Our First Half Century

Dear Comrades,” the letter began. It was a dead giveaway. The 1965 missive was yet another laudatory letter to the editors of USSR, heralding the magazine’s contributions to “producing peace and understanding in our troubled world,” remarking on USSR’s position “as a counterbalance to the anti-Soviet distortions presented by the mass media.”

Across the hundreds of old back issues of USSR and Soviet Life, the pattern is amazingly predictable. Letters to the editor march down an inside column of a forward page, echoing well-worn tunes: about the magazine’s “objectivity,” about how it is “fascinating” and “colorful” and provides that important “counterbalance” to prevailing media coverage.

The cynical 21st century editor cannot help wondering if some or all of the letters were put-up jobs, written by the magazine’s Washington editors according to a standard formula laid down by Moscow, with names and addresses laughingly plucked from phone books and atlases. There is, after all, an eerie similarity to the complimentary phrases from issue to issue, a stilted style that pervades the letters, suggesting a non-native hand (“add my encomiums”; “I would like to make known to you”; “all the copies I put my eyes on,” etc.). But perhaps the cynical editor has simply forgotten that there was a time – not so long ago – when people did write letters. And perhaps most were complimentary, in substandard English, and filled with encomiums.

Well, to be honest, there were the occasional critical letters (“all you print are the good things”; “I don’t expect...that the magazine gives an unbiased picture of Soviet life”). But then, allowing in the occasional voice of a dissident, surrounded by a chorus of yea-sayers, only goes to prove the overwhelming wave of support. (So says the Cynic.)

Sometimes, as in the March 1964 issue, negative letters – in this case questioning the treatment of Jews in the USSR – become a pretext for editorial coverage. Thus, the letters (which sound very authentic in this case) are followed by a long, defensive letter from the editor and a two-page spread on the respected Moscow Rabbi Natan Olevsky.

Whether Soviet Life letters were fabricated or not is something only the editors of that day could answer. But either way, the sorts of letters published in the magazine tells us much about how the Powers That Were saw themselves and about how they wanted to be seen by the outside world: progressive, ever striving for peace, yet fundamentally misunderstood by those in power in the West.

In the 100th issue of the magazine, in January 1965, when the name was changed from USSR to Soviet Life, the editors responded to the objection of one reader, published in an earlier issue, that the magazine was “nothing but a piece of propaganda:”

This criticism misses the point. Our magazine presents its readers with the highlights of Soviet life, with the problems the Soviet people are discussing and the tasks they are setting themselves. We are aware that it is not easy for an American reader to understand everything in our way of thinking and our way of life. That is why we are trying to give him cultural and historical background material.

To paraphrase: “Of course we are offering propaganda, but, if you can just learn to read between the lines, you can glimpse life as it is being lived in the Soviet Union.” Propaganda, after all, is merely “the spreading of ideas and information deliberately to further one’s cause or damage an opposing cause.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) Other names might be “public relations” or “advertising.”

At times, Soviet Life offered plenty of “advertising” to sift through. For example: verbatim party speeches, humanitarian declarations, a “short biography” of Leonid Brezhnev that spanned 13 pages, a year-long paean to Lenin on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1970, an article on “The Scientific Management of Society,” or an impenetrable essay by noted author Ilya Ehrenburg, “On Our Young People Today.” 

There may well have been some “fellow-travelers” who read each issue from front to back, even including the ideological tripe. But one suspects that most readers honed in on stories of everyday heroes, of distant regions, of the Second World War and the latest Soviet-American exchanges. 

Some of the most interesting reading in back issues is the short “People and Events” or “Around the Country” department, which presented news tidbits like the inauguration of the new Zaporozhets auto (which had a 40-hp engine and could do 75 miles per hour), the discovery of a one-inch long diamond, the invention of a new underwater glider for sea exploration, a beaver being shipped off to repopulate a region of Siberia, round houses, ancient Roman coins plowed up on a Ukrainian collective farm, the opening of the Tashkent metro...

By the late 1970s, Soviet Life was featuring more color and the design was becoming more imaginative and interesting. The magazine’s extra-large format (10 x 14 inches, or almost 50% larger than the current magazine) persisted until the 1980s, when perestroika and glasnost changed the size and face of the magazine, as well as its content. Less pronounced were the ideological notes (although Gorbachev’s policies still needed proper advertising), and there was more talk about the things that needed changing in Soviet society.

When the Soviet Union was extinguished on Christmas Eve 1991, the magazine too ground to a halt. The final issue of Soviet Life (#423) was published in December 1991. 

About a year later, in the spring of 1993, the magazine was resurrected as Russian Life – a joint venture between Novosti and an American company. That venture produced seven issues, published on a near-quarterly schedule. But funding issues and partner disputes doomed the partnership. In January 1995, publication of Russian Life was suspended, the last issue having been published the previous fall.

Interestingly, Amerika magazine, this magazine’s USIA-published sibling, suspended publication about the same time, in September 1994, due to funding cutbacks. Apparently, the time for superpower exchange of propaganda and public relations was over.

Six months later, in July 1995, Russian Life was purchased by Russian Information Services, a privately-owned publisher of books and maps on Russia based in Montpelier, Vermont. For the first time in its 40-year history, the magazine had no connection to the government of Russia or the Soviet Union. This change was reflective of the modern history of Russia, with its mass privatization... and its unwarranted hubris. Initially resurrected as a thin, monthly magazine, Russian Life was soon scaled back to a bimonthly publication, so that it could fill out a full 64 color pages and establish itself on a secure financial footing. (Interestingly, a private Russian publisher’s parallel effort in the late 1990s to resurrect Amerika magazine did not survive.)

Today, 50 years and 514 issues into the magazine’s history, letters (usually emails) are still an important way readers communicate with the editors. Most times, the letters are corrective (e.g. the several letters in this issue), which is something we value, given the huge amount of material we must present in each issue. Some letters are simply laudatory (which generally we do not publish, but which we do keep to help buck us up in times of stress). None are made up. Honest. 

Still, it is interesting to note that, even today, the letters we publish are reflective of how we, the publishers, would like readers to see Russia: as a complex and fascinating country with countless stories to tell; as a place for which many Americans share an inexplicable passion.

In February 1965, a reader wrote to the editors of USSR: “I hail your magazine as an effort to inform the American people of ‘another side of Russia.’” 

Put-up job or no, those words could just as well have been written by a reader of Russian Life today. In that respect, the magazine’s mission has not changed. RL

That Was Then...

A comparison of the magazine’s subscription rates over the decades is illuminating, as are data on the number of Americans visiting the USSR and Russia.

*Calculated using Consumer Price Index. ⁺ Per year. Through 1991, figures are for the USSR as a whole. For 1986, the figure for 1989 is used; for 2006, the figure is an estimate, based on 2004 (182,000).