Radio
Suspicious behaviour
Noel Malcolm
My copy of Inside the KGB: an exposé by an officer of the Third Directorate contains a useful list of all the tell-tale signs of a secret agent. It begins with 'general nervousness, constrained movements, fre- quent looking over one's shoulder', and it gets better. Half-way down the list one finds the following: 'Recording radio broadcasts on a tape recorder; conceal- ment of knowledge in radio matters; refus- al to receive visitors, especially on days of radio reception.' I'm a marked man.
Some of the things I hear on Radio Moscow are so odd that I feel sure they must be coded messages. Miss Amy Smith of Orkney, whom I have mentioned in this column before, writes to Moscow Mailbag each week. She ran out of sensible things to ask several years ago and is now preoccupied with questions such as whether ballroom dancing is popular in the Soviet Union. One of her most recent inquiries was: 'Do Soviet people grow spinach?' The team took it in their stride: `Although many supermarkets in Moscow offer spinach . . .' and so on. It turns out that this Orcadian delicacy is not as widely appreciated in Moscow as it should be, because 'most people try to eat it fresh, without cooking it.' Apart from these tantalising glimpses of Russian nouvelle cuisine, the great fascina- tion of Radio Moscow nowadays lies in its use as a showcase of glasnost. Much nonsense has been written about glasnost in the West by people who are apparently incable of opening a dictionary. It's an abstract noun formed from the word glas, which means `voice'; glasnost means speak- ing up about things, either in the advertis- ing sense of giving things publicity or in the sense of publicising faults. There is some- thing very revealing about the way in which western observers have seized on the word `openness', with all its Des Wilson over- tones of 'open government', as if they thought that Mr Gorbachev was sponsor- ing a Freedom of Information Bill. Other observers have used it to fill the gap in their brains that was previously occupied by the word 'détente': thus the recent visit of the Kirov Opera was attributed, meaninglessly, to glasnost. Washington sternly announced last week that it was waiting to see whether glasnost was just window-dressing, or whether it would in- volve real action. But why should it? Publicising is publicising, which is neither of those two things. What they do with their publicity is a matter of policy, and the policy will vary according to the audience they are addressing.
On Radio Moscow the ultimate emph- asis is still on propaganda. They do, it is true, report on subjects which would never have been mentioned a couple of years ago. A recent feature on drug addiction, for example, included interviews with peo- ple in the 'narcotics department' of a Moscow hospital. The number of reg- istered drug addicts was given as 50,000, and 46% were said to have been sentenced by courts for criminal offences. But the final emphasis in such reports is always on the enlightened progress they are making and on the greater severity of such prob- lems in the West.
A less sanguine view of this problem came from Mary Seton-Watson on Radio 3 last weekend in a repeat of her excellent talks on 'Russian Literary Trends'. In the recent novel by Aitmatov which she de- scribed, the hero tries to persuade a gang of drug smugglers to see the error of their ways. The chief villain turns on him and says: 'I've given more happiness with my drugs than you have with your preaching. Preaching has changed nothing. All life is still based on lies.' The idea that opium is the opiate of the people must seem daring- ly novel in the Soviet Union.
Much of the glasnost on Radio Moscow is served up rather in the spirit of Rous- seau? s Confessions, where the discredit of what he tells you is meant to be out- weighed by the credit of being so honest. Normally, the message serves some further purpose of exculpation as well. We were told recently that Russia suffers from not having a convertible currency and that applications for government permits are hampered by red tape. But the point of these admissions was to explain why so few Russians have holidays in the West — they can't afford it, you see, and there are all those queues at the passport office. Then there was the problem of Russia's 'acute labour shortage' — 'economists believe this is a sign of low labour efficiency.' But that was an answer to a question about whether the Soviet Union suffered from the problems of unemployment.
Radio Moscow is at its best when it is reflecting what 1 can only describe as Victorian values. A young teacher from Moscow was asked last month about her experiences on an exchange visit to a North London comprehensive. 'Frankly, I didn't enjoy it, because the relations between pupil and teacher were, um, peculiar. The boys said: "If you want to learn something you can, but they won't make you".' Those boys had a good line, I think — one which could profitably be addressed to many observers of the Soviet Union.
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