Publicity and Media under Communism and After: The Destruction of Privacy

AT first glance, it may seem oddly inappropriate that someone from today’s Ukraine would discuss its media in terms of the postcommunist destruction of privacy rather than by examining violations of freedom of speech. The “destruction of privacy” naturally implies the encroachment of what was once dubbed the “public sphere” on the formerly “private” territories, and of all the postcommunist European states (with the understandable exception of totalitarian Belarus), Ukraine has become notoriously known for just the opposite: the state’s brutal attempts to silence the sphere of public discussion wherever it interferes with the private interests of those in power. One may say that such attempts illustrate the durability of the “good old Soviet” ways of keeping things secret. Yet, I will try to show that, paradoxically enough, it is precisely the profound current political crisis in Ukraine, unleashed by the discovery in late 2000 of the headless corpse of Internet journalist Heorhij Gongadze, that can help us reveal the transformations in the very structure of publicity and privacy that have occurred since the collapse of communism. I will approach the problem both as an intellectual, professionally destined to hanker at the essence of things seen through accidents , and as one of contemporary Ukraine’s public figures whose past five years of life have, to a considerable extent, been spent in SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) Publicity and Media under Communism and After: The Destruction of Privacy BY OKSANA ZABUZHKO© 2002 by Oksana Zabuzhko. All rights reserved. the media spotlight and who, therefore, has had a chance to learn from her own personal experience that which may still call for a thorough scholarly study. My most recent experience is worth some scrutiny. On the same day I received the invitation to deliver this paper, I attended a press conference held by a public initiative group announcing “The Loser of the Year” awards (the alternative to the “Man of the Year” awards, the pompous and sumptuous “royal court” ceremony celebrating mainly pro-presidentially oriented, high-ranking officials, businessmen, and media people). The group had chosen President Leonid Kuchma as “Linguist of the Year” (“for the contribution he has made to Ukrainian public discourse,” the ironic formula referring to the tapes on which Kuchma was allegedly heard discussing the aforementioned journalist and using vulgar language), and I was asked to present the award. The room was overcrowded, the audience amused and agitated, and many (though not all) private television stations and newspapers reported the event. What stunned me, however, was something else. None of the journalists at the press conference raised the question that I was specifically prepared to answer: the authenticity of the notorious tapes tacitly taken as the main source of the president’s “innovative” discourse. There can be only one reason why this did not happen: whatever the judicial aspects of “tapegate ” may be, the language of the person on the tapes perfectly fits the president’s personality as it had been gradually revealed to the public on radio and television. Foul words notwithstanding, it was first and foremost the speaker’s personality, or, more precisely , the characteristic individual mixture of the vulgar and boorish old Soviet apparatchik’s ways with the semicriminal manners of the post-Soviet nouveau riche, that sounded so instantly recognizable that there could hardly have been any doubt concerning the speaker’s identity. Here, I believe, lies the mark that separates us from our communist past. If we rewind the tape of history some 15 years back (to the days before perestroika), we must admit that, whatever the 36 SOCIAL RESEARCH attitudes of the public toward the ruling elite might have been, it was altogether impossible to imagine them conversing in private. The true revolution launched by Gorbachev (a revolution still underestimated, and of which he himself certainly was not aware) consisted of the fact that he was the first communist leader in decades who had chosen to reveal himself to the public as a private person: a Soviet leader with a wife in flesh and blood who gave interviews to the press (however censored!) and met people and argued in public with his “uncensored” opponents; performing , on the...