Jam today
Tim Garton Ash
The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News Paul Lendvai (Burnett Books, pp.258, £6.95) I have made a New Year's Resolution never to use the word 'Orwellian' when writing about the Soviet Bloc. It is the great strength of Paul Lendvai's book about the politics of information between Belgrade and Vladivostok that it demonstrates precisely and chillingly the 'Orwellian' quality of Communist mass media without resorting to the tag. `Orwellian' has become, alas, an automatic turn-off word, Sensible Westerners who have never read a Soviet Bloc newspaper cannot believe that black reallY is turned into white and yesterday's truth into today's falsehood. Mr Lendvai gives chapter and verse.
Take a Polish censor's instruction front January 1976 for example 'Publication is not permitted of any expressions of sympath,Y with the Eritrean Liberation Movement 10 Ethiopia'. One year earlier the papers were full of encomia to the heroic liberatiori struggle of the oppressed Eritrean brothers etc etc. Then the Soviet Union switched its support from Somalia to Ethiopia. Ove,r." night the heroes became villains. Ethiopia was now the hero. Ethiopia had alvvaYs been the hero . . . no wonder in EaSt Germany collecting old newspapers is a criminal offence. Mr Lendvai rightly observes that 'met° supervision cannot be narrowed down to the classical instruments of censorship'. Indeed it can be worse where there is no censor, because there the journalist himself carries the ultimate responsibility for what he writes. That is one reason why some liberal journalists do not want to do away With the censor in Poland today. Unfortunately this book was largely written before the Polish August and therefore cannot take account of recent developments in that country. But he quotes the opinion of Zedenek Mlynar, a leading Czech reformer under Dubcek, that the abolition of censorship in June 1968 was one of the major errors committed by the leadership.
The Soviet system needs censorship as capitalism needs capital. They are inseparable. Yet the story of organised lying in the Soviet Bloc is by no means a success story. Mr Lendvai's subtitle would more accurately read 'How Communist Governments try to manage the news.' Their Achilles Heel is the ionosphere. Two chapters are devoted to an informative account of the extraordinary influence of Western broadcasting to Eastern Europe. 'If the West believes in the Power of ideas', he quotes a Hungarian intellectual as saying, 'then additional transmitters and funds for broadcasting to the East are more important than missiles: Certainly Marxist leaders do not underestimate that power. The Soviet Union is now the world leader in external broadcasting. Furthermore, it devotes immense resources to jamming Western stations: an estimated $300 million in 1971. According to calculations made in 1968 the money Czechoslovakia spent on jamming would have bought a whole new television centre. When Warsaw intellectuals passed a resolution last autumn that the government should cease jamming Radio Free Europe as a contribution to the country's economic recovery they were only half joking. The last part of Lendvai's scrupulous account surveys the patchy record of Soviet Bloc compliance with the information provisions of the Helsinki Final Act. He argues that the Yugoslav example should be used as the key argument in the continuing battle for compliance with the Helsinki Accords. But the whole force of his own analysis, and o_f the Polish example, is that the Soviet Bloc cannot afford to comply with this part of the Accords; now less than ever. Of course the renewed jamming of BBC and Voice of America broadcasts to the oviet Union last summer is a back-handed compliment to those stations. Soviet Bloc governments will soon be spending more money jamming the External Services of the BBC than the British Government spends supporting them. Lendvai recalls the words with which the BBC itself rejected suggestions that we should retaliate in kind against jamming by the Axis Powers in World War Two: 'Jamming is an admission of a bad cause. The jammer has a obr conscience. He is afraid of the influence the truth. In our country we have no such fears . . •
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