Word: ogonyok
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...drug addiction, prostitution and youth gangs are unveiling the darker side of Soviet society. Disasters such as mine accidents, floods and train crashes, once ignored by the press, are now routinely covered. "We are working on enthusiasm and adrenaline," says Dmitri Biryukov, 32, foreign editor of the weekly Ogonyok (Little Flame...
...gray and stilted Izvestia. The official government newspaper is selling 8 million copies a day, up from 6.7 million two years ago, thanks to its transformation under Editor Ivan Laptev into a lively collage of reporting and commentary. "For Soviet readers, Izvestia is the most interesting newspaper around," says Ogonyok's Biryukov. In early August the paper published an interview with a military officer whose duty it is to push the launch button at a nuclear missile center. Never before had a Soviet publication reported in such detail on a missile site and the men who operate...
...capital is the provocative Moscow News, which was the first Soviet publication to run the full story of Mathias Rust's Red Square landing. Readers sometimes buy the paper, which is primarily intended for foreigners, for ten to 20 times the official cost of 10 kopecks (16 cents). Ogonyok, which two years ago was largely unread, now sells out all 1.5 million issues every week. Under the editorship of Vitaly Korotich, the magazine has published a 1939 testament from an exiled Bolshevik denouncing Stalin as "the real enemy of the nation, and the organizer of famine and fake trials...
...policy has also led to squabbles within the official press. Last month, for example, Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) attacked Ogonyok and Sovietskaya Kultura (Soviet Culture) for their liberal leanings. The two journals shot back with equally harsh words for Molodaya Gvardiya's out-of-date views. Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, intervened with a commentary calling the articles "rude" and a warning that scores should not be settled in print...
Suddenly Soviet television began broadcasting frank discussions of social and economic problems. Press articles appeared on such subjects as drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. The picture magazine Ogonyok and the multilanguage weekly Moscow News started printing hard-hitting stories about corrupt officials, inefficient factories and alienated youth. Ogonyok, for example, has published such long-banned writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Osip Mandelstam. Moscow News has exposed police harassment of a journalist seeking to document shoddy construction of a power plant. Just how daring the press became is illustrated by a joke making the rounds in Moscow. A pensioner calls...