Word: afanasyev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...voice of the Communist Party, Pravda could hardly avoid addressing President Mikhail Gorbachev's ambitious agenda. But the paper did so unevenly, sometimes approving changes and at other times reflecting the views of the Politburo's conservative members. As for investigative journalism that turned up scandals from the past, Afanasyev gradually grew tired of exhumed skeletons. "To dig around in the dirty linen of our history," he told the daily Sovetskaya Rossiya in September, "merely serves to lead people away from the solution of our contemporary problems...
...Afanasyev suffered a nasty embarrassment last month, when Pravda reprinted a lurid dispatch from an Italian newspaper claiming that reformist Supreme Soviet Deputy Boris Yeltsin boozed and shopped his way through a tour of the U.S. The paper was later forced to publish an apology, even though tapes subsequently broadcast over Soviet television appeared to show Yeltsin at least mildly intoxicated. But Afanasyev's most serious failure was one that has also undone many an editor in the West: falling circulation. Over the past four years, as Soviet news buffs switched to livelier journalistic fare, Pravda's readership slipped from...
...Afanasyev was dismissed under the guise of requesting a "transfer to scientific work." Named as his replacement was Ivan Frolov, 60, by no coincidence a close Gorbachev ally. Frolov has held academic and journalistic posts, in 1986 and 1987 as editor of the ideological journal Kommunist. His stewardship of that once stiffly orthodox publication was marked by the introduction of new voices, including some that have been prominent in the perestroika movement...
Gorbachev singled out an unscientific poll rating the popularity of leading Supreme Soviet Deputies that had appeared two weeks ago in Argumenty i Fakty. The four top scorers, based on 15,000 pieces of reader mail, were physicist Andrei Sakharov, economist Gavril Popov, Yeltsin and historian Yuri Afanasyev (no kin to Victor) -- every one a member of the Interregional Group A&F, which was founded by Starkov in 1978. It has grown to the astonishing circulation of 26 million, specializes in service features and has published other reader polls. It has thrived on controversy in the past, publishing glasnost-enlightened...
Gorbachev may have targeted Starkov as a sop to conservatives, then moved against his real target: Afanasyev. Said Vitali Korotich, editor in chief of the liberal weekly Ogonyok: "Gorbachev is an experienced politician who does things in combinations." Another element in this combination may be a new press law under consideration by the Supreme Soviet. The measure, which has been welcomed by liberals, purports to abolish censorship and provides for creation of independent publications with none of the organizational sponsorship now required...