s raise our glasses to it (1988), because among other things it helped us get rid of the lines for this holiday drink,” Izvestia’s correspondent Yuri Makarov wrote in a rare bit of levity published in the central Soviet press.

The article was headlined “Congratulations on the Old Year.”

Reviewing the events of 1988, Izvestia said goodby to West German daredevil pilot Mathias Rust, who was allowed to return home in August after serving 14 months of a four-year sentence for making an unauthorized landing in Red Square.

‘Madcap Inspector’

“ Auf wiedersehen Mathias Rust, madcap inspector of our anti-aircraft defenses,” Izvestia said.

The newspaper saluted the dramatic changes that took place in the Soviet Union last year as the country pursued Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika program of political and economic reform and his glasnost policy of openness.

Many government bureaucrats were sent to work in industry as ministries were slashed or reduced, and multi-candidate elections to a new two-tiered Parliament were scheduled for 1989 as part of sweeping constitutional changes.

“Farewell to the exciting election of one deputy from one candidate,” Izvestia said.

“We bade farewell to some officials who ruled our country. . . . We bade farewell to a number of ministries and branches despite their desire to stay on. How invincible and compulsory they seemed to be for many years!”

Of the decision to stop jamming foreign radio broadcasts, Izvestia said tongue-in-cheek that it was difficult to abandon the belief that millions of dollars must be spent “to save our ears from the misinformation of foreign radios.”

Izvestia praised another new direction of glasnost taken in 1988--the end to the intentional distortion of maps.

“It was also difficult for us to abandon the conviction that maps of our country are issued only to mislead foreign spies,” the paper said.

Now better maps are being issued “and a precise map of Moscow can be bought not just in London.”

Places and institutions re-named after Leonid I. Brezhnev and Konstantin U. Chernenko, former Soviet leaders now officially linked with stagnation, resumed their old names last year--another change praised by Izvestia.

“We departed from the city of Brezhnev with a light heart,” the newspaper said. The old name of the city on the Volga, Naberezhniye Chelny, was restored last January.

“Goodby, 1988. You were a good year. But at the same time you were a difficult year, and frankly speaking, it is a good thing that you are leaving,” Izvestia said.