Cold War Correspondents by Dina Fainberg

Author:Dina Fainberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

The Unimaginable Plight of Soviet Everyday Life

In 1972, on the eve of President Richard Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union, the Christian Science Monitor published a series of five articles by its Moscow correspondent Charlotte Saikowski. Addressing each piece “Dear Mr. President,” Saikowski’s series offered “an American’s” perspective on “some of the basics about Soviet life […] how Russians work, how they view their government, how they spend their leisure, what they see on television.”29 In the first installment, titled “Russians Rarely Worry about Losing Their Jobs,” Saikowski told her readers that although Soviet everyday life “is still generally drab and often lacking in simple necessities,” most Russians were convinced that socialism was “morally superior,” and they took pride in the progress their country had made since the revolution.30 Saikowski had arrived in Moscow in 1969. Born in Chicago, she was fluent in Polish and Russian. Having spent time teaching English and studying violin in postwar Warsaw, she spent ten years working at the Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Respected for her generous, level-headed attitude and her expertise in Soviet affairs, Saikowski got along with her Soviet hosts and the American press corps alike. Her series “How Russians Live” was published by the Monitor and then reprinted in many newspapers across the nation.31

Ten years later, shortly after President Ronald Reagan had won the election—in part by campaigning against détente—Washington Post correspondent Kevin Klose visited Donetsk, a major mining city in the Ukrainian SSR, to interview local workers and residents. Traveling with a dissident friend, mining engineer Alexei Nikitin, Klose visited a housing complex for retired miners. Klose was dismayed to discover that none of the apartments had running water or functioning lavatories and that elderly residents had to rely on a “community well in a weed-choked field” and “foul-smelling, rough-hewn outhouses.”32 The visit left Klose appalled with the living conditions experienced by regular Soviet people. His article series on Donetsk exposed the glaring gaps between the proclamations of Soviet propaganda and the daily lives of Soviet workers and described how Nikitin’s efforts to improve the lot of the local miners were brutally repressed by the state. Klose’s series were so damning that the Washington Post published an editorial condemning the Soviet regime for its treatment of Nikitin and his fellow workers.33

Almost ten years—and radically different political climates—separated Saikowski’s and Klose’s accounts. What persisted was the two journalists’ interest in the most mundane aspects of Soviet everyday life, an interest shared by their contemporaries and predecessors alike. Saikowski’s and Klose’s approaches to Soviet society and their overall conclusions represented two opposite ends of the spectrum. As the years progressed, the tone of reports about Soviet daily life, especially in long-form accounts, grew harsher, and journalists’ assessments became more critical. This shift derived from the logic of Soviet commitments on the one hand and the investigative ethos of American reporting on the other. For years, Soviet Cold War propaganda had promised that the USSR would “reach and surpass” the United States.

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