American Translators Cheer Pravda Shutdown : Journalism: A firm that translates Soviet publications into English, says the Communist Party newspaper was a declining source of information.

When Soviet hard-liners on Tuesday shut down all the nation’s printing presses--with the exception of those publishing eight Communist Party newspapers--a wave of depression swept over the small office in Columbus, Ohio, where the staff of the Current Digest of the Soviet Press reads and translates Soviet publications.

“It could have been very nasty,” said Robert Ehlers, executive editor of the Digest, a nonprofit corporation that supplies about 1,000 U.S. subscribers--mostly universities and computer databases--with weekly translations of excerpts from close to 100 Soviet newspapers and magazines.

But on Friday--when Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered the Communist presses to halt, shutting down Pravda and other widely read newspapers--there were cheers of approval from Ehlers’ staff of 12.

Though central to the Digest’s operations for its first 40 years of existence, Pravda’s importance as a source of information about the Soviet Union has declined drastically since the advent of glasnost in 1987.

“When the Politburo was the dominant policy-maker and Pravda was its voice, Pravda was absolutely essential,” said Ehlers. “But that was when the Communist Party ran things. Since 1987, there’s been this proliferation of interesting and much more intellectually vital sources.”

In recent months, the space that the Digest allots Pravda and the other Communist organs has declined to about 10% of the weekly 32-page magazine, Ehlers said. And he is certain that any gap created by their absence will be quickly filled by what he believes will be “a real flowering of Soviet journalism” in the aftermath of the failed hard-line coup.

Since its creation in 1949 at Columbia University, the Digest’s purpose has been to mine the Soviet press for any useful information it might reveal about the Soviet Union’s closed society.

With the gradual opening of the Soviet Union and the fading specter of nuclear confrontation over the last year or so, there has been a drop in subscriptions, Ehlers said.

Although it is too soon to tell, however, he expects the renewed interest in America’s former archrival to result in more business.

For now, Ehlers and his staff are happy not to be condemned to translating--and trying to sell--eight dreary Communist Party publications, as would have been their lot for a while had the coup succeeded.

“There was a terrible sense of depression at the thought that all this liveliness, all this disputatiousness in the press, was going to disappear, and we were going to go back to the same old drab stuff,” Ehlers said. “Fortunately, we didn’t have to sit on the edge of our chairs too long to find out what happened.”

Up to now, the magazine has had no formal financial arrangements with the media whose articles it publishes.

“It had always been a high priority for them to spread their views as far and wide as possible,” Ehlers explains. “It was controlled news, after all, and really we were regarded as performing a service.”

If the current trend toward privatization continues, though, the Digest may need to start paying for the information it disseminates.

“But we’re poor enough,” Ehlers said. “If they want to have their material continue to enjoy the exposure it does, they’ll have to accept very modest recompense.”

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