Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (review)

Thomas Wolfe sets out to describe the "central place of journalism within the Soviet system" from a "broadly interdisciplinary viewpoint of the cultural study of mass mediated communications" (p. 3). His aim is not to write another history of Soviet/Russian journalism or to advance our understanding of the Soviet public's (more accurately, publics') reception of media or media effects. The "Socialist Person" in the book's subtitle is not a self-standing newspaper reader, but a construct of the features or characteristics of the model of an undifferentiated public targeted by newspapers. This construct changes in the course of major revisions of the model (if not modal) citizen.

Wolfe's study begins in the 1920s and ends roughly with the demise of the Soviet Union. His Foucauldian point de départ involves treating the press (the book is almost wholly about newspapers) as an instrumentality and extension of government and thus of a model of personhood consonant with the government's role. This is a study "living" almost entirely within the world of newspaper doctrines and changing concepts of socialization of the citizenry, for that, according to Wolfe, is the newspapers' role—to serve first and foremost as teachers. His descriptions of the different stages and forms of socialization, drawn from press examples and some interviews, constitute the bulk of the text. One chapter, however, uses archives from the Soviet Communist Party's Propaganda Department during the era of Leonid Brezhnev and provides insight into how party officials saw the boundaries of journalism. The Propaganda Department did not have the same clout as the two Politburo and Secretariat members who oversaw ideology, and I would recommend including their discourse, if possible. Until Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the two members was unmistakably senior (e.g., Mikhail Suslov, for many years), and when Gorbachev deliberately evened their power he set the stage for internal cracks in party governance. Wolfe's book is situated within the world of texts published during the main stage of Soviet development, when unified purpose and collectivity were stressed, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the construct of a unified society fragmented with the introduction of the market.

The policy environment, including economic, social, political, and military issues as well as purges, wars, and low-intensity conflict such as the events of the Hungarian uprising, the crushing of the Prague Spring, and the invasion of Afghanistan are all extraneous to Wolfe's intentions. Wolfe alludes to the capitalist world in only two respects: first, he notes that revelations of capitalism's supposedly exploitative nature became part of the mission of the Soviet newspaper; and second, he observes that post-Soviet society and its market features exist in a global system permeated by capitalism.

This, then, is a narrow slice of a study, venturing into neither the reading public itself nor power relations between the press and the highest officials.

Perhaps Wolfe's most interesting story is his retelling of the problem of socialist realism, as it was called years later. He suggests that in the 1920s Soviet newspapers began to reflect the new doctrine that society was made up not of discrete, competitive subgroups but of a unified whole. The newspapers, he argues, had to play their role in projecting the desired harmonious collective. As a result, news was redefined from the fresh and recent to the socialist realist—composed of the "socialist" (which was predicted by "scientific socialism" to emerge as the true essence of society) and the "realist" (which could be recognized by everyone, even untrained eyes, as solid and familiar, as opposed to mystical, formalist, modernist, and symbolist conceptions). Thus the front page might highlight an excellent harvest, new production techniques, or stores overflowing with shiny fruits and vegetables, when the facts of everyday life showed quite the opposite. The front page was not mere fantasy but real news; it was real that the telos of what seems to be idealized...