Now a Sexagenarian

Sixty years ago this fall, bureaucrats and journalists on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain came to a remarkable agreement: our bipolarized world would be better served if we exchanged magazines to show one another how the other lived.

In October 1956, the first issue of USSR appeared. It would later be renamed Soviet Life, and after the fall of the USSR it was resurrected as Russian Life. While the Soviet Union existed, the magazine was unquestionably a propaganda tool of the Soviet Communist Party, and some of our readers (many of whom have subscribed since the Soviet Life days) have told me that copies were sometimes mailed in brown envelopes, to hide their “subversive” reading from their neighbors.

By my count, this issue of Russian Life is the 574th in the long lineage of these magazines, and it is the 143rd we have produced since we took it over (making it free of censorship for the first time) in July 1995.