VII. Conclusion Society shapes the press--and the press shapes society The relationship of the press to the larger society Throughout its short history, the Northern News Service has proved a remarkably precise mirror of changes taking place in the Soviet and Russian societies it served. The stages of its development reflect the changing context of its times: As a foot soldier in the army of glasnost', NNS pressed forward through periods of opposition and ultimately won surprising victories, opening closed territories and closed pages to fresh views. Later, as a campaigner for candor, it worked though the end of the Gorbachev reign to bring hundreds of uncensored news stories to more than a million readers in the Russian North. And as an uncertain survivor, adapting after the coup to new realities of political and financial uncertainty, it struggles today to find a place in a changed world where it could be more useful than ever, but may be far less likely to survive. NNS was unique, as Novosti editors assert, in the degree of "penetration" it allowed foreign reporting into the Soviet press. It was not a one-time exchange of articles between twinned cities, but a continuing relationship that brought the "bourgeois press" into remote republic and district newspapers throughout the Russian North and Far East. In newspapers ranging from the 250,000 circulation Tikhookeanskaya Zvezda (Pacific Star) to the 5,000 circulation Mayak Arktiki (Beacon of the Arctic) , readers for the first time found a regular diet not only of uncensored foreign journalism, but also of journalism focused on their local and regional concerns. NNS served the needs of the Soviet press at the dawn of glasnost'. With stories written by Western reporters bearing a mantle of authority for many Soviet readers, the NNS stories presumably brought credibility that years of Soviet censorship had stripped away from the Soviet press. With attention to problems and conditions more likely reflective of readers' own concerns and experiences, it brought vigor and diversity to a style of journalism characterized as one of "dreary uniformity." NNS provided foreign news, among the most desired of Russian news commodities. And it brought what Novosti editor Buranov described as the "expectation of solutions" that may have introduced optimism and fortified some aspirations. Certainly the press played a central role in shaping the society that turned its back on seven decades of Communist Party rule and ventured into the untested new world Russia occupies today. Hosking wrote: The widespread dissemination of new political ideas and information would have been impossible without the remarkable flowering of the mass media which began in 1986 and steadily deepened thereafter. It is often assumed that this flowering was decreed by Gorbachev, in the form of glasnost'. It is true that without Gorbachev it could not have taken place, but [the glasnost' media] had constantly to maneuver against authorities accustomed to blandness and half-truths ... The 19 August coup demonstrated how vital these publications and the attendant technology had become. Yeltsin's grand gesture of clambering on to one of the junta's tanks to issue his defiant proclamation would have gone for nothing had it not been shown on television and had printers and duplicating machines not immediately ensured that his words were posted up at street corners and in metro stations all over Moscow. (Hosking: 1992: 209) Significantly, not just in Moscow. Ten time zones to the east, in the tiny Bering Strait village of Provideniya, Russians watched the same defiant Yeltsin on ABC Television news live from New York, captured on a satellite dish tuned to US programing as part of the general thaw in relations between Alaska and the Russian Far East. By later that same day, Provideniyans had made videotape copies of the broadcast for distribution elsewhere in the Soviet Union (Bernton, 1991: 1). Glasnost' and widespread public awareness certainly helped save Gorbachev and his reforms from the coup of conservative Communist forces. But those same forces played a central role in toppling him and introducing today's political chaos into the former Soviet empire, as well. Gail Lapidus argued in 1990 that "At bottom, glasnost' is ... a symbol of trust. It reflects a recognition by the Soviet leadership of the maturity of the Soviet people ... It is equally an expression of confidence in the basic legitimacy of the Soviet system and in its leadership, a recognition that the pretense of infallibility is no longer necessary to command popular allegiance and support" (Lapidus, 1990: 24). How remote that three-year old argument already seems. Much more to the point were insights offered by her Soviet colleague Melville in the same volume, when he wrote: When perestroika was first launched, many regarded it as a miraculous panacea for all the ills and problems of the stagnant system. Glasnost' likewise was endowed with the qualities of political magic: All that was needed was to curse the crimes and errors of the past and to proclaim new verities, and reality would miraculously be transformed into a new world of justice and abundance. In other words, glasnost' was widely regarded not as a precondition of perestroika but as its guarantee. Alas, the miracle did not occur ... If glasnost' deserves the credit for the broadening spectrum of public discussion, it also leads to a hardening of political positions and the intensification of political struggle in a polity that lacks both consensus and a tradition of democratic conflict resolution. The result is a growing destabilization of our society. (Melville, 1990: 337) In his enforced retirement, Gorbachev seems likely to reflect on Napoleon's observation that, "If I let go the reins on the press, I will not last three months in power." The destabilization Melville described accelerated with surprising swiftness to the point of collapse, and, at this writing, Russia is still searching for a political zeitgeist to contain the energies of the emerging new society of the Russian federation. At about the time Melville was writing that, Gellner reflected on 12 months spent in Moscow and observed that "the success of the perestroika experiment depends precisely on being surrounded by a cloud of ambiguity ... One might sum up this view by saying that the success of glasnost' depends on not having too much of it, at any rate from the top; just as the termination of the cult of personality depends on Gorbachev's charisma" (Gellner, op. cit.: 7). The Northern News Service also lived with ambiguity, principally over the dual role of Novosti as both journalistic partner and part of the state information apparatus. Baranikas suggests the contradictions and ambiguities were present from the start, mainly represented by institutional imperatives to "make propaganda for Gorbachev's Murmansk proposals" (Baranikas, 1993a: 1; and 1993b: 1) and the desires of individuals inside Novosti to reach beyond those boundaries. Over four years of NNS operation, this conflict became less important because the journalism from Soviet (and later, Russian) sources betrayed little evidence of classic propaganda. Indeed, by some measures the glasnost'-era press in Russia may have been more free to pursue a genuinely independent agenda than many in the West. Gennady Gerisimov, former spokesman for the Soviet foreign ministry, once told an Anchorage audience that Alaska-Russia exchanges enjoyed a rare opportunity of "going in the back door" while traditional diplomacy focused on the Moscow-Washington axis (personal communication, 1989). Similarly, the NNS may have been able to provide its level of multi-national, pluralist reporting at least partly because it operated outside the main focus of attention. A news service involving the main newspapers in Moscow and Washington would likely have faced closer government scrutiny than one linking Magadan and Yellowknife. An unstated but nonetheless real concern for Western journalists was the matter of traditional links between Soviet journalists and Soviet intelligence services. It is an old and generally recognized relationship, which specifically includes Novosti. Ilya Dzhirkvelov has written that "In the mid-1960s, a special group was set up in the Novosti agency ... where disinformation was prepared to be published in Novosti's official publications and distributed abroad by the staff of Soviet and diplomatic trade missions, by TASS and Novosti correspondents, and, of course, by KGB and GRU officers" (Dzhirkvelov, 1987: 302). Of more recent activities we read that: "... the KGB maintains an active presence in Soviet press agencies like Novosti and TASS, which provide international news coverage. Not only do KGB agents posing as journalists engage in intelligence gathering; the KGB reportedly issues content guidelines for materials designated for foreign consumption" (Knight, 1987: 203). (For a fuller discussion of the press-intelligence relationship in the USSR, see also Dzirkals, 1982 and Kuzichkin, 1990). There was a general concern among Western NNS members about the prospect of being manipulated unwittingly, and some more specific worries. Although the Novosti's Finnish-Russian translator appeard to speak no English, Western reporters were cautioned by a Finnish editor to beware: "I am sure he speaks good English; I think he is KGB" (personal commuication, 1990). He offered no evidence to support such a conclusion about that man; the anecdote is repeated simply to illustrate the suspicions that sometimes surfaced in NNS proceedings. Western NNS members also displayed ambiguities. There was a strong sense at the initial meetings that the way for NNS to work was for Soviet journalists to act more like Western reporters. And yet, while Western journalists at NNS meetings might propose resolutions demanding high journalistic standards and even-handed treatment of the news, most were willing to let Novosti pay for their plane tickets and book their hotel rooms in Russia. For at least some of the Western members, there was, as well, a tension between the desire to tell the plain truth and to contribute to the growing good will between members. The contradiction between blunt truthfulness and diplomacy was demonstrated when a Noril'sk television interviewer asked a Westerner for impressions of the city: Another man came up and asked bluntly: "What are your impressions of Noril'sk -- first, the negative?" I told him I found it unattractive, especially the lack of greenery and the flat paved spaces between buildings. Then I described a feeling I have genuinely had about this place--about how it must force individuals to focus on their inner landscapes, to draw together. I do admire the spirit that says "We can take whatever the climate throws at us." There is a resiliency here, a can-do attitude. It feels to me like a moon-base might. ... If I had been thinking faster, what I would have told the man who asked my impressions ... was that the pollution appalled me. It does. (Weaver, 1989: 8) The Soviet and later Russian press has proved itself more than able to provide criticism and articulate dissent. Other roles remain to be explored and defined. The press does not exist separately from the society that it serves. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have argued repeatedly since an initial article in 1979 that for all its protestations of freedom and independence, the Western press fully reflects the values of the establishment society and operates within surprisingly tight constraints imposed by it. Views offered in the press "have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or magnified by the ideological institutions of the West" (Chomsky and Herman, quoted in McNair, op. cit.: 124). In Manufacturing consent they argued that journalistic agendas are shaped by societal forces far more often than the converse, and describe in detail the dynamic by which dominant values are expressed through the self-described independent media (Chomsky and Herman, 1988). Similarly, David Lane noted that, "In the West, powerful commercial and political pressures make for a homogeneity in the mass media, especially television, and the mass media provide a politically sanitized view of the world. Commercial interests establish limits to mass communications: anarchists, communists, and fascists do not have an equal chance to influence the population. Commercial stations are not interested in propagating views advocating the demise of capitalism" (Lane, 1990: 317). And yet the Communist Party boss of journalism in Noril'sk introduced foreign journalists to Green Front dissidents who did indeed advocate the demise of the people's metallurgical works in their town. Perhaps in the interval between its days as Communist tribune and eventual role within a typical capitalist society, journalism in the USSR--or at least in the Northern News Service--reached a detachment even freer than the average Western newspaper. At its inauguration, NNS represented a rare, perhaps unique opportunity for exchange between Soviet and Western journalism. During the four years represented in this study, that initial trickle of information became a deluge, witnessing joint-venture Western-Russian newspapers, advances in of telecommunications (including faxes and electronic mail), satellite links to regional television outlets, and the like. At the same time, the need for a central propaganda ministry serving the needs of Soviet empire vanished with the empire itself. No longer did rubles (much less dollars) flow freely from the central government for multi-national exchange projects or hands-across-the-water diplomacy. Thus two crucial raisons d'être of the NNS were removed: its role as a unique provider of independent information, and its central government propaganda functions. In their absence, it faces (like most former Soviet institutions) an uncertain future. A unique and Northern view of the world Given the opportunity to talk to one another after decades of enforced silence, there were a number of particular subjects Russians and non-Russians wanted to discuss with one another: stewardship of their natural environment; the role of wildlife and the other resources that endow it; conditions, languages and cultures of the indigenous peoples who have long made the North their home; and exchanges and cooperative ventures between Northerners, no matter what their country of residence. Of course they wrote about much in addition to subjects of special Northern interest; government, economics and technology shape life in Northern regions as fundamentally as anywhere, and were much evidenced in the agenda of the Northern News Service. But even in those areas, analysis shows a special Northern character to the reporting: government stories, to be sure, but half of them dealing with indigenous people; economics reporting, but more than half of it focused on wildlife, energy or environmental concerns. News judgment is neither an abstract nor mechanistic process. The ways in which stories were identified for transmission to the Northern News Service and then selected for inclusion in the monthly bulletin were based on individual human decisions about what mattered, what was of interest, what was expected. These decisions were made at many different locations: each participant newspaper nominated its own stories for inclusion; in Moscow, a number of these were picked each month for the bulletin, reflecting a rough geographic balance between contributors. Arkady Kudrya, the Novosti journalist most directly involved with that process, reported that he sought to cast as wide a net as possible: "We tried to put into Northern News every good article (sometimes even not very good, but acceptable) to keep the balance of themes and countries" (Kudrya, 1993a: 7). Further, he wrote: There were of course some political and ideological considerations about the selection of articles. I expressed it myself after the first visit to Alaska when I gathered facts about the problem of land and private business of Alaska's Native people and began writing articles of what I saw in Alaska. I felt that they could have a powerful effect on the minds of Native people in our country because it was, from my point of view, a great example how to deal with the most delicate questions concerning the land Native people live on. There is another example--a story from a Norwegian newspaper about the Saami parliament , which also had as I know a strong effect on our Northern Natives, especially Saami people. And as I know, these stories did have a strong effect on the minds of some people living in the Russian North. I'm glad I met no obstacles to publishing them in the [Northern News] bulletin. This became possible only due to the policy of glasnost'. (Kudrya, 1993a: 8) Shortly after the inaugural meeting of the Northern News Service in Leningrad, the deputy editor of Leninskaya Pravda in Petrozavodsk wrote about the fledgling venture in sentimental terms characteristic of the spirit in which it was launched. Quoting Evgeny Yevtushenko ("Nature does not know the borders people create") he said of the new news service, "At our time borders which prevent people from communicating in the name of peace and cooperation are being destroyed. The meeting of journalists from several countries and creation of NNS is one more confirmation of it. The more we know about each other, the more we trust each other and cooperate, the safer our world will be and the safer our natural environment" (Kolosov, 1988:1). More than four years later, in a country altered almost beyond recognition from the changing but still thoroughly Soviet state in which Kolosov wrote, Kudrya again reflected on the process and came to equally emotional conclusions: "At this time when people in our country are trying to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel of our present life, they more often than before are eager to look to the US for the example of life people deserve. Russian Northerners see this good example in Alaska ... I hope that we manage to survive and bring NNS to a new height ... The interest people in Russia show ... is great, and with common efforts we can satisfy it" (Kudrya, 1993c: 2). In that quest for survival, NNS turns today toward an asset that remains even though its initial raisons d'être have disappeared: its established network of Northern journalists and the peculiarly Northern perspective they can employ. As this study is written, negotiations are under way about contracting between the Northern News Service and the recently chartered Northern Forum, an association of regional Northern governments based in Anchorage, Alaska.Eager to establish credibility as a new, multi-national organization, the Northern Forum has decided to publish a newsletter for member governments. To do so, it needs material. In exchange for articles for the forum's newsletter, NNS would receive the single ingredient most essential for continued existence in Russia today: hard currency.