3 - Glasnost' and public life

Summary

Secrecy is a very well-established Russian tradition. In Tsarist times not only military but also quite harmless social information was withheld from the population at large, and especially from foreigners. The Bolsheviks briefly abolished secret diplomacy and other customs of the past when they came to power, and indeed there was consternation in Allied capitals when they published the annexationist secret treaties on which the conduct of the war had been based. Older practices, however, soon reasserted themselves, and for many Western students of Soviet affairs control over the flow of information came to represent a basic element in the communist system of power (it was, for instance, one of the issues about which Soviet negotiators were most concerned during their dealings with the Czech reformists in 1968). Western journalists have generally been compelled to live within a separate foreigners' compound and operate under great restrictions; Soviet official statistics, until recently, left out whole areas of social and economic life, from crime and mortality rates to balance of payments and road accident data; and the official media, at least until the early 1980s, typically presented an almost unvarying diet of champion milkmaids and heroic shockworkers marching forward to a fully communist society in contrast to the unemployment, poverty and hopelessness of the capitalist West.