The New Soviet Journalism: The Best of the Soviet Weekly "Ogonyok" - Softcover

Korotich, Vitaly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807061514 ISBN 13: 9780807061510

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Articles from the Russian magazine Ogonyok (Flame) deal with formerly forbidden topics, including labor camps, Stalin, and Afghanistan

About this title

Reviews

This eye-opening anthology offers 32 pieces (some significantly abridged) published during 1988 and 1989 in the progressive Soviet journal Ogonyok (Flame), which Korotich edits. Dmitry Gubin interviews Arkady Norinsky about his fight against Pamyat, an anti-Semitic nationalist organization that seems to have the tacit approval of Leningrad authorities. Dmitry Likahnov explores how the fledgling cooperative marketing system has been exploited by organized crime as well as by government employees, who have their own "vast official racket." Physician Andrei Popov describes how, lacking safe, effective contraception, Soviets rely on abortion for birth control: in Moscow, more than 70% of women "unofficially terminate their first pregnancies." Yury Belyavsky and Vitaly Vitaliev depict an eerily empty Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Officials keep most people out for fear they will steal the food from the displays. Such lively pieces are complemented with effective photos ranging from a street vendor selling Brezhnev masks to an excavated mass grave of some of Stalin's victims. Porter is the author of Women in Revolutionary Russia.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This excellent translation of 32 articles from the muckraking Soviet weekly includes exposes of some of the USSR's dirtiest linen (juvenile sex offenders, crooked undertakers, half-starved child laborers, urban gangsters, and anti-Semites) as well as interviews with Soviet personalities like theater director Anatoly Vasilev and composer Alfred Schnittke. An emphasis on the latter might have been more satisfying, since last year's Small Fires: Letters from the Soviet People to "Ogonyok" Magazine ( LJ 11/1/90) uncovered much of the same muck raked out here. This new digest of sorrows is, however, more concise, organized, and sophisticated. For all academic collections.
- Robert Decker, Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807061514
• ISBN 13: 9780807061510
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Korotych Vitalii Oleksiiovych, Porter Cathy