III. History: Organization and performance of the Northern News Service The media climate in the USSR in 1988 might have been tailor-made to render the Northern News Service attractive: (1) a period of sustained hunger for international news (particularly if direct from foreign sources) that was being inadequately served by existing papers; (2) a low point of credibility for a Soviet press that badly needed buttressing; and (3) a newly competitive marketplace in which existing papers struggled to overcome their "depressing uniformity" and dullness. In some small measure, the contributions of the Northern News Service could claim to address all three points. The Northern News Service (NNS) was the conception of the Novosti Press Agency, at that time a formidable organ of Soviet information and propaganda employing more than 4,000 people and producing some 50,000 informational articles annually to help present a "sympathetic Soviet face to the world" (Remington, op. cit.: 112). Unlike the more widely known TASS news agency, Novosti was concerned with human interest and lifestyles feature stories as well as political and other "hard news" items. In addition, Novosti (or APN, following the initials for the Russian words in its title, Agenstvo Pechati Novosti) served a variety of other propaganda and public relations functions, including publication of the newspaper Moscow News (an important flagship of glasnost' in several languages), extensive book publishing, and the provision of guides and translators who served as "minders" for foreign journalists travelling in the USSR. Thus APN was well-situated to undertake the initiative for the Northern News Service, which it launched with an invitation to journalists and editors in the summer of 1988. Participants at what would become the NNS founding session were selected by APN officials and invited to Leningrad in November, 1988. As befits Novosti's parentage (one of APN's four sponsoring organizations was the Society of Soviet Leagues of Friendship with Foreign Countries), the sessions held in Leningrad's grand "Friendship House" were elaborately scripted affairs with simultaneous translations, catered dinners and speeches from an impressive array of Soviet government officials and top academicians specializing in Northern affairs (personal observation, 1988). According to Ilya Baranikas, then the editor of Novosti's "all-union" staff of correspondents and later an NNS co-chairman, "Novosti's initiative was politically motivated: it came in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's ... speech in Murmansk, which included a number of proposals with respect to détente and cooperation in polar regions. Novosti's aim was to get another propaganda channel" (Baranikas, 1993a: 1). By 1 October 1987, when Gorbachev traveled north of the Arctic Circle to award the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal to the hero-city of Murmansk, perestroika already was powerfully at work to bring uskoreniye (acceleration) to many segments of Soviet society. Certainly it was ready to come to the North, introduced in dramatic fashion by the proposals Gorbachev spelled out that day in a speech described as "the most significant official pronouncement on Soviet arctic policy to be made in many years" (Armstrong, 1987: 68). Gorbachev's 8,500-word address ranged across the globe, from the Reykjavik arms agreement with the US to systems of quality control in Soviet factories. He concluded, however, with a long discussion specific to the arctic, inviting a new level of cooperation between circumpolar nations and opening the door for an unprecedented level of exchange and joint initiative. Excerpts from the speech illustrate the scope: Since I am speaking in Murmansk, the capital of the Soviet Polar North, it is a good time to consider the idea of universal cooperation from the viewpoint of the situation that exists in the northern part of the globe, as well ... The Arctic is not only the Arctic Ocean, but the northern edges of three continents: Europe, Asia and America ... It is in the North, in the Arctic, as, perhaps, nowhere else, that the community and interdependence of interests of our entire world are so keenly felt ... Let the northern part of the globe, the Arctic, become a zone of peace. Let the North Pole become a pole of peace ... At present, the Northern countries, which is to say Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, do not have nuclear weapons. We are aware of their concern over the fact that we have a nuclear testing range on Novaya Zemlya ... The Soviet Union attaches great importance to peaceful cooperation in exploiting the resources of the North and the Arctic. Here an exchange of experience and knowledge is extremely important. It would be possible to devise, through joint efforts, a common conceptual framework for the rational development of the northern regions ... The scientific study of the Arctic is of enormous significance to all mankind. We have extremely rich experience in this regard, and we are prepared to share it. In turn, we are interested in the research under way in other Arctic and northern states ... Questions involving the interests of the North's indigenous population and the study of its ethnic characteristics and the development of cultural links among the northern peoples require special attention ... We attach special importance to cooperation among the countries of the North in environmental protection. The acute need for this is obvious ... The shortest sea route from Europe to the Far East and the Pacific lies through the Arctic ... we could open the Northern Sea Route to foreign vessels, with ourselves providing icebreaker services ... The most important consideration is to go about these matters in such a way that the climate here be determined by the warm Gulf Stream of the all-European process, not the polar breath of accumulated suspicions and prejudices. ... (Gorbachev, 1987a: 15-19) For this study, Gorbachev's speech is worth considering in some detail for two reasons: First, it was this speech that gave rise to the idea in Novosti of starting the Northern News Service, and, second, the direction Russian reporters would follow in subsequent years is in some measure foreshadowed in it. In the few words quoted above are many of the subjects that later would be highlighted by reporters: exchanges and cooperation; nuclear questions; exploitation of resources; science and technology; issues of indigenous peoples; the environment; and the Northern Sea route. As the analysis of Northern News Service reporting summarized in Section V demonstrates, Gorbachev in 1987 identified many of the central subjects that would occupy journalistic attention in the NNS. The Soviet interest in making propaganda for this major initiative is self-evident, but from the first, NNS served more than a single purpose. Baranikas also recalls "the project rapidly evolved into something different, something devoid of propaganda," partly because a core of project supporters at APN saw it as "a possibility to use Novosti's extensive resources for something meaningful, namely exchange of information among Northern regions' newspapers, most of which are small and poor, unable to maintain any international contacts" (Baranikas, ibid.). Baranikas and Novosti were right about the needs of Northern newspapers. Very little news focused specifically on Northern affairs was available, and virtually none from an international or circumpolar perspective. Newspapers in the far north usually serve small populations, and can't afford their own foreign correspondents. The region was seldom even visited by existing news services or major newspapers. Asked what kind of general, widespread coverage of circumpolar news he saw during his long tenure as a British journalist in Scandinavia, Roland Huntford replied succinctly: "None at all" (personal communication, 1993). Likewise, a survey that attempted to catalog every television news story on the planet on the day of 19 November 1991 came up with 1,380 news stories--only two of which were even arguably polar. "There were only two news stories in the whole data set which dealt with polar regions: a Danish story about a satellite view of an iceberg, and a Norwegian report on the northern night sky" (Chapman, 1992: 15). In the United States, only the relatively unpopulated state of Alaska generates specific interest in polar affairs, and very little information is handled by national newspapers or news services (personal observation). The world's largest news-gathering organization, the Associated Press, maintains bureaus in major capitals in the arctic world but news of the region represents a small proportion of the report. "The percentage of polar news carried by a general news service is clearly less than a service that specializes in polar news. We do, however, find it a region that has a thirst for news of local interest, and that stories from the region do well internationally" (Kent, 1993: 1). Political barriers had also sealed the USSR away from sharing information with Northern neighbors. Gorbachev and the USSR moved forcefully toward lifting that circumpolar "ice curtain" in October, 1987 with a speech in Murmansk that would have far-reaching consequences. Believed by many to have been the key event that broke the impasse and led to formation of the International Arctic Science Committee, the speech also outlined and encouraged cooperation in other Northern areas. "The Murmansk Initiative advanced a wide range of topics for dialog and negotiation with other arctic and North Atlantic states. It indicated that the USSR had gone some way towards abandoning a predominantly conflictual approach in its relations with the other states in the North" (Scrivener, 1989: 68). Vladimir Milyutenko, the vice chairman of the APN Board who hosted the NNS founding session a year later, told participants "Such a seminar became possible thanks to the current restructuring in the USSR. Several years ago we could not even think of it, though many have long suggested holding a meeting of journalists writing about the North" (Novosti, 1988: 1). Even across the generally friendlier frontiers of North America, political (often protectionist) barriers obstruct exchange of circumpolar information. For example, although Canadian broadcasting satellite transmissions are easily accessible from Alaska, American companies are prohibited by international regulations from receiving and rebroadcasting information from them (personal communication from David Paeth, Prime Cable of Alaska). Thus Alaska sports fans are denied access to Canadian ice hockey matches, and Alaska Eskimos are prohibited from using the large volume of television programming in the Inuktitut language regularly broadcast in Canada. To address that void, the NNS proposed supplying information written specifically for and about life in the North. It would do so straightforwardly, simply by having the Novosti headquarters in Moscow receive stories offered by member newspapers, translate them and redistribute them by mail in monthly "bulletins" available for use as desired by any member. The initial NNS operation followed the classic pattern of capitalist entrepreneurs: identify a niche, create a perceived need, and then market a product to fill it. NNS members of generally were from the far northern reaches of their countries. "The initial selection of members was based on the geographical, 'polar' principal'. Thus, a Swedish paper was not supposed to be a Stockholm or Gothenburg paper, as the service was designed for papers based in polar regions, the Far North" (Baranikas, 1993b: 1). Although a few member papers--including the Anchorage Daily News, a metropolitan paper located at just 60° North--did not fit that pattern, most of the other invited participants did. A total of 15 Soviet journalists from far north regions of the USSR joined 11 journalists from the US, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Faroe Islands, Finland, Sweden and Greenland at the organizing session (Novosti, 1988: 2). As outlined by Baranikas, the geographic distribution was biased heavily toward the far north. From Finland, for example, there were representatives not from Helsinki but from Rovaniemi and Kemi; Norway was represented by Tromsø, not Oslo. Soviet papers included those from Dudinka, Noril'sk, Murmansk and Khabarovsk. (See Page 4 for a map of founders locations. Appendix A is a list of NNS member papers; Appendix B lists Russian subscribers to NNS in 1992; and Appendix C lists selected NNS member newspapers and their circulation totals). Every representative at the session voted to join the newly chartered news-sharing cooperative, but from the earliest moments of the organization, there were doubts about motives and methods that continued to surface in the news service. On the motion of Annelies Pool, a Canadian editor from Yellowknife, the session adopted a resolution outlining the basic purpose of the Northern News Service: "Northern News Service shall provide articles and other news items and photographs for members, who may use this material as they see fit. "Northern News Service shall promote mutual understanding and cooperation in matters relating to the development of the North. "Northern News Service shall enable members to exchange news items and use them without editing or changing their content. "Northern News Service shall further exchanges between journalists representing its members." (Novosti, ibid.: 22-23) The language of this brief charter recognized a concern among Western journalists present. In the phrases "use this material as they see fit" and "use them without editing or changing their content," participants sought to address their concern over the recognized dual role of the Soviets who worked both as journalists and propagandists for the state. Indeed, even among Western journalists present, many different philosophies of journalism were represented. Many Scandinavian and Icelandic newspapers have explicit links to political parties; in North America, newspapers generally do not, but they may be directly subservient to their owners. [A further discussion of the relationship of the press to society is found in sections VI and VII.] Icelandic journalist Ingolfur Margeirsson, editor in chief of the newspaper Alpydubadid in Reykjavik, spoke plainly to that question: "The fact is that the Western system of the press is different from what the Soviet Union has. The West is showing much interest in the promotion of the policy of glasnost' and its influence on the press in the USSR. For the Northern News Service to be effective, it is necessary that the Soviet and Western media systems work in the same manner. The service should, on the Soviet side, cover the developments inside the USSR and the material in the [shared] bulletin must not differ from what local Soviet newspapers write."(Novosti, ibid.: 16). How well were those objectives met? The answer is mixed, but Baranikas has since claimed that NNS performance remained responsive in varying degrees to prevailing Soviet political pressures until after the 1991 coup attempt yielded a "democratized" Novosti (Baranikas, 1993b: 3). Arkady Kudrya, the Novosti North American department editor who was in direct charge of the NNS bulletins, says there was never any censorship of Western items contributed for the bulletin, but he and Baranikas agree that some material produced by Baranikas' staff of Soviet journalists was indeed censored. "In late 1990 ... the situation worsened: my superiors (Chairman of the Board Albert Vlasov and his deputies) started to read almost every single article and to ruthlessly censor them in the most conservative Communist manner. They even corrected things without either the author's or the editor's consent, not only deleting but adding whole sentences and paragraphs" (Baranikas, 1993b). After the abortive 1991 coup attempt, those Novosti leaders were accused of following the decrees of the coup plotters and making propaganda for them, and were dismissed (Kudrya, 1993b; Baranikas, 1993b). Indeed, even the origins of the Soviet initiative in launching NNS bespeak a predictable political component: I remember that [Novosti Board Vice Chairman Vladimir] Milyutenko and I paid a visit to an official at the Communist Party Central Committee headquarters in order to discuss the project and get it approved before we really got involved ... he held some position within the North American section of the Central Committee's International Department. He agreed with us on the point that the project could be politically useful, and we later referred to his opinion when we tried to convince Novosti's conservative Chairman of the Board [at that time] Valentin Falin, who was sceptical of the idea. The task set by the Central Committee was to make propaganda for Gorbachev's Murmansk proposals, and Falin perhaps thought NNS would be too reciprocal, with foreign viewpoints penetrating into local Soviet press. Penetrate it did, with hundreds of Western articles appearing in Russian newspapers during the next four years. They were handled differently by different papers: "As far as [Russian] participating papers go, the censorship of NNS articles differed from city to city. In some places, local censors relied on Novosti, whereas others regarded 'dissident' articles from the nation's capital with suspicion" (Baranikas, ibid.: 2). In the Far East of Russia, editor Anatoly Sevryukov of the Khabarovsk newspaper Krasnoye Znamya (Red Banner) reported that he employed no ideological considerations in deciding to publish more than 100 articles from the NNS bulletin during the years under study. "At the time when I worked as editor of this newspaper I published in it more than 100 (NNS) articles ... We published articles from the bulletin in our newspaper under the special heading called The Orbit of Cooperation. They were mostly articles of foreign authors. As a rule they (were) published in (their) original size without any comments and remarks. Sometimes, but very rarely, we had to shorten them a little ... not because some points didn't suit us or contradicted (us) ideologically. The reason was simple: problems of space" (Sevryukov, 1993: 2). Evgeny Bugaenko, for more than 20 years a Novosti correspondent in the Far East of Russia, found the premise of the NNS remarkable. "It was a new, non-standard approach to journalism. To offer local newspapers quite original, without any censorship, stories written by journalists from bourgeois (as we called it) press--it was a revolutionary experiment unknown previously in our practice." He likewise took advantage of the opportunity to send similarly "non-standard" stories back to the West. "I tried to choose themes which previously (before perestroika) were considered banned: the problem of alcoholism among Natives, conservation of salmon, poaching, conservation of native languages by aborigines" (Bugaenko, 1993). [Of those topics, Kudrya says only alcoholism among indigenous inhabitants was genuinely banned in earlier reporting.] Roy Vontobel, at the time editor of the Canadian magazine Arctic Circle, contributed stories from his publication regularly to the news service but used little material offered in return. He cited logistics as the key impediment, including lack of timeliness and the fact that many stories contained too little background about their specialized subjects, but also noted that "I was sometimes uneasy about the integrity (truthfulness, slant, etc.) of articles, and I was not entirely encouraged in this by some of the articles selected from Canada, about which I knew more background" (Vontobel, 1993: 1). Finnish editor Tellervo Hoppula of Pohjolan Sanomat newspaper in Kemi also was troubled by logistics. "The worst problem (to) my mind was ... that it wasn't possible to connect photo service to the news service. The other problem was that the service was very slow" (Hoppula, 1993: 1). In fact, the service could not have existed even in its slow, postal-delivery form without major support from Novosti. Not only did Novosti's initiative launch the project, its continuing contribution as translator and distributor of the shared news stories was the central fact of NNS existence. Only the Soviets had in place a large, state-funded apparatus for translating between the six languages involved, or for collecting materials from Tiksi to Tromsø and redistributing them to members from Rovaniemi to Resolute. According to Kudrya, Novosti spent money on NNS in two ways: first, by producing the monthly bulletin and, second, by paying expenses of most of the journalists (Russian and non-Russian) who attended the three NNS seminars in Murmansk, Noril'sk and Anchorage. According to Irina Golovkina, a Novosti employee who handled logistics for the meetings, "expenses were great ... I do not remember how much our charter flight from Anadyr to Anchorage and back cost in rubles, but the price we paid Aeroflot in dollars only for that charter flight was $22,000" (Golovkina, 1993: 2). Producing the monthly bulletins has been estimated to cost 500,000 rubles in 1993, Kudrya said, including one salary, royalties, expenses of printing and mailing, computers and taxes. Subscription fees charged in rubles in Russia in 1992 totalled slightly less than 100,000 rubles, he said. (Kudrya, 1993a: 5-6) As Novosti's capacity to spend such sums was diminished with changing political and economic conditions in Russia, the prospects for continued existence of the news service changed as well. "This useful international project, ironically, became possible more due to the old totalitarian system (in Moscow) than to what is being born in its place. As long as the old system worked, Novosti got sufficient means from the Soviet budget to perform such projects, and no one demanded that Novosti should commercialize its activities. Its non-profit character was taken for granted, just as its American counterpart, the United States Information Agency, is regarded a purely money-spending government institution" (Baranikas, ibid.: 2). With the breakup of the former Soviet Union, Novosti lost its former "all-union" mandate and became Novosti-RIA, the Russian Information Agency. It also lost many of its former employees and faced considerable pressure to generate hard currency revenues by selling the news service rather than simply sharing it on a cooperative basis. Indeed, pressure to find a source of funding outside the government treasury predated that breakup; as early as the third NNS members meeting, held in Anchorage, Alaska, in September 1990, the service addressed a resolution to "the need for broader means of financial support to meet its objectives in the future." Possibilities to be explored included selling subscriptions to the news service to libraries, university departments and government bodies, and to the possibility of associating the service with the embryonic Northern Forum, an association of Northern governments (Northern News Service, 1990: 1). Uncertainty and contention over the role of the NNS and its place within the Soviet (later Russian) system was a continuing feature of the Northern News Service. The service was more dependent on and responsive to developments on the Russian side than any other; it loomed larger in the Soviet/Russian context than for Western members, where it was generally a very modest part of the newspaper or magazine enterprise. The role of the service and Novosti's relationship with it were also challenged as glasnost' supporters within the agency pressed to expand the freedoms such association offered. For example, the two tours of the Soviet North offered to NNS members both included areas formerly closed to inspection by foreigners, partly to demonstrate the glasnost' foundations of the service. The group's visit to the Kola Peninsula Saami settlement of Lovozero in 1988 and, even more, to the strategic mining center of Noril'sk-Dudinka in 1989 required considerable preparation and were the occasion of considerable internal debate. "It is an open secret that about five months after [NNS members'] invitation to Noril'sk, highly placed officials expressed disapproval and felt we should choose some more attractive site. They thought our foreign colleagues would be appalled at the ecological conditions," Novosti correspondent Boris Ivanov from Krasnoyarsk told NNS members gathered in Noril'sk in 1989 (Weaver, 1989: 9). Baranikas also reported that those visits "required a lot of bureaucratic work to get permits from the Ministry of Defense and the KGB" (Baranikas, 1993a: 1) Official reluctance over letting foreign journalists visit a strategic defense mining center with a history as a Gulag death camp came as no surprise. But the visit to Noril'sk not only was allowed, but was expanded to include access for foreign reporters to a group of dissident environmentalists in the city. From a journal written at the time: "The Taimyr Green Front only has 10 members. It is not an officially recognized organization, cannot legally print a newspaper and has only begun to make contacts with environmentalists and allies in the outside world. "But today it is holding a press conference, arranged by its political enemy, to speak to reporters from six nations. What's going on here? "Pluralism. "The Green Front seems very loosely organized--but probably that is to be expected in a country that only in the last two or three years has begun to recognize the legitimacy of dissent. There is clear animosity between its members and Vladislav Liscovsky, the party man who supervises the local newspaper and has been a main organizer of our event. "For all that, it is Liscovsky who has arranged the 'press conference,' and while it is a hasty 50-minute affair with little advance warning, it's still a chance for his enemies to denounce him before foreign journalists--and allowing that is a big step toward the pluralism you hear so many Communists discussing these days." (Weaver, op. cit.: 15) In addition to allowing foreign journalists access to scenes like that in Noril'sk, the Northern News Service also exposed Russian readers to a wide variety of stories about other societies, written by foreign journalists. Editor Sevryukov in Khabarovsk recalled publishing articles on misimpressions of North American Indians in textbooks (from Alaska); Shamans and missionaries (Canada); folk healing (Finland); costs of education (Alaska); American-style business (Alaska); Soviet-American ethnographers cooperating (Russia); Russian Orthodox icons in Alaska (Alaska); and uses of the larch tree (Finland). [Details of the shared content of the news service comprise Section V of this thesis.] In the opinion of Sergei Buranov, a senior journalist in the Novosti North American section, the kind of foreign stories distributed by NNS were valuable to Russian readers for two basic reasons. The first was that the credibility of traditional Soviet sources of information had declined so badly that presenting unmediated Western reports was a decided strength for the local newspapers that ran Northern News Service materials. (For further discussion of the erosion of credibility in Soviet media, see also McNair, op. cit.: 52; Hosking, op. cit.: 2; and Mickiewicz, op. cit.: 66). More subtle but perhaps more important, he said, was the fact that Western stories generally included what he called "the expectation of a solution." By this he meant that while the stories sent to NNS from the West did deal with problems in Western countries, those problems were usually presented in a context that suggested solutions either were or should be forthcoming. Soviets, he said, had ceased to believe that the solution of identified problems was a natural consequence. "Seeing that other people expect solutions to their problems is very valuable for us" (Personal communication, 1990). Sevryukov's impressions from Khabarovsk support that view. "When an 'Iron Curtain' began to open little by little the articles from the NNS were for us the first swallows that bring the spring. The staff of the newspaper as well as our readers were attracted by the possibility of getting [first-hand] information, with the help of an independent news service, and the articles we received were unique in some way because unlike others there were no politics in them and they dealt with life problems close to the problems of our readers" (Sevruykov, op. cit.: 3).