An As-Is View of Soviet Life

In 1975, it was a “City Without Fear.” Now it’s a “Big City With Big Problems.”

In both cases, the city is Moscow, as seen from the journalistic viewpoint of Soviet Life magazine. The difference is that 15 years after its last Moscow issue, the magazine has taken off its rose-colored glasses.

“Our task has always been to present the Soviet Union and its people to the American people,” Sergei F. Ivanko, the Washington-based editor of the magazine said while in Los Angeles recently for a Volunteers of America function. “Now that perestroika and glasnost are in full swing, it is much easier for us to present life in the Soviet Union as it is.”

So Moscow, once the “model communist city,” where naughty teen-agers were the biggest crime threat, is now portrayed as an overcrowded, “increasingly discontent” megalopolis where people line up for hours to buy food.

In other recent issues, the magazine has taken on the problem of alcoholism in the Soviet Union, and--in a piece that may offer a glimpse of a new and improved post- glasnost propaganda--the possibility of a convertible ruble, which will make foreign trade easier.

These days no one in the Kremlin is likely to say nyet to a topic, and the magazine may even tackle the crisis in Lithuania soon, said Ivanko, a scholar of American literature, with a special interest in Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck and James Fenimore Cooper.

Journalistic issues aside, the magazine also has become Westernized stylistically and is gradually overcoming its traditionally frumpish demeanor.

To improve their product, Soviet Life editors have been carefully examining American publications. The current product is a bland mix of People magazine style features, sociopolitical articles vaguely reminiscent of the Washingtonian and increasingly strong color art.

Not everyone is pleased with the changes, though, and at least a few American readers have written to complain. “They tell us,” says Ivanko, “that we have become too bourgeois, that we should be more revolutionary.”

REQUIRED READING:

* At long last, ubiquitous pundit Michael Kinsley joins Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Harvard Prof. Douglas Ginsberg and so many other public figures in admitting that he smoked marijuana back in less Draconian times. What his sarcastic confession, in the April 30 New Republic, really exposes, though, is the hypocrisy behind the chorus now sniveling that its pot smoking was a “deeply regretted, youthful indiscretion.”

“Where’s the line between youthful indiscretion and adult depravity?” he wonders. And what has really changed since 20 years ago, except for the fact that those who were breaking the law then are making the laws now?”

* Is narcissism, as many shrinks think, “the classic psychological disturbance of our age?” Probably. And what better place than Glamour for an airhead defense of me-ism? Right? Nope. In the April issue of this makeup magazine, writer Jeanne Marie Laskas offers a bright, hilarious look at the subject. For instance, of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the therapist’s bible) she writes: “This book is like chocolate, or a steamy romance novel. You can’t put it down. You are in it, everywhere. You are THE MAIN CHARACTER.”

* For years, Sunset magazine (recently purchased by TimeWarner) has been trying to wean Westerners of their water addiction. The April issue contains the Sunset Water Watch 90 guide and excellent articles on drought resistant gardening.

* It goes without saying that the American Spectator would be suspicious of someone who proposed that President Ronald Reagan’s entire Star Wars budget be spent, instead, on solving city traffic problems. But is Larry Agran really “The Evil Emperor of Irvine, Calif.” and “California’s Worst Mayor?” Not only that, says the May Spectator, he’s also “a Jane Fonda in Tom Hayden Clothing.” Read around the invective in this interesting article and make up your own mind.

* Hospitals can be dangerous to your health, as all too many of the 20 million Americans who paid $260 billion to spend an average of 7.2 days in hospitals last year can attest. The April 30 U.S. News and World Report ranks the country’s best hospitals, as selected for specialties by a large sampling of medical specialists, who considered such criteria as technological excellence and nursing care. UCLA Medical Center was the only Southern California institution to make the Top 10--in cancer, gastroenterology, neurology, ophthalmology, rheumatology, and urology. Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles ranked in the top 57 for its pediatric care.

* Dave Barry likes to make fun of things: light beer, “President George Herbert Walker Armoire Vestibule Sputumhead Bush IV,” airlines (“under deregulation, anyone who can produce two forms of identification is allowed to own an airline”) and newspapers that edit the humor out of his Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated column (this one does it by not running it at all). In the May Playboy interview, Barry runs amusingly amok, gently skewering everything from remodeling contractors, to his own sad career as an apartment building landlord: “There were only seven apartments, but there were, like, 70 toilets, and every one of them had an inappropriate object shoved down it by a tenant.”

SHREDDER FODDER:

In the ‘70s, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation fame bragged that he could teach his acolytes to fly. Now his organization is selling something called the “Ayurvedic approach to healing.” It may work. But there’s not a shred of serious investigation into those claims in a long, subtly gullible article in the current In Health--a magazine with a reputation for solid journalism.