Typing Out the Fear

By VITALI KOROTICH Vitali Korotich, 52, has been editor of Ogonyok since 1986.

We have no room in our Moscow offices anymore. Since January we have been receiving 500, 600, even 700 letters a day. Our secretaries dump mail sacks right on the floor of the reception area, and our conference rooms are filled with folders of mail. Old-timers remember how only four years ago Ogonyok used to receive no more than 20 letters a day, mostly naive poetry or the memoirs of retired people.

The flood of letters underscores the changing relationship with our readers. For the first time, we are experiencing the uneasy satisfaction of a journalism that inspires not only love but hatred too. We are drowning in comments. No one is indifferent.

Occasionally, I receive letters with obscene words and drawings. There are threats, the mildest being a pledge to beat my face in. Our weekly magazine is criticized in a newspaper that from force of habit no one dares argue with: * Pravda. The fear caused by this newspaper is supposed to be so deep and basic that it is ten times greater than other fears.

But something has changed in our society. Fears do not come true as inevitably as they used to. The machine that used to subjugate by crushing rather than persuading is worn out. But control through fear, discipline through fear, debate regulated by fear, they are all still alive in the souls and experience of millions. Fear can grab typewriters by the keys and plug up ears and mouths. Yet this fear is fading, and the nation is slowly coming back to life.

We are learning to say out loud words we were afraid to voice for decades. In the past it was difficult for Ogonyok to decide to publish just a one- sentence reference to the need for public control over the Soviet military and the KGB. Now we publish everything that we can vouch for, which is how it should be. That is how Ogonyok's stories on the crimes of Stalin and modern corruption originated. That is how we examine such things as the decline of the Bolshoi Ballet, the rise of nonparty organizations in the Baltic republics, the problems of the poor and attempts to use anti-Semitism to restore a dictatorship of fear.

Generally, those who disagree with us write letters to the Central Committee or the government demanding that the magazine be punished or banned. Many of these complainers either do not wish or do not know how to argue directly with us. Once I asked someone who had sent a critical letter about Ogonyok to the Central Committee why he had not raised the issue with us. "What do you mean, directly with you?" he asked in surprise. "I wanted to know who it was that allowed you to write that way." That is our major problem. For too many of our citizens, the question is not whether what a person says is correct but whether he has the right to state the truth about a particular subject.

Most of us at Ogonyok feel that we are not alone, that what we are doing is important to those around us. This has made the magazine not just stronger but more self-confident. At the beginning of 1986 Ogonyok had fewer than 300,000 subscribers. By last January we had more than 3 million. Today it is virtually impossible to buy Ogonyok at the newsstand. Our print run is clearly not enough to satisfy demand, but official promises to allow us a larger circulation have so far not been realized. There is a very special feeling about being part of a process that is of your own making, rather than one that is imposed upon you.

The further this process continues among ordinary people, the more apocalyptic must be the visions of Soviet bureaucrats. I do not think our bureaucracy ever really believed in the system it created. Any attempt to introduce change or novelty has traditionally set off a wave of bureaucratic hysteria about the death of socialism or the violation of revolutionary ideals. Even Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was viewed as an attempt to overthrow Soviet power. Just imagine how little the bureaucrats must have believed in this power if they thought it could be destroyed by intellectual novels.

Such attitudes, however, are becoming a thing of the past. I believe a return to the Stalin era, or even the Brezhnev era, would require a coup of the same dimensions as the one that led to the establishment of Soviet power in 1917. That is something unthinkable today. The state has finally chosen to rely on the support of democratic laws. The mass media are awaiting and fighting for the new law, currently being drafted by the Central Committee, that would formalize the relationship between the press and government and give individuals the right to sue for libel. We are learning to walk, having reached adulthood at a mature age. Excuse our fumbling footsteps. The point is not to stop.