WORLD, Page 62SOVIET UNIONDear Editor: You're Fired. Signed, Mikhail GorbachevFed up with journalists on the right and the left who snipe athis policies, the Kremlin leader calls for a rewrite
Victor Afanasyev and Vladislav Starkov are both journalists,
but they're unlikely ever to share a byline. As editor of the
gray-tinged daily Pravda, Afanasyev, 66, has been less than eager
to rush into print any of the startling revelations or
investigative spadework that has become the hallmark of glasnost.
On the other hand, Starkov, 50, oversees the weekly tabloid
Argumenty i Fakty, whose sharp prose and readers' letters more
often than not dwell on the changes sweeping the country, and
helped make the paper the most widely read in the Soviet Union. Yet
last week both men faced pressures far worse than those posed by
deadlines: Afanasyev was summarily fired from his job and Starkov's
resignation was demanded by high Kremlin officials.
As the official 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 10 million to 5 million.
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.
Starkov's troubles began at a meeting two weeks ago between
Gorbachev and leading media representatives. The Soviet President
has held other such sessions, but this time he did all the talking.
During a two-hour finger-wagging lecture, Gorbachev delivered a
blistering attack on liberal elements of the press, accusing them
of undermining the influence of the Communist Party. He was
particularly thin-skinned about press coverage of the so-called
Interregional Group of Deputies, a liberal caucus in the Supreme
Soviet, whose members voice harsh criticism of Gorbachev's
leadership that makes its way into print. Said Gorbachev: "We are
standing knee deep in an ocean of gasoline, and you throw in
lighted matches."
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 statistics
on the number of Stalin's victims and the country's budget deficit,
as well as admiring profiles of Western millionaires. But a poll
that gave top ratings to Gorbachev's leading critics clearly had
tested, and broken, glasnost's boundaries. It was hardly the type
of news Gorbachev and other leaders wanted to read at a time when
support for the party was visibly eroding and Establishment
candidates faced even more serious challenges in local elections,
scheduled to be held in some republics beginning in December.
Gorbachev may also have been displeased by a pair of letters,
pro and con, about his own performance as Chairman of the Supreme
Soviet. ``Many thanks to M.S. Gorbachev for his self-control, his
modesty, his culture, his ability to listen, to restrain and
persuade several undisciplined Deputies," went one missive. But
another writer castigated Gorbachev for "the way he forces his
opinion on Deputies, his commentaries on many speeches, the
elections without alternative candidates, the pressure shown during
voting . . ."
Last week Starkov was summoned to the Central Committee office
of Vadim Medvedev, the party's chief ideologist, and urged to
resign. Normally such an invitation, which unquestionably reflects
the wishes of Gorbachev, would be an irrefusable offer. But Starkov
so far remains in his job. "Everything here is normal," he said
late last week. "I put my signature on this week's edition, and I
plan to sign the next one too. Mistakes sometimes happen." Starkov
retains the support of his staff, some of whom have threatened to
go out on strike, while worried readers have been pestering
phone-in television shows, inquiring about the fate of the editor.
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.
But other Soviet journalists did not exclude the possibility
that the campaign had been mounted against two men who had
something else in common: they dared to print something that
