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Perestroika and the End of Government by Journalism | 143 FOUR Perestroika and the End of Government by Journalism The Gorbachev era saw all the contradictions of Soviet history compressed into six chaotic years, and depending on one’s theoretical point of view, the policy decisions of Gorbachev and his allies can be read for the way they embodied a logic that had to lead to the regime’s collapse. One could argue that the managers of the Soviet economy simply stopped needing to worry about socialism, since by the mid-1980s they had become more powerful than the party.1 One could also argue, on the other hand, that the logic was embedded in Gorbachev’s own weakness: he was both seduced and distracted by his adulation in the West, and this led him to carelessly formulate a revolution from above that left the vast majority of Soviet citizens worse off than before.2 Yet another argument is possible, that the logic of the collapse was simply the logic of freedom, proven by the way the Soviet people between 1985 and 1990 rose up to denounce the tyranny that had kept them enslaved for four generations. Every theory, however, is selective; every theory constructs its arguments by leaving things out, and every theory values history above all as the terrain of its own proof. The Foucauldian concept of governmentality draws our attention to the fact that subjects of modern states are formed by a range of actors and institutions, that government goes on in myriad sites outside of official institutions, and that many institutions share in the imperative of discursively constructing the subjectivities of those individuals who form the populations of states. In this sense the Soviet state appears as not radically different from but contiguous with the operation of government in the West. Although in liberal capitalist states this process occurred by working from the assumption that an individual’s free initiative could be molded in 144 | Governing Soviet Journalism ways consonant with the overall aims of democracy and the market, in the Soviet Union the molding of persons was to be directed toward the goal of creating a socialist society. One of the distinctive aspects of the process by which Soviet government had operated was the assumption that that this molding could take the form of an overt pedagogy by which governors would form the governed. One of the roots of the Soviet system was the assumption that a society could govern itself through its citizens’ dedication to creating a socialist society. Such a vision of a different kind of polity was both made possible by, and could only be realized through, the establishment of a new environment of texts and images—print socialism—that would serve as the conduit for a kind of fusion of individual and collective purpose and understanding . Representations of society would be vehicles of instruction and enlightenment; they would foster the splicing of a self into the larger material of society by portraying the project of social transformation as the most attractive and compelling form of life. This project emerged in part from an analysis of and deep experience with the mass press that appeared in the second of half of the 19th century and from the organization of cultural technologies that would enable new forms of subjectivity. The core act of this mode of government was a multitude of private acts of reading; the socialist society imagined at the end of the 19th century was in a sense a political vision enabled by the newspaper. Because this technology of government appeared from within capitalism, a socialist society would necessarily resemble a modern capitalist one, with the difference that citizens would not carry inside of them the priorities and imperatives required by capitalist competition, but rather the goal of collective progress toward a just and prosperous life. The corollary of this intimate connection between socialism and journalism was that any actual realization of socialism would depend on the existence of a cadre of specialists in its representation; socialism would be only as vital as the commitment of journalists to its continued development. The government of Soviet society was thus doubly fragile. First, it depended on the party leadership’s willingness to give journalists a role in this process of government. The leadership had the ability to encourage, distort , resurrect, or suffocate the governmental role of journalism. Second, it depended on the integrity of what I have called the radial diagram of government , which...

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