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News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism
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Simon Huxtable
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News from Moscow

News from Moscow

Soviet Journalism and the Limits of
Postwar Reform
SI M O N H U X TA B L E
1
1
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
Note on Abbreviations and References xi
References to Komsomol’skaia pravda Editorial Meetings and Articles xiii
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists: The Paradoxes of
Post-war Soviet Journalism 1
SE C T IO N 1 . 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 7 : R I T UA L S O C IA L I SM
1. Rituals, Routines and Ideology in the Late Stalinist Press 21

2. Satire, Sensations, and Slander: Criticism and Self-Criticism
from Stalin to the Secret Speech 54
SE C T IO N 2 . 1 9 5 6 – 1 9 6 4 : R OM A N T IC S O C IA L I SM
3. Far from Moscow: Heroic Autobiographies and the Paradoxes

of Thaw Modernity 93
4. From Word to Deed: The Communard Method and
Thaw Citizenship 123
SE C T IO N 3 . 1 9 6 0 – 1 9 7 0 : R E F O R M I N G S O C IA L I SM
5. The Institute of Public Opinion and the Birth of Soviet Polling 157
6. From Technocracy to Stagnation: When Did the Thaw
Freeze Over? 187
Epilogue: Thaw Journalism after the Thaw 217
Bibliography 227
Index 245
Acknowledgements
Researching and writing this book has spanned the vast majority of my academic
career. It is a project that began in youth and has ended in middle age. Looking
back on that process, one realises not only how much one has changed, but also
how much the final product owes to others.
This project began as a MA, then a PhD dissertation, at Birkbeck College. Sean
Morcom helped develop my ideas about the nature of Soviet society during my
MA and in the early stages of my PhD. I am indebted to Jessica Reinisch, who
heroically stepped in to supervise the project at a time when the entire disserta-
tion was still a pile of notes, offering excellent feedback and good advice through-
out. Polly Jones co-supervised the project in its latter stages and has continued to
provide comments, support and good humour ever since. I am also grateful to
Nik Wachsmann for reading and commenting on the dissertation in its latter
stages, and to Anna Pilkington and Olga Makarova, who let me audit their
Russian language classes at Queen Mary, University of London.
A number of funders made my PhD research possible. I am extremely grateful
to the AHRC for funding the project with a doctoral grant, as well as to the Royal
Historical Society, the University of London’s Central Research Fund and to BASEES
for funding various parts of the dissertation and its dissemination. I benefited
greatly from participation in Russian Archive Training Scheme (RATS), organised
through CEELBAS, for a first foray into archival research and many disturbing
encounters with a human-sized papier-mâché mouse. Sadly, that scheme is no
longer in existence, but I know that a whole generation of young scholars have
been grateful for a soft landing into the complex world of Russian archives.
My archival trips were enlivened by contact with many wonderful people. I greatly
valued the wry humour of Michel Abesser as we navigated the Komsomol archive
together, as well as our many conversations about late Soviet history over a beer
or at the Shawarma van. My flatmates on Prospekt mira, Andy Willimott, Jon
Waterlow and Alessandro Iandolo enabled me to navigate Moscow with bad
jokes, good conversation and much Baltika-7. Veterans of the Komsomol archive
Courtney Doucette, Mary- Catherine French and Adrienne Harris provided
invaluable support, good cheer and sometimes consolation, during my archive
trips. I would like to offer a particular thank you to Maria Menshikova for her
brilliant work as a research assistant in the final stages of the project. Chapters 1
and 4 have benefited greatly from her diligent digging in the archives.
My research would not have been possible without the support of archivists
and librarians in Russia and the UK. I would like to thank the librarians at the
viii Acknowledgements
British Library Newsroom and the Lenin Library in Moscow for their invaluable
help during this project. Galina Mikhailovna Tokareva, the now-retired archivist
at the youth section of the Russian Archive of Socio-Political History, ensured
that a little corner of a reading room on Profsoiuznaia would always belong to the
Komsomol. She nurtured a small group of mostly foreign researchers, even going
as far as to berate the cooks in the stolovaia when I expressed misgivings about
the kotlety. Her stories from the Soviet past (and strong opinions about the pre-
sent) provide some of the most enduring memories of this project.
This book has benefited from conversations with many people. Alex Boican,
Polly Jones, Alexandra Oberländer and Jan Plamper all offered detailed feedback
on chapters, and their comments and criticisms have helped make this a better
book. I would like to offer particular thanks to Kyrill Kunakhovich, whose pene-
trating comments greatly improved Chapter 5.
It has been gratifying to see a scholarly community emerge around socialist
media. Thomas C. Wolfe’s Governing Soviet Journalism placed the issue of Soviet
journalists on my agenda, and this book has benefited from many years of engage-
ment with his work. More recently, Christine Evans, Anikó Imre, Stephen Lovell,
Lars Lundgren, Sabina Mihelj, Dana Mustata, Kristin Roth- Ey and Natalia
Roudakova have contributed their own stimulating studies of socialist media, and
I have been lucky to benefit from their research, as well as participating in confer-
ence panels alongside them.
Over the course of this project I made many friends who reminded me why my
work was important, but also not to take it too seriously. My profound thanks to
Ana Baeza-Ruiz, Alex Boican, Josh Clayton, Jan van Duppen, Molly Flynn, Daniel
Levitsky, Sarah Marks, Raisa Sidenova and Tijana Stevanovic for their encourage-
ment over many years. Special thanks to two friends, both of whom I met while
on archive visits in Moscow. Dina Fainberg has been a source of intellectual
stimulation and friendship over many years. I’m so happy that our respective
books on Soviet journalists have finally seen the light of day. Anna Toropova has
been a true comrade during the many twists and turns that characterise a research
project and a life. I am incredibly grateful for her friendship.
My family have been unfailingly supportive, and not just during this project.
I’m so pleased to finally respond to the frequent question ‘how’s the book going?’
with a concrete answer. A special mention for my niece, Mia Huxtable, who might
one day grow up to write books of her own.
It’s impossible for me to adequately express my love and gratitude to Chrys
Papaioannou, a companion through the entirety of this project, which included
such highlights as tears at the complexity of Russian verbs of motion, impostor
syndrome, years of precarity and a research project that never seemed to end.
Without her incredible editing, sound advice and emotional support, I doubt
whether this book would ever have seen the light of day. I am incredibly lucky to
have spent the last two decades growing middle-aged with her.
List of Figures
1.1 Picture of a logging vehicle with the offending ‘swastika’ marked by

an official (Russian Archive of Socio-Political History) 26
1.2 Mock-up front page for a special edition commemorating the
80th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 1950 (Russian Archive of
Socio-Political History) 29
3.1 Komsomol’skaia pravda front page, May Day, 1960 90
4.1 The Komsomol’skaia pravda newspaper editorial office. The staff
of the Department of Letters work with incoming correspondence
(S. Lidov/Sputnik Images) 140
5.1 Glory to the Soviet People’s Great Feat! Komsomol’skaia pravda celebrates
Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, 13 April 1961, pp. 2–3 154
6.1 Soviet journalist Boris Pankin (Vladimir Savostyanov/TASS) 198
Every effort has been made to contact the image rights holders for this title. If any credit
has been omitted in error, we will endeavour to correct this in a future printing.
Note on Abbreviations and References
This book employs the following abbreviations in archival references:
HIA Hoover Institution Archives

GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii
RGANI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii
RGASPI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii
(Dokumenty Komsomola i molodezhnykh organizatsii)
TsGAM Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy
This book uses the conventional Russian archival subdivisions:
f. Fond (Collection)
op. Opis’ (Inventory)
d. Delo (File)
l. (pl. ll.) List (pl. listy) (Page/s)
References to Komsomol’skaia pravda

Editorial Meetings and Articles
Where possible, archival references contain a description of the source, the date
of creation, details of the archive and a reference:
Example: Kraminov to TsK KPSS, 26 Oct. 1954, RGANI, f.5, op.16, d.671, ll.34–35
The sole exception is for references to Komsomol’skaia pravda editorial meetings
(letuchki) which, for reasons of space, refer only to the date of the meeting, the
delo and the list. As the paper’s letuchki are all preserved in RGASPI, f.98, op.1,
this information is omitted from the reference.
Example: 13 Oct. 1954, d.131, ll.38–39
Similarly, when newspaper articles from Komsomol’skaia pravda are cited, the
name of the publication is omitted:
Example: V. Efimov, ‘Sovetskoe sotsialistichskoe gosudarstvo’, 1 Feb. 1950, 3.
Introduction: Reformers
and Propagandists
The Paradoxes of Post-war Soviet Journalism
On 25 February 1956, in the early hours of the morning, Dmitry Goriunov,

editor-in-chief of the youth newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, reached for his
heart medication.1 For the last four hours, delegates in the Kremlin hall at the
Twentieth Party Congress had listened with horror as Nikita Khrushchev attacked
his predecessor’s ‘grave abuse of power’, revealing Stalin’s role in the terror and
lamenting his deviations from a Leninist course.2 A week later, in an internal edi-
torial meeting, Goriunov’s colleagues were no less shaken. They knew the Congress
demanded radical changes in their working practices, but were unsure how to
proceed. For long periods, they sat in silence. Journalists’ confusion was under-
standable: for a quarter of a century the Soviet press had been a vital cogwheel in
Stalin’s ruling apparatus; now journalists and editors were being asked to overturn
their ways of thinking and working. In the years that followed, journalists at
Komsomol’skaia pravda reimagined the newspaper as a site upon which
Khrushchev’s, and later Brezhnev’s, priorities could be promoted and enacted. To
perform their role as propagandists journalists needed a new mode of address
which would offer space for readers to think about their place in the socialist
experiment and their relations with their fellow citizens. But as they considered
the future, journalists were forced to confront their complicity in the crimes of the
Soviet past. How could they regain readers’ trust after years of varnishing the truth?
This book begins in the rubble of post-war reconstruction and ends in the
messy aftermath of the Prague Spring: twenty-five years in which Soviet journalism
was transformed. Newspapers had always been recognised as a vital component
of Party rule: ‘a weapon’, to use Stalin’s words, that allowed the Party to speak
‘every day, every hour, with the working class in its own language’.3 As the country
began its long road to reconstruction in May 1945, the content of Soviet news
papers mocked these rousing words. Newspapers were full of sober resolutions
and formulaic editorials; ritual praise for the country’s leader often drowned out
1 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 273.
2 Ibid., 271.
3 Quoted in D. Dubrovskii, V. Dukel’skii, ‘Znaete li svoego chiatatel’ia?’, 5 May 1932, 2.
News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform. Simon Huxtable, Oxford University Press.
© Simon Huxtable 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.003.0001
2 News from Moscow
more readable stories. In early 1952, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Party Organisation

admitted: ‘Much of what we print on the pages of our paper does not satisfy our
readers . . . The pages of our paper are often filled with boring, grey material.’4 It
was a different story by the end of the 1960s when newspapers were speaking a
language very different to the dry scholasticism of late Stalinism. Enticing layouts,
reader-friendly features on technology, travel and nature, coupled with discussions
of morals and ethics, transformed the post-war newspaper, and helped overcome
a crisis of Party propaganda that had long afflicted journalists’ lives.5
The media, alongside the arts, had been at the heart of the Stalin cult; after his
death it emerged as a privileged space for rethinking socialism’s meanings. But
despite its centrality, the press appears as an afterthought in recent media histor
ies. While radio, television and cinema have been revealed as dynamic spaces for
reimagining post-war communism, newspapers have so far played second fiddle.
As the bright young things of broadcasting experimented with new technologies
and new formats, the press has taken on the appearance of grandpa in his
favourite chair, telling stories that people had long since tired of hearing. This
book is not an act of advocacy for the Thaw press, and it details many episodes in
which the press failed to live up to its lofty goals, but it does argue that news
papers, just like radio, television and cinema, were a site upon which burning
questions of Thaw socialism and Soviet modernity could be discussed. Who was
the socialist person: what did they believe, what should they believe and how
should they behave? Were there new ways for humans to relate to each other, new
paths to the future? And, even if the fundamental tenets of the system could not
be debated, could it be improved through new ways of organising industry,
different forms of education, and by exposing the lawlessness that bedevilled
everyday life?
News From Moscow is about the difficult process of de-Stalinising the press,
and shows how journalists at the country’s leading youth newspaper,
Komsomol’skaia pravda, imagined and reimagined the newspaper’s social and
political role during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I argue that journalists occupied
an ambiguous position in the cultural politics of the Thaw: they embraced their
role as Party propagandists and derived much prestige from disseminating its
messages, while also envisaging a central role for themselves as agents of social
change.6 As propagandists, journalists recast tired Stalinist codes, seeking out
new ways of turning dry resolutions into articles that could genuinely inspire. As
4 ‘Otchetnyi doklad partbiuro redaktsii Komsomol’skaia pravda’, 10 Mar. 1952, TsGAM, f.1968,
op.1, d.27, l.24.
5 On this crisis see David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination,
and Terror Under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
6 The term ‘propagandist’ may appear pejorative, but it is the way journalists referred to them-
selves. I use it in this book as a non-evaluative term to describe journalists’ work to further the Party’s
priorities.
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 3
activists, they tried to promote more long-lasting change by supporting and

implementing new initiatives which, so they hoped, would wipe away the vestiges
of Stalinism. These two orientations need not have conflicted; in practice, how-
ever, they often did, as journalists’ plans for building communism clashed with
the Party’s own ideas. Journalists were able to advocate for change—and were
often quite daring in their attempts to enact it—but such initiatives could only
succeed if their plans received the approval of a group of officials who were not
always receptive. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of intellectuals, journalists
were the ‘dominated fraction of the dominating class’.7 Their ability to set the
terms of debate and disseminate their ideas to millions gave them considerable
cultural capital. What they lacked was the political power to put these reformist
ideas into practice.
We know from countless memoirs and interviews that the Thaw generation’s
plans never came to fruition: that era of hope ended with the invasion of
Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Those accounts often lend a retrospective coher-
ence to a somewhat unclear set of ideas—the limits of post-war reform were also
the limits of journalists’ own outlook. If we try to untangle the threads we see that
many Thaw journalists held out hope for a better future: a path to communism
fuelled by the heady brew of human kindness, modern technology and Marxism-
Leninism. However, what emerges from these memoirs seems oddly decaffein-
ated, with journalist’s role as Party propagandists replaced with a vaguely
oppositional stance as defenders of the humanistic values. Such versions of the
past are not fabrications—this book provides ample evidence of those values in
action—but they often omit the fact that journalists saw themselves as servants of
the Party. For all the creativity journalists displayed in rooting out corruption,
creating forums for dialogue and devising schemes to drive the country forward,
journalists were committed to communist rule and saw the trumpeting of Soviet
achievements as an extension, not a contradiction, of reform. But as Thaw news
papers ventured more and more often into an ideological grey zone, journalists
soon found that their twin roles as propagandists and reformers were not always
compatible.
Overcoming the Past
Komsomol’skaia pravda was not in favour of The Thaw, the novella that would give
the post-Stalin decade its name. The paper’s review, published in June 1954,
argued that its distinguished author, Ilya Ehrenburg, was too concerned with the
‘dark sides of life’ and that the book’s characters were ‘spiritually empty, broken
7 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1993), 196.
4 News from Moscow
people’.8 The real task of literature, its author pronounced confidently, was to cre-
ate ‘life-affirming’ art which would ‘nurture a cheerful, brave youth . . . ready to
perform any feat in the name of the Fatherland and its people’.9 In private, jour-
nalists at the paper were no less critical, and claimed that Ehrenburg’s story had
been successful only because it ‘tugged on a person’s darkest heartstrings’.10 They
attacked his central metaphor of a thawing winter, and rejected his reading of the
past. ‘The chronology is wrong’, one journalist told colleagues: ‘In our country the
thaw started in October 1917.’11
Journalists’ harsh views on one of the iconic texts of the Khrushchev era shows
that they benefited from the Soviet intelligentsia’s battles for freedom but, when
push came to shove, they stood on other side of the barricades.12 Politically, Soviet
journalists stood somewhere between the artistic intelligentsia, committed to a
far-reaching programme of de-Stalinisation, and a technical intelligentsia which
was happy to trade political quiescence for scientific freedom.13 Journalists at
Komsomol’skaia pravda were certainly conscious of the need for deep and mean-
ingful change, but their priorities were tightly interwoven with those of the polit
ical elite.
The contested reaction to Ehrenburg’s story, which offered readers a hopeful
metaphor for a country emerging from the bitter chill of Stalinism, is also a
reminder that term’s meaning has long been disputed. After the Soviet Union’s
fall, the period’s protagonists weaved an optimistic narrative, focusing nostalgic
ally on liberals’ dashed hopes for a better future—hopes blown asunder by the icy
gusts of the Brezhnev era.14 Today, scholars are more critical of this idealised
story. While many historians have emphasised the positive changes of the period,
such as Khrushchev’s house-building programme and widespread improvements
in living standards, others have pointed to the period’s illiberal core, particular in
terms of attitudes to crime.15
8 ‘V zhizneutverzhdenii—sila nashei literatury’, 6 Jun. 1954, 2.

9 Ibid. 10 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, l.131. 11 27 Sep. 1954, d.131, l.112.
12 It should be borne in mind that the paper had been burned by its earlier support for Vladimir
Pomerantsev’s essay on sincerity, which resulted in censure from the Central Committee. Original
article: S. Bocharov, V. Zaitsev et al. ‘Zamalchivaia ostrye voprosy: Pis’mo k redaktsii’, 17 Mar. 1954, 3;
Central Committee response: ‘O publikatsii v gazete Komsomol’skaia pravda pis’ma v zashchitu stat’i
V.M. Pomerantseva ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, 24 Mar. 1954 in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura,
1953–1957. Dokumenty, ed. by V. Iu. Afiani (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 211. On the paper’s reaction to
this criticism see 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, ll.128–42.
13 On the liberal intelligentsia see Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience
and Memory on Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s
Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009). On the technical
intelligentsia see Maria Rogacheva, The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
14 Bittner, Many Lives, 5–7; Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd, ‘The Thaw as Event’, in The Thaw:
Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, ed. by Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 24.
15 Stephen Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home:
There is much to be said for the Thaw metaphor, however. Not only does it
capture the provisional nature of these changes, with the tantalising prospect of
spring counterbalanced by the threat of winter’s return, the term at least registers
the fact that a fundamental change occurred.16 Put simply, the Soviet Union after
the Thaw was not the same as the country that entered that process.17 While there
were still prohibitions, people spoke and lived their lives more freely; though
crime became a public obsession, mass terror became a thing of the past; and in
the midst of a Cold War, the country opened itself to the world. The term is par-
ticularly apposite for the cultural sphere, where exciting new possibilities for self-
expression were counterbalanced by the ever- present possibility of being
silenced—sometimes, as was the case for Ehrenberg, by journalists who did not
share their values.18 In this monograph, ‘the Thaw’ stands for a process of rapid
change—uneven, unsettling and radical—that challenged and recast the certain-
ties of the Stalin era. Journalists’ daily task was to smooth over those doubts and
present readers with an authoritative view of the world and of readers’ place in it.
The newspapers discussed in this book were, to recast Trotsky’s statement
about art, both mirror and hammer: they reflected wider political developments
and societal discussions even as they sought to sculpt them into a
revolutionary shape.19
The Thaw’s significance can only be understood with reference to the country’s
tumultuous early decades. In May 1945, weeks after the population celebrated the
raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda
were celebrating their paper’s twentieth anniversary. With a circulation of less
than 10,000 in 1925, the newspaper’s reach was initially much more limited than
the nearly 8 million copies printed at the end of the 1960s.20 Nevertheless, the
paper rapidly established itself as a mainstay of the country’s media. It had
Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015);
Susan E. Reid, ‘Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home’, Cahiers du
Monde russe, 47.1–2 (2006), 227–68; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees,
Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Brian Lapierre,
Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual
in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
16 This sense of impermanence was Ehrenburg’s intention: ‘short-term ambiguity amid a long-term
process’ as Bittner puts it (Many Lives, 3, see also 1–13 for useful background). For a detailed discus-
sion of the metaphor see Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 18–23.
17 Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 27.
18 Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1965); Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet
Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir:
Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Dina
Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982).
19 Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957
[1924]), Ch. 4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch04.htm [Accessed: 1
Aug. 2021].
20 ‘Tsifry pobed’, 5 May 1931, 1; Letopis’ periodicheskikh izdanii SSSR, 1966–1970 (Moscow:
Kniga, 1975).
6 News from Moscow
emerged at a time when Soviet newspapers were undergoing a sudden shift: early
Soviet newspapers had been unable to speak the language of the masses, with
readers frequently confused by their mixture of new terminology and bureaucratic
language. During NEP, however, a strict regime of ‘cost-accounting’ [khozraschet]
meant that newspapers now had to break even rather than relying on government
subsidies.21
To do so meant selling more newspapers; that, in turn, meant journalists
needed to better appeal to readers. Who, the paper’s journalists asked, was
Komsomol’skaia pravda for? The masthead gave one answer: it was the ‘Organ of
the Central and Moscow Committee of the VLKSM’—in other words, a branch
newspaper for the ‘All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League’ at both Union
and Moscow level. The League, which was more commonly known as the
‘Komsomol’, had been set up in 1918 as a means of raising a new generation of
communists and became a powerful means for inculcating Soviet values in ado-
lescents (entry was at the age of 14 or 15).22 The organisation oversaw a large
stable of youth newspapers and journals, including the literary journal Molodaia
gvardiia [Young Guard], and the children’s newspaper Pionerskaia pravda, but
Komsomol’skaia pravda would become its flagship. The resolution that gave the
green light to the new title stated that ’Komsomol’skaia pravda should be a leading
and at the same time a mass newspaper.’23 Not an impossible combination, but in
practice it made the paper’s content uneven, with resolutions, announcements
and reports of Komsomol meetings for activists all vying for space with material
catering to a broader readership. Conversations about the nature of the paper’s
audience—activists or the mass reader—consumed a great deal of journalists’
energy during the paper’s early years.24
The ‘Great Break’, the term given to the transformative period of breakneck
industrialisation that began in 1928 and transformed the Soviet Union, was no
less an upheaval for its propaganda apparatus. Komsomol’skaia pravda became the
spearhead of a new form of exhortatory ‘mass journalism’ which sought to drive
the masses to ever-greater labour feats.25 Journalists like Iurii Zhukov found fame
through their participation in the mass works of the first Five-Year Plan as
Komsomol’skaia pravda journalists staffed mobile editorial units to report from
21 Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in
Revolutionary Russia (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Peter Kenez, The Birth of
the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and
Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 46–69.
22 On the early Komsomol see Mathias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the
Transformation of the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2011).
23 Stanislav Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 1925–2005 gg. Ocherki istorii (Irkutsk: Irkutskaia
oblastnaia tipografiia, 2008), 36.
24 Ibid., 26–40; Lenoe, Closer, 70–100. 25 Lenoe, Closer, 103–244.
the country’s biggest construction projects.26 Some scholars argue that during
this period the press’s ‘mass enlightenment’ project of the 1920s was abandoned
in favour of an activist readership that was fed the information necessary for their
daily political work.27 The discursive standardisation of the press, which became
increasingly apparent as the 1930s progressed, certainly suggests that newspapers
were reorienting towards cadres. Through editorials and other propaganda art
icles, the officialese of speeches, resolutions and official announcements worked
its dismal magic on public gatherings across the country. However, the language
and style of reporting from the country’s new construction projects suggests that
journalists and editors sometimes had in mind a wider audience. The presence of
readers’ letters (or even, in the case of Komsomol’skaia pravda, their diaries and
poems) also suggests that newspapers had more than just activists in their sights.
By the late 1930s, the press printed articles debating questions of ethics, morality,
love and friendship as part of a turn away from class politics towards the i ndividual.28
Even the Stalin cult, which rose in prominence as the decade progressed, and con-
tinued into the post-war period, cannot be pigeonholed as a ritual staged for the
eyes and ears of activists. All of which suggests that the ‘mass journalism’ of the
1930s was aimed at a mass as well as an activist readership, and was considerably
more diverse—both in terms of form and function—than some accounts allow.
Catering for the press’s two audiences became a headache for post-war journal-
ists, with the dry language of speeches and resolutions limiting the paper’s appeal
to the wider readership. As the press’s activist focus waned, journalists had to find
new ways of reaching an audience that was understood as more diverse and more
demanding than ever before. Thaw journalism, its ethics and aesthetics, consti-
tuted a conscious reaction to a constellation of ideas and practices that took shape
under Stalin. Their response was not always negative: the paper’s ‘mass journal-
ism’ about the construction of factories, dams, canals and metro stations proved
to be an inspiration for their successors two decades later and dispatches from the
front lines during World War II contained echoes of the more individual-focused
forms of journalism that would become popular under Khrushchev.29 But as the
dust settled on the Secret Speech, there was a palpable sense that the Stalinist
newspaper’s pursuit of the activist reader needed to end.
26 Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 103–20; Iurii Zhukov, Liudi 30-x godov (Moscow: Sovetskaia
Rossiia, 1966).
27 Lenoe, Closer, 145–81; Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from
Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15–18.
28 Anna Krylova, ‘Soviet Modernity in Life and Fiction: The Generation of the “New Soviet Person”
in the 1930s’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2000.
29 On wartime journalism see Brooks, Thank You, 159–94; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in
Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012);
G. Zhirkov, Zhurnalistika stalinskoi epokhi (Moscow: FLINTA, 2016), 418–48. On the idea of a move-
ment towards individualisation see Anna Krylova, ‘Imagining Socialism in the Twentieth Century’,
Social History, 42.3 (2017), 315–41.
8 News from Moscow
More fundamentally, Thaw journalists were driven by the desire to end the
violence that Khrushchev’s speech had so shockingly revealed. During the 1930s,
newspapers like Komsomol’skaia pravda stoked outrage against perceived ‘enemies
of the people’ and lauded reprisals against ‘fascist terrorists and traitors to the
motherland’ but soon found themselves to be targets.30 At the height of the terror,
42 members of the paper’s 187 editorial staff were earmarked for dismissal by a
Komsomol commission.31 Of the paper’s first six editors, spanning a period from
1925 to 1937, five were repressed by the Soviet authorities, with the other dying of
natural causes. These included long-standing editor Vladimir Bubenkin, who
arrived at work on 7 July 1937 and never returned home.32 He, like his deputy
Anton Vysotskii, was arrested as a member of a ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist
organisation’ and shot in October 1937.33 Journalists and editors at other titles
suffered similar fates.34 Two decades later, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda
rarely discussed Stalinist violence in print, preferring to focus on more positive
exemplars from the period. Nevertheless, in their search for a more humane and
more ethical form of journalism, it is impossible not to see the afterimages of this
traumatic period of mass violence.
Journalism and Thaw Media
The post-Stalin period was Soviet media’s ‘prime time’: an era when Soviet
authorities conceived of the press—alongside radio, cinema and television—as
part of a single propaganda arsenal.35 Resolutions on media priorities were
backed by material resources—capital, cables, infrastructures—which enabled
images and texts to cross the country faster, and to a larger audience, than ever
before. Newspapers constituted an important part of this apparatus: they were, to
use the popular metaphor, a ‘mighty weapon of communist construction’, which
brought the experience of the masses in industry and agriculture, as well as the
sage words of the Communist Party, to the masses.36 Moreover, newspapers con-
tinued to hold a sacred position in Soviet mythology, given the importance of the
30 ‘Prokliat’e banditam!’, 1 Feb. 1937, 2. On enemies see Lenoe, Closer, 78–100; Brooks, Thank
You, 126–58.
31 A full list is provided in Gol’dfarb, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 138–44.
32 Vysotsky’s arrest is discussed on the ‘Open List’ of victims of the terror: https://ru.openlist.wiki/
Высоцкий_Антон_Антонович_(1905) [Accessed: 11 Jul. 2020].
33 V. Krivoruchenko, ‘K probleme repressii v molodezhnoi srede v 30-e gody XX stoletiia’, Znanie.
Ponimanie. Umenie, 2 (2011), http://zpu- journal.ru/e-zpu/2011/2/Krivoruchenko_Repressions
[Accessed: 5 May 2020].
34 Zhirkov, Zhurnalistika, 35–46.
35 Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the
Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
36 ‘Den’ pechati’, Pravda, 5 May 1955, 1.
underground press in sustaining the communist movement, and Lenin’s frequent

contributions to Iskra and Pravda.
But after Stalin’s death (and, sotto voce, before it) journalists were conscious of
the difficulties of turning this high-flown rhetoric into a product audiences
wanted to read. In the editorial letuchki and Party meetings that constitute this
book’s central source, we eavesdrop on discussions of journalistic style and hear
frequent debates about how readers would perceive the paper’s dispatches. Thaw
journalists were involved in a political project to revitalise and reform Soviet
socialism, but they realised that forming a new relationship with readers was the
key to success. Far from inaugurating a normalisation of Soviet language, then,
Stalin’s death revealed new possibilities for would-be authors of authoritative dis-
course.37 Newspapers became more eye-catching, more readable and more intim
ate in tone as part of a wider shift in media’s relationship with its audience. Just as
broadcast journalists grasped that tub-thumping speeches didn’t work well on air,
print journalists soon realised that officialese was also a turn-off for readers.38
Across Thaw media, there was a shift towards a more personalised form of address
in which journalists encouraged audiences to participate, play, discuss or construct—
in short, to make their own meanings.39
As the country’s third largest newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda was both
atypical and typical of Thaw journalism. No doubt the profession seemed very
different to a low-paid correspondent at a district-level newspaper looking to
Moscow to understand how they should write: examples of lower-level journalists
‘borrowing’ the ideas of their more prestigious colleagues were legion. But the
paper’s place as an exemplar is precisely what makes Komsomol’skaia pravda
worth examining: it gives us a sense of what was possible in the Thaw press as well
as the limits of experimentation. It also offers an insight into the relationship
between Party and youth during a particularly fraught period. The post-Stalin
period was ostensibly a period of renewal and youthfulness: many iconic images
of the era involve young people, from the idealistic activists making their way to
the Virgin Lands in 1954 to the vibrant chaos of Moscow’s World Festival of
Youth in 1957.40 But in a Cold War climate, journalists and officials feared that
Soviet youth’s ideological fervour was wilting in the face of an onslaught from the
37 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 36–76.
38 Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 192–6; Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of
Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168–78.
39 Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 14–17, 71–130; Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time: A
History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Alexei Golubev, ‘Making
Selves through Making Things: Soviet Do- It-
Yourself Culture and Practices of Late Soviet
Subjectivition’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 54.3–4 (2013), 517–41.
40 On youth and Sovietness, see Kristin Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture’,
Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2003, 51–9.
10 News from Moscow
west.41 Such fears were not limited to the Soviet Union, but in a country that
staked its reputation on its superior culture, the spectre of jazz lovers tuning into
the Voice of America and fashion-conscious stiliagi on the streets of Moscow
sparked fears about an erosion of values. Moreover, in a time of rapid change—
epitomised most of all by the sudden collapse of Stalin’s reputation—journalists
often expressed anxiety about Soviet youth’s ideological disorientation. For both
these reasons, youth journalists were keen to find a new path to their readers as
they sought to redirect young people’s energies away from the Cold War enemy
and regain their trust.
It was apt that the task of addressing Soviet youth fell to one of the country’s
more youthful editorial staffs. A place on the staff of Komsomol’skaia pravda was
one of the most prestigious postings for a young journalist: a position there was a
stepping-stone to а job at Pravda or Izvestiia, the country’s two leading news
papers, or with the news agency TASS. The 1950s witnessed a rapid turnover of
staff, with senior members of the editorial board like correspondents Aleksandr
Pliushch (b. 1905) and Semyon Garbuzov (b. 1908) moving elsewhere, to be
replaced with a new and younger cohort. It is striking how many of the leading
figures of Thaw journalism were born within a few years of each other:
Komsomol’skaia pravda’s editors Iurii Voronov (b. 1929) and Boris Pankin (b. 1931),
as well as the paper’s award- winning Vasilii Peskov (b. 1930), journalist-
sociologist Boris Grushin (b. 1929) and innovative pedagogue Simon Soloveichik
(b. 1930) were all part of this group. A generational identity—in itself, and later
for itself—was forged through common experiences: a war they were too young
to fight in, university study in the final years of Stalinism, and the shock of the
Secret Speech—all experienced at roughly the same age. As the novelist Vasilii
Aksenov (b. 1932) observed, his cohort, which by the early 1960s was in its thir-
ties, should be termed the generation of the fifties [piatidesiatniki], a group apart
from the shestidesiatniki.42 This grouping is not as celebrated as their sixties suc-
cessors, but for the journalists discussed in this book, their coming-of-age was
timely: it was they who reached positions of influence at the time of the Secret
Speech and could use that auspicious moment to reshape the Thaw newspaper
and, so they hoped, Thaw society.43
The journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda were mostly young; they were also
predominantly male. A survey of 1957 found that less than 40 percent of
Komsomoml’skaia pravda’s staff were women, the majority occupying lower-level
41 Mark Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi,
1945–1953’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 50.1 (2002), 37–61; Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last
Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 167–99 and passim; Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, 46–98; Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth,
Consumption, and State- Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 54–100.
42 Vasilii Aksenov, ‘Tri shineli v nos’, in Negativ polozhitel’nogo geroia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006), 24.
43 For a notable exception see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, which focuses on the post-war generation.
positions as staff writers, literary correspondents or sorting mail in the

Department of Letters. At middle and upper levels (departmental heads and
members of the editorial board), there were only eight women out of twenty-
five.44 Though figures like Izvestiia’s Tat’iana Tess and Komsomol’skaia pravda’s
Inna Rudenko are remembered as Soviet journalism’s ‘golden pens’, the almost
total omission of women from an anthology of twentieth-century Russian jour-
nalism suggests that women’s contribution to Thaw journalism has too often been
forgotten.45 Simple sexism might be part of the explanation—a problem not
unique to the Soviet Union, but real enough that the plot of a 1958 film, Our
Correspondent, could hang on a group of male journalists who refuse to believe
that a female colleague could have written an anonymous exposé.46 But
Komsomol’skaia pravda, at least from the memoirs we have available, seems to
have been largely free from such prejudices, which demands another explanation.
In a job where working hours were irregular, with shifts often extending from one
morning until the early hours of the next, motherhood proved a high barrier to
advancement. Because of these long hours, it was unusual for women to take on
major roles as correspondents, especially when one factors in the need for leading
journalists to spend time away from Moscow on assignment. Famed
‘Komsomolka’ journalist Ol’ga Kuchkina recalled making a conscious decision to
prioritise her career, leaving her young children with her husband, grandparents
or a nanny: ‘Women were expected to be a mother first, but I worked in a male
profession, and had a male lifestyle, and I made a male choice.’47 Given such con-
straints, it is little surprise that many women opted for the security and predict
ability of work in the paper’s Department of Letters or Department of Corrections
to the irregular hours and pressures of life as a top-level journalist.
It will not escape the reader that the ‘News from Moscow’ analysed in this
book looks very different from the Anglo-American conception of news. It isn’t
that stories about current events were absent from Soviet newspapers, nor that
journalists were uninterested in current affairs; rather that the Party’s reluctance
to relinquish control over information offered journalists little option other than
to express their dissatisfaction in private.48 Throughout the period discussed in
this book, domestic news remained the least prestigious form of writing available
to journalists—aside from the dispatches of a few famed foreign correspondents,
who generally worked for bigger newspapers. Most rank-and-file journalists were
more inclined to the aesthetic possibilities of other kinds of stories, from the
44 ‘Svedeniia o komsomol’skikh gazetakh’, undated 1957, RGASPI, f.1M, op.32, d.847, l.62.
45 Zhurnalisty XX veka: liudi i sud’by (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003).
46 Nash korrespondent (d. Anatolii Granik, 1958).
47 Melanie Ilic, Life Stories of Soviet Women: The Interwar Generation (London: Routledge,
2013), 119.
48 On the development of post-war news, see Simon Huxtable, ‘Making News Soviet: Rethinking
Journalistic Professionalism After Stalin, 1953–1970’, Contemporary European History, 27.1
(2018), 59–84.
12 News from Moscow
analytical sketch [ocherk] to the satirical feuilleton [fel’eton], each genre with its
own rich history.49 The stories that resulted, whether an essay on heroism or a
humorous skewering of an official taking backhanders, should also be considered
as ‘news’. Such stories reveal that Soviet newspapers, despite appearing daily, were
based on different aesthetic principles and a different temporality to Anglo-
American newspapers: Soviet journalists’ attention was more often focused on
the far horizon of communism than the messy realities of daily events.
The story told in this book is, in part, a story of changing aesthetic norms as
journalists updated their writing to keep pace with the perceived needs of their
audience. Hand-in-hand with that shift came a change in ethical norms. If Anglo-
American journalism was characterised by a quest for objective truth, conveyed
through a commitment to balance, Thaw journalists, who disdained ‘bourgeois
objectivity’ and happily called themselves propagandists, constructed their moral
code on a wider set of principles.50 The ideal Soviet journalist was characterised
not just by their mastery of Marxist-Leninist principles, but by a striving for
exemplary conduct in their personal life, a responsibility to readers, commitment
to the public good and a striving for the truth.51 While these moral injunctions
were sometimes contradicted in practice, professional discussions convey a clear
sense that the Thaw journalist was bound by a code of ethics and was responsible
for upholding the lofty ideals of the Soviet order.52
This book considers ‘Thaw journalism’ not only as an aesthetic and ethical
imperative but also as practice, with the clash between ideas and practices lying at
the heart of this book’s narrative. Despite journalists’ best intentions, much could
go wrong between the Party and Komsomol’s lofty pronouncements and the
printed page. Even under Stalin, where the leader sometimes vetted the texts of
his cult of personality and made edits to articles,53 journalists voiced—and some-
times enacted—their own ideas about the best way to fulfil the Party’s goals. After
his death, the renunciation of terror, coupled with expansion of journalism
education in universities and an intensification of debate in professional unions
and workplaces, created new possibilities for conversation and camaraderie.
Journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda often speak of the ‘spirit of the sixth floor’,
49 Komsomol’skaia pravda, for example, only possessed a handful of foreign correspondents, almost
all posted in the ‘fraternal states’ of Eastern and Central Europe. On foreign correspondents in the
post-war period see Dina Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the
Ideological Frontlines (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
50 Ibid., 3–9.
51 For one of many articles on this theme see F. Krutov, V. Sitov, ‘Ob avtoritete i dostoinstve zhur-
nalista’, Soveskaia pechat’, 6 (1957), 12–14.
52 On professional ethics see Natalia Roudakova, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth
Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 51–97; Mary-Catherine French, ‘Reporting
Socialism: Soviet Journalism and the Journalists’ Union, 1955–1966’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 2014.
53 For a well-researched example, see Malcolm Spencer, Stalinism and the Soviet-Finnish War,
1939–40: Crisis Management, Censorship and Control (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
referring to the location of their offices in the Pravda building: a spirit characterised
by shared values and mutual solidarity.54 Journalists at the paper worked together,
drank together and closed ranks when attacked.55 Though the Soviet editorial
team [redaktsiia] could be analysed as a disciplinary organism, with editorial
meetings a means of enforcing collective judgement on recalcitrant individuals, a
sense of shared values also insulated members of the collective from the authorities’
assaults.56 It was this ability, enabled by the collective, to assert one’s own creativity
in the face of attacks that made the practice of journalism more than a mere
recitation of Party slogans.
The authorities saw the situation rather differently. Though journalists enjoyed
more freedom than at any time in the previous thirty years, Khrushchev still
regarded journalists as the Party’s ‘assistants’, whose job it was to bring Party
ideology to the people. As he argued in a speech at the First Congress of Soviet
Journalists in 1959, journalists were a ‘faithful transmission belt’, who would ‘take
the Party’s decisions and bring them to the very heart of our people’.57 The image
is not especially flattering, since it suggests that journalists were a conduit for the
Party’s ideas rather than creative workers. And indeed, journalists’ everyday work
quite often resembled a mechanical process of placing TASS’s news stories and
Party resolutions onto the printed page. But although officials still exerted tight
control over newspapers, from phone calls on the vertushka to ‘conversations’
(read: dressings down) to discuss controversial articles, their influence was less
total in a post-terror era. Instructions became less prescriptive, discipline less
strict, so journalists could discharge their responsibilities with more freedom.58
Even if they slipped up, those unwelcome conversations generally led to a repri-
mand rather than dismissal. In this changing atmosphere, journalists began to
develop their own notions of professional excellence—a value that could be con-
ferred not just by the Party, but also, increasingly, by the perceptions of one’s
peers. Nevertheless, it is clear that officials did not always share the values of the
journalists under their supervision, and frequently took action to curb initiatives
they considered ideologically dangerous or—especially in the colder climate of
the Brezhnev era—to take action against the journalists who supported them.
54 E.g. Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Informirovannyi istochnik’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 19 Apr. 2011, https://
rg.ru/2011/04/19/ignatenlo.html [Accessed: 24 Aug. 2021].
55 See the interviews collected in Bol’she, chem gazeta, ed. by Liudmila Semina (Moscow: PoRog,
2006); Aleksei Adzhubei v koridorakh chetvertoi vlasti, ed. by Dmitrii Mamleev (Moscow:
Izvestiia, 2003).
56 Kharkhordin, Collective and Individual, 279–328.
57 Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd zhurnalistov. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gospolitizdat,
1960), 11–12.
58 A characteristic of Thaw culture more broadly: see Karl Aimermakher [Eimermacher], ‘Partiinoe
upravlenie kul’turoi i formy ee samoorganizatsii (1953–1964/67)’, in Ideologicheskie Komissii TsK
KPSS, 1958–1964. Dokumenty, ed. by Aimermakher et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 7.
14 News from Moscow
The question remains how scholars of the Soviet press should understand and
evaluate journalists’ work. One of the most stimulating attempts, by Thomas
C. Wolfe, argues that the Thaw press became a privileged site for thinking about
socialism and disseminating its ideology. In Wolfe’s account, journalists were
‘governors’, who would ‘supply the texts and images that would make the Soviet
readers aware of and a part of the processes through which their society was
realizing socialism’.59 In this Foucauldian reading, the Soviet press’s work was
essentially pedagogical: it involved a vast flow of messages from a centre
‘composed of those thinkers who understood what socialism was to be’ to a
periphery occupied by Soviet reader-citizens.60 But, as I suggest in this book,
messages flowed from readers to journalists as well as the other way round, and
journalism wasn’t simply concerned with images and representations. Wolfe’s
discussion of the Thaw largely focuses on what journalists called the ‘moral and
ethical theme’: discussions of individual conduct in which gazetchiki involved
themselves in the forms of government he describes. But there were other, less
subtle, ways for journalists to govern, from hectoring editorials to denunciations
of the latest US outrage. Even though journalists often carried out those duties
with creativity, it is unclear in such instances whether journalists should be seen
as governors or a ‘transmission belt’. Wolfe’s governing hub is a centre of ideas and
images and this book, too, shows how Thaw journalists tried to make Party
strictures meaningful for readers, and were actively involved in thinking how the
socialist person should be. Yet there were other, far less discursive, ways for power
to be exercised: in tandem with the Party elite, the courts, the police. Thaw
journalism was sometimes less heroic than Wolfe sometimes makes out: governing
was certainly about words but it was also about actions that went beyond the
printed page and into the world outside. This book shows how Thaw journalists
used their words to remake the press—and by extension the post-war Soviet
Union—and the many obstacles they faced along the way.
Book Structure
To explore the world of the Soviet journalist in the post-war period, I draw on a
range of archival and printed sources. Komsomol’skaia pravda’s internal archive,
which scholars were once able to draw on for their work, perished in a fire at the
paper’s offices in 2006. However, a wide range of documents from the paper are
preserved in state archives, including transcripts and protocols of editorial
letuchki and Party meetings, correspondence with the Party and Komsomol,
59 Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 18.
60 Ibid.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pour moi seule
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Pour moi seule

roman
Author: André Corthis
Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72393]
Language: French
Original publication: Paris: Albin Michel, 1919
Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POUR MOI

SEULE ***
ANDRÉ CORTHIS
POUR MOI SEULE

ROMAN
PARIS
ALBIN MICHEL, Éditeur
22, RUE HUYGHENS, 22
DU MÊME AUTEUR
Chez FASQUELLE, Bibliothèque Charpentier.
Gemmes et Moires (poésies).

Mademoiselle Arguillès (roman).
Le Pauvre amour de doña Dalbine (roman).
Le Pardon Prématuré (roman).
EN PRÉPARATION :
L’Entraîneuse (roman).
Chez PIERRE LAFFITTE.
Petites vies dans la Tourmente
A PARAITRE :
Les Rameaux rouges (roman).

IL A ÉTÉ TIRÉ DE CET OUVRAGE
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Tous droits de traduction et reproduction réservés pour tous pays. Copyright by

Albin Michel 1919.
A ma chère Maman
je dédie ce livre
POUR MOI SEULE
Sur le toit de tuiles rousses que je vois de ma fenêtre, une fumée

voudrait monter, que rabat le grand vent. Elle bouillonne au sortir de
la cheminée noire comme un jet d’eau sans force ; elle se couche et
s’échevèle. En la regardant, je pense à beaucoup de choses que je
ne saurais pas bien dire. Certes, j’ai de l’instruction. A Paris, j’ai suivi
des cours. Je lis quelquefois. Et l’on m’a toujours affirmé que je fais
bien les lettres. Mais il est difficile de connaître ce que l’on éprouve
et de l’exprimer exactement.
Je voudrais cependant m’y appliquer. Les journées sont longues
et ma sœur Guicharde me décharge de tout le soin de la maison. En
ce moment (c’est aujourd’hui samedi), elle s’occupe en bas à
changer le papier bleu sur les planches du buffet. Elle est prompte
dans ses gestes, et les vaisselles déplacées font en se heurtant un
tapage qui inquiéterait bien mon mari, plus ménager que moi-même,
et qui devrait peut-être m’émouvoir.
Seule dans ma chambre, devant ce papier que je viens de
prendre, je me trouve toute sotte, comme on dit ici. Et qu’est-ce que
je vais raconter, puisqu’il ne s’est rien passé qui ne fût au dedans de
moi ? Cependant, je voudrais essayer… Ce sera bien ordinaire sans
doute, et tourné maladroitement, mais personne n’en pourra rire et le
feu seul connaîtra ces pages, quadrillées de bleu, après que mon
écriture les aura couvertes.
… Notre maison est sombre et froide avec un seul étage et de
très grands greniers. Point de jardin. Une cour seulement, par
derrière, nous sépare de la chapelle désaffectée d’un ancien
couvent ; un acacia maigre y puise un peu de vie. Ses branches
balancées touchent à nos fenêtres et s’allongent de l’autre côté
jusqu’aux petits vitraux jaunes et bleus ; ses fleurs, flétries presque
en naissant mais cependant odorantes, recouvrent au printemps
avec la même abondance notre toit aux fortes lucarnes et le toit
ovale que surmontent encore la cloche et la croix. Pas de vue de ce
côté et pas de vue sur la rue, qui est étroite. Elle s’appelle la rue des
Massacres en souvenir d’horribles choses qui s’accomplirent là
pendant les guerres de religion… Mais ce n’est pas ainsi que je dois
commencer.
Il y a cinq ans que je suis venue dans cette ville, il y en a quatre
que je suis mariée et que j’habite cette maison. Les premiers jours…
Ah ! ce n’est point encore cela. Vais-je enfin y parvenir ? Tout à
l’heure ils m’appelleront pour le souper et je n’aurai pas écrit quatre
lignes. Il me faudrait les premières phrases ; le reste sera bien
facile… Cette fois, j’ai trouvé ; voici qui est vraiment pour moi le
commencement de tout :
Je me souviendrai ma vie entière du jour où maman nous
raconta son histoire.
*
* *
Nous étions à Paris alors, quelques mois après la mort de mon

père, et nous occupions rue des Feuillantines ce petit appartement
propre et triste où j’avais toujours vécu. Un brouillard vert, traversé
d’or, flottait entre les branches des arbres lointains où commençaient
de naître les premières feuilles. Penchée à la fenêtre ouverte, je les
regardais ; je regardais le ciel, bleuâtre sous ses voiles gris étirés
déjà et prêts à se rompre, et je dis tout à coup :
— Maman, n’est-ce point cette année que nous irons à la
campagne dans votre pays ?
— Ferme la fenêtre, Alvère, dit maman. Je m’enrhume et tu vas
prendre froid.
— Mais il ne fait plus froid… c’est le printemps.
Cependant j’obéis. Guicharde, avec des ciseaux qui grinçaient,
taillait sur la table un corsage d’étoffe noire. Nous étions dans la
salle à manger où se passaient nos journées, car il n’y avait pas de
salon et nos deux chambres étaient obscures et petites. Je me
rappelle ces pauvres meubles que nous avons dû vendre, car ils ne
valaient pas ce que leur transport eût coûté, le bureau de mon père,
dans un coin, avec le papier à lettres et les livres de comptes, les six
chaises dont le cuir très usé commençait à blanchir, et la petite
étagère à côté du buffet bas où les vieux journaux étaient rangés
soigneusement, près de quelques boîtes ayant contenu des poudres
ou de la mercerie, vides, mais fort nettes, et qui pouvaient servir un
jour.
— J’aimerais bien aller dans votre petite maison, maman. J’ai
rêvé cette nuit des trois figuiers autour du bassin et du potager en
terrasse d’où l’on voit toute la plaine avec le Rhône, et les Alpes au
loin quand l’air est bien limpide, après les grandes pluies.
— Avec nos pauvres rentes, dit Guicharde, nous pourrions là-bas
vivre mieux qu’à Paris. J’ai payé les œufs quatre francs ce matin et
nous n’aurons pas de dessert à dîner parce que les châtaignes se
finissent et que les confitures ont augmenté encore.
— Hélas ! soupira maman, ce serait mieux sans doute. Oui, ce
serait mieux…
Elle secouait la tête. Une détresse profonde qui montait de son
cœur serré à son pauvre visage faisait trembler et se crisper chaque
muscle sous la peau mince et pâle. Des larmes montaient à ses
yeux toujours beaux.
— Ce serait mieux, je me le répète souvent. Mais je n’ose pas
retourner là-bas. J’ai peur de « les » revoir. « Ils » lui ont fait trop de
mal. « Ils » m’ont trop fait souffrir.
Elle parlait des parents de mon père, nous le savions. Nous
savions que la misère de notre vie était due à cette laide colère qu’ils
avaient sentie en voyant un des leurs épouser une fille pauvre et de
naissance presque ouvrière. Et, sans les avoir jamais vus, comme
nous les haïssions, ces Landargues, de Saint-Jacques, directeurs
des grandes carrières de Saint-Jacques au bord du Rhône où mon
père aurait dû faire sa fortune comme chacun des fils de cette
famille y faisait la sienne depuis plus de deux cents ans ! Cependant
nous ne redoutions point de nous trouver en leur présence.
Guicharde, rancunière et point timide, souhaitait le plaisir insolent de
les bien regarder et puis de détourner la tête en gonflant une bouche
méprisante, et moi je ne jugeais pas qu’ils valussent ce sacrifice que
nous leur faisions, de n’occuper point une maison qui nous venait
des parents de maman et dont le loyer ne nous coûterait rien.
— Vraiment, dit ma sœur, interrompant son ouvrage et
s’asseyant au bord de la table, le temps serait venu, je crois, de
prendre une décision. Pourquoi nous obstiner à rester ici et que
pourrions-nous regretter de Paris ? Nous ne voyons jamais
personne, nous ne prenons pas un plaisir, et nous mangeons très
mal, quoique dépensant pour notre nourriture beaucoup d’argent.
— Je sais, continuait de soupirer maman, je sais bien.
J’insistai à mon tour.
— Le jardin nous donnerait quelques légumes. Nous pourrions
porter des souliers de toile avec des semelles en corde, qui ne
coûtent pas bien cher. Et le bon air de Lagarde nous ferait à toutes
tant de bien !
— Oui, oui, disait maman… l’air est bon… mais les gens ne le
sont pas…
— C’est ridicule, s’exclama Guicharde, tout à fait ridicule. Ces
Landargues, en somme, ne sont pas tout le pays.
— Mais, dit maman, et jamais elle ne m’avait paru si humble et si
découragée, ce ne sont pas seulement les Landargues, c’est tout le
pays que je redoute.
— Tout le pays, répéta Guicharde, — et comme elle n’éprouvait
rien qu’avec violence, elle n’était pas en ce moment surprise, mais
stupéfaite. — Vous redoutez tout le pays !… Et pourquoi cela ?
— Parce que tu étais déjà au monde depuis plusieurs années
quand je me suis mariée, ma petite fille, et que là-bas, les gens le
savent bien.
Maman dit cela sans baisser la voix. Elle avait porté son secret
trop longtemps et maintenant elle le laissait aller devant nous,
simplement, parce que le cœur s’ouvre de lui-même comme font les
mains quand elles sont trop lasses et que toute la volonté ne peut
plus servir de rien. Elle ne parut pas gênée du silence qui suivit ses
paroles, et le petit soupir qu’elle poussa était comme de
soulagement… Je la regardais, et, dans cette seconde, me
rappelant toutes les sévérités de notre éducation, les livres
défendus, les coiffures sans fantaisie, les belles phrases
impérieuses sur l’honneur féminin, je sentais, je le crois bien, plus de
trouble encore que de désespoir et je ne pouvais plus rien
comprendre… Mais Guicharde avait dix ans de plus que moi. Elle
posa doucement ses ciseaux. On eût dit qu’elle écoutait quelque
chose, et sûrement se lamentaient autour d’elle toutes les détresses
qui s’étaient un jour levées autour de notre mère. Et puis elle se jeta
vers elle, l’enveloppa de ses deux bras, et glissant sur les genoux :
— Oh ! maman, ma pauvre maman ! gémit-elle, sur un ton de
tendresse que n’avait jamais eu sa voix un peu rude.
*
* *
Maman appuya sa tête sur l’épaule de Guicharde et se laissa

bercer ainsi. Dans le silence, j’entendais rouler une lente et lourde
voiture sur les pavés de notre rue. Un fouet claquait allégrement,
mais on devinait bien qu’il ne touchait pas aux bêtes et rythmait
seulement au-dessus de leur fatigue une chanson entraînante. La
fenêtre était demeurée ouverte. Un petit souffle faisait doucement
trembler sur la table l’étoffe que tout à l’heure taillait Guicharde.
— Vous comprenez, disait maman rêvant à mi-voix, tout
inconsciente et apaisée, quand je suis entrée à l’usine pour y tenir
certains comptes, ils étaient tous très aimables pour moi. Il y avait le
père Landargues qui vivait encore ; mais il ne s’occupait plus de
grand’chose et il n’a pas tardé à mourir. Et puis Mme Landargues qui
faisait tout marcher. Elle avait déjà les cheveux blancs, à cette
époque, et aussi étincelants que peut l’être au soleil la cime du mont
Ventoux, et la figure bien fraîche, mais pas trop bonne, avec une
bouche toute serrée et sans lèvres, et des yeux gris, très durs. Il y
avait aussi Robert, le fils aîné qui était veuf et déjà bien malade, et
puis son fils à lui, le petit François.
Elle réfléchit et calcula :
— Il doit bien avoir plus de trente-cinq ans aujourd’hui. C’est lui
qui sera l’héritier de tout.
Je m’étais rapprochée d’elle, moi aussi ; je m’appuyais
maintenant à son fauteuil et, moins effrayée, quelquefois,
doucement, j’embrassais ses cheveux. Elle continuait, lentement et
comme heureuse que nous fussions enfin ses confidentes :
— Ils étaient bien aimables pour moi au début, oui, et même ils
avaient l’air assez simple et de ne pas trop s’en croire. Ils m’ont
invitée deux fois à déjeuner… Mais après, oh ! après ! quand ils ont
vu que Georges devenait amoureux de moi…
Tout maigre et consumé que fût son visage, tout enveloppé de
misérables cheveux gris, qu’il paraissait jeune en ce moment, avec
cette flamme qui se levait soudain au fond des yeux, ces yeux de
maman, un peu gris, un peu bleus, verdâtres quelquefois, d’une
couleur indécise, hésitante, eût-on dit, et timides comme l’était ce
cher être tout entier ! qu’il paraissait jeune, ce visage, à ce tourner
ainsi vers l’amour d’autrefois !
— Alors, voilà, vous comprenez, mes petites… Moi, vous le
savez, j’étais la fille d’un menuisier, bien artiste, c’est vrai, et qui
aimait les livres, et qui savait parfaitement réparer les vieux
meubles, avec leurs pieds tordus et toutes leurs petites sculptures,
mais enfin, un ouvrier tout de même, et qui employait seulement
deux ouvriers. Et Georges, c’était M. Georges Landargues, le
second fils des Landargues, de Saint-Jacques… Alors, ses parents
à lui, n’est-ce pas, c’était bien naturel qu’ils ne soient pas très
contents… Après seulement ils auraient pu être moins méchants.
Oh ! oui… après… parce que voilà… Quand Guicharde a été sur le
point de venir au monde, nous sommes partis tous les deux pour
Paris à cause du scandale… tout le monde savait… et nous ne
pouvions plus rester au pays. Ma mère était bien en colère. Elle
m’aurait gardée cependant, je le crois, parce que… le mal, c’est
avec un Landargues que je l’avais fait, et les Landargues, dans notre
région, vous ne pouvez pas savoir ce que c’est comme
importance… Mais c’est mon père qui ne pardonnait pas… Une fille
bien élevée comme j’avais été, avec de l’instruction et toutes ces
habitudes de dame qu’on m’avait données…
— Maman, disait Guicharde quand elle se taisait, la tenant
toujours serrée comme un enfant et lui caressant la joue de ses
lèvres, ma petite maman.
— … Oh ! ma grande… si tu savais… la honte… comme ça peut
faire du mal, mal comme de se couper ou de se brûler, aussi fort…
seulement ça ne guérit pas… Alors nous sommes venus à Paris,
dans une petite chambre d’abord, presque misérable. Georges
n’avait pas voulu demander un sou à ses parents parce qu’ils lui
avaient dit sur moi et sur lui de trop vilaines choses… Il a travaillé,
mais il connaissait seulement les carrières et comme il faut
commander à trois cents ouvriers. Dans les tissus, il n’y entendait
rien, et dans la porcelaine non plus, ni dans l’ameublement. Il a
essayé de tout ça. Il ne gagnait pas grand’chose. Un hiver nous
étions trop malheureux. Il a écrit à sa mère. Elle a répondu : Si tu
renonces à tes droits sur mon héritage, que tu ne mérites pas, et si
je dois n’entendre plus jamais parler de toi, je veux bien te donner
cent mille francs… Naturellement il a renoncé à tout… Cent mille
francs… pensez donc…
— Tout de même, dit Guicharde qui était pratique.
— Ah ! il fallait voir où nous en étions… A cause de ces cent mille
francs, pendant quelques mois nous avons été bien heureux.
Georges me disait : je cherche une bonne affaire, et j’y entrerai
comme associé. Je ne sais pas bien être employé. Je n’ai pas été
dressé à ça… mais comme patron, tu vas voir… Et il a bien trouvé
l’affaire : seulement, elle était mauvaise et les cent mille francs ont
failli être perdus. On a pu en sauver la moitié ; mais nous avions eu
si peur… si peur, que nous ne voulions plus risquer rien. Nous les
avons placés en fonds d’État pour être tranquilles et votre père a
trouvé chez Marpeau cette petite place de caissier où il est resté
plus de vingt ans, jusqu’à sa mort…
Nous savions certains de ces détails, mais les plus familiers
aujourd’hui étaient pour nous comme les inconnus et nous écoutions
avec un étonnement triste et passionné cette histoire nouvelle…
Guicharde baissa la voix pour demander :
— Et alors, maman… votre mariage ?…
— Voilà, dit-elle. C’est quand mon père allait mourir. Il ne voulait
pas me revoir et j’en avais du chagrin… Georges, — il était si
doux… et un : peu craintif aussi… comme moi ! — il espérait
toujours que sa mère pardonnerait, et qu’elle autoriserait notre
mariage. Comme il avait été très bien élevé, et ne pouvait pas se
passer de ce consentement… Il me le disait et je le comprenais bien.
Mais il a fini par se rendre compte qu’elle le détestait pour la vie et
que sa colère contre lui, rien ne pouvait la faire plus grande. Alors,
un jour, après en avoir bien parlé, nous sommes partis tous les deux
pour la mairie et pour l’église sans rien dire à personne. Comme à
Paris on m’appelait déjà Madame Landargues, ça n’a rien changé ;
mais tu te rappelles bien, Guicharde ? c’est ce matin où, quand nous
sommes rentrés, nous t’avons apporté la belle poupée avec sa robe
rose, et il y avait un gâteau pour le dessert tout couvert de crème
glacée et de fruits confits.
— Mais oui, dit Guicharde, je me rappelle très bien… J’étais si
contente !… Ah ! c’était pour cela le gâteau et la poupée… On ne
sait pas comprendre quand on est petit.
Maman se redressa dans son fauteuil, et regardant par la fenêtre
le ciel et ces vilains toits gris qui commençaient de devenir bleus :
— Voilà, dit-elle encore… voilà… Vous comprenez, mes petites,
pourquoi je vous ai élevées comme j’ai fait. Deux heures tous les
matins dans une petite pension du quartier. Et je vous conduisais
moi-même, et j’allais vous chercher. Comme instruction, c’était bien
suffisant puisque je ne voulais pas que vous fassiez aucun travail qui
vous aurait éloignées de moi… Ah ! non ! j’avais trop peur… Dans
toutes ces maisons où l’on emploie des jeunes filles, dans tous ces
bureaux, c’est mon histoire qui recommence… Non !… non !… Je ne
voulais pas… J’aimais mieux que vous ne gagniez aucun argent.
J’aimais mieux notre misère et vous garder là, près de moi,
toujours… Alors, si je vous ai élevées bien sévèrement, si j’avais
peur de tout, des amies, des livres, des théâtres, de la rue, si vous
vous êtes toujours bien ennuyées, vous comprenez, maintenant, il
ne faut pas m’en vouloir…
Elle n’avait pas su nous dire de bien grands mots et elle
n’attendait pas que nous lui en disions. Mais je crois que depuis
longtemps elle éprouvait un grand besoin de ne plus nous mentir sur
elle-même, et presque vieille déjà, languissante et affaiblie, de se
remettre entre nos mains. Elle se pressait maintenant contre
Guicharde, et quelquefois contre moi, avec une tendresse touchante
et rassurée. Nous étions désormais ses confidentes et son soutien.
Et quand, ce même jour, un peu plus tard, ma sœur, dans sa
sagesse, eut décidé qu’un passé aussi lointain, suivi des années les
plus honorables, ne pouvait vraiment nous empêcher d’organiser
notre vie selon la raison et l’économie, elle approuva aussitôt,
obéissante et résignée.
*
* *
La maison de mon grand-père le menuisier était au cœur même

de la très vieille ville. D’autres maisons la pressaient ; son toit se
confondait parmi des toits inégaux. Le soir de notre arrivée, au sortir
de la petite gare, quand maman étendant le bras nous dit : c’est là !
nous ne vîmes rien d’abord au flanc de la colline qu’un
enchevêtrement de tuiles, couleur d’amandes brûlées, sur de petits
murs couleur de rouille et de miel. Le clocher carré de l’église portait,
visible à tout le ciel dans une belle couronne de fer forgé, sa plus
grosse cloche, et toutes les cheminées des maisons s’élevaient vers
lui, surmontées chacune de deux briques, inclinées et unies par leur
pointe comme sont les doigts roides des saintes en prière dans les
sculptures primitives et dans les tableaux d’autrefois.
C’était à la fin d’avril et, comme le vent soufflait, il faisait encore
froid. La nuit tomba dans le temps que nous gravissions le chemin
qui monte. Par les petites rues tournant sous des voûtes, par les
petites places qui s’empanachent d’un gros orme ou de trois
acacias, nous gagnâmes la ruelle où s’ouvre notre maison. Le vent
plus fort y coulait comme une lame et déchirait les poumons. Nos
valises liées de cordes et le gros sac de moleskine où étaient nos
provisions de route, tout alourdi de verres et de bouteilles qui
résonnaient à brinqueballer ainsi et à se heurter les uns contre les
autres, nous coupaient les doigts. Et personne ne nous attendait que
la simple maison mise en état par une servante de quinze ans que
Guicharde avait engagée par lettres adressées à la mairie deux
semaines auparavant.
Il fallut heurter trois fois, et cette fille enfin se décida à nous
ouvrir. Elle avait l’air niais et bon, la gorge déjà hardie dans un
corsage à raies roses, et de fausses pierres vertes, enchâssées de
cuivre, pendeloquaient à ses oreilles. En nous voyant, elle demeura
bêtement à rire sur le seuil sans même songer à nous débarrasser.
Mais déjà, dans les autres maisons, des rideaux se soulevaient
derrière les vitres verdâtres des petites fenêtres. Une porte
s’entr’ouvrait. Quelqu’un, d’un balcon, se penchait vers nous. Une
voix souffla :
— La femme de Georges Landargues, avec ses deux filles.
— Entrons, dit maman, entrons vite.
Et elle passa la porte, toute roide et violente de gestes, avec une
sorte de courage désespéré. Mais Guicharde, sur le seuil, demeura
derrière elle : elle fixa les fenêtres derrière lesquelles frissonnait
sournoisement une curiosité sans bienveillance et j’eus l’impression
que son dur et hardi regard faisait se détourner, derrière les rideaux
fanés, d’autres regards invisibles. Ensuite elle entra à son tour et la
petite servante referma la porte. Je dis tout bas :
— Nous sommes chez nous.
Je regardais le couloir que remplissait l’escalier de bois, les deux
portes ouvertes, à gauche sur la salle qu’enfumait une lampe coiffée
de jaune, à droite sur la cuisine où flambaient de menues branches
dans une large et noire cheminée… Déjà Guicharde relevait la
mèche de la lampe, ouvrait les placards, s’inquiétait de la façon dont
passeraient par l’escalier trop étroit nos malles que l’on devait porter
le lendemain. Maman se taisait. Il me semblait qu’elle baissait la tête
et serrait les épaules. Elle s’approcha d’une fenêtre qui devait
donner sur le jardin et regarda la nuit. Elle tremblait doucement.
Peut-être elle pensait à ces rideaux soulevés sur son arrivée, et
peut-être ce qui se chuchotait à cette heure, dans les maisons
obscures, venait jusqu’à elle.
— Je n’aurais pas dû revenir ici, dit-elle.
— Mais puisqu’il était impossible de faire autrement, remarqua
Guicharde, avec son bon sens un peu brusque.
Et elle demanda une bougie pour monter aux chambres.
Maman soupira :
— C’est vrai !
Résignée, elle s’assit devant la table où le couvert était mis. Elle
avait retiré sa jaquette noire garnie de faux astrakan, mais elle
conservait son petit chapeau de crêpe tout déformé et déplacé par le
voyage. Je le lui fis remarquer.
— Enlevez-le, maman. On dirait que vous n’êtes pas chez vous,
et que vous allez repartir.
Aussitôt elle obéit avec une tranquillité douce.
— C’est vrai, tout de même, dit-elle, que je suis chez moi… m’y
voici donc revenue, dans ma maison.
Elle me montra dans un coin une chaise de paille, très basse,
dont le simple dossier portait en relief trois abeilles sculptées dans
une couronne d’olivier.
— Tu vois, c’est là que je m’asseyais quand j’étais toute petite.
Et elle me montra encore, près de la fenêtre, une table carrée
avec des pieds en torsade qui luisaient sous la lampe :
— C’est là que j’écrivais mes devoirs. J’y ai préparé mon
certificat d’études. Après, je faisais surtout des comptes. C’est mon
oncle Jarny qui m’apprenait. Il avait été caissier à Paris dans une
grande maison de tissus.
Elle se tut, regardant de nouveau la fenêtre, et ce qu’elle voyait
maintenant, je le savais bien, était au delà des meubles et des
murs… Sa tristesse, en ce moment, me pénétra jusqu’au désespoir.
Son pauvre cœur saignait et pleurait dans mon cœur, et, doucement,
je passais ma main sur la petite main si pâle. Mais Guicharde entrait
à grands pas. Parlant des malles, elle déclara :
— Elles passeront, mais il faudra prendre garde à ne pas érafler
le mur.
Derrière elle venait la servante Adélaïde portant la soupière et
nous prîmes place pour le repas. Nous n’avions pas grand’faim. La
lampe continuait de fumer et d’éclairer mal. A travers l’odeur de sa
mèche grésillante l’odeur humide et morte des vieilles pierres et des
vieux plâtres tenus trop longtemps dans l’ombre nous devenait
sensible. La grande force du vent, se pressant contre les murs,
menaçait de faire crouler cette pauvre demeure. Dans son
grondement des lanières claquaient, qui, semblait-il, retombaient sur
nos cœurs tressaillants. Par instant, il semblait s’apaiser. Mais de
ces silences nous venait une oppression plus grande, car nous
sentions bien qu’il était toujours là, couché sur la maison,
l’enveloppant de sa force pour bondir et siffler de nouveau dès qu’il
aurait bien pris son repos effrayant. La fatigue maintenant pesait sur
nous au point que nous ne pouvions plus parler. Et cependant il

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News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism

and the Limits of Postwar Reform

News from Moscow

News from Moscow

1. Rituals, Routines and Ideology in the Late Stalinist Press 21

3. Far from Moscow: Heroic Autobiographies and the Paradoxes

1.1 Picture of a logging vehicle with the offending ‘swastika’ marked by

Note on Abbreviations and References

This book employs the following abbreviations in archival references:

HIA Hoover Institution Archives

This book uses the conventional Russian archival subdivisions:

References to Komsomol’skaia pravda

On 25 February 1956, in the early hours of the morning, Dmitry Goriunov,

2 News from Moscow

more readable stories. In early 1952, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Party Organisation

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 3

activists, they tried to promote more long-­lasting change by supporting and

Overcoming the Past

4 News from Moscow

8 ‘V zhizneutverzhdenii—sila nashei literatury’, 6 Jun. 1954, 2.

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 5

6 News from Moscow

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 7

8 News from Moscow

Journalism and Thaw Media

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 9

underground press in sustaining the communist movement, and Lenin’s frequent

10 News from Moscow

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 11

positions as staff writers, literary correspondents or sorting mail in the

12 News from Moscow

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 13

14 News from Moscow

Title: Pour moi seule

Author: André Corthis

Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72393]

Original publication: Paris: Albin Michel, 1919

Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POUR MOI

POUR MOI SEULE

Chez FASQUELLE, Bibliothèque Charpentier.

Gemmes et Moires (poésies).

Chez PIERRE LAFFITTE.

Petites vies dans la Tourmente

Les Rameaux rouges (roman).

10 exemplaires sur papier du Japon

25 exemplaires sur papier de Hollande

Tous droits de traduction et reproduction réservés pour tous pays. Copyright by

Sur le toit de tuiles rousses que je vois de ma fenêtre, une fumée

Nous étions à Paris alors, quelques mois après la mort de mon

Maman appuya sa tête sur l’épaule de Guicharde et se laissa

La maison de mon grand-père le menuisier était au cœur même

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