Better Off Red?
Table of Contents:
- Better Off Red?
- Introduction
- Before the Fall:Seeing Communism as a "Success Story"
- The Liberation of Eastern Europe: Missing the "Safety" of Communism
- "The Workers' Paradise Has Become a Homeless Hell"
- Whitewashing the Communist Record on Human Rights
- Journalists Distressed by China's Shift Towards Capitalism
- North Korea: Singing Along With Diane Sawyer
- Enthralled with Fidel Castro's Communist Paradise
- Scorning the Anti-Communists: "Nobody Likes a Snitch"
- Journalistic Gorbasms Over the Last Soviet Dictator
- Conclusion: Nostalgic for Totalitarian Communism
Before the Fall:Seeing Communism as a "Success Story"
Perhaps the most amazing piece of pro-Soviet propaganda produced in the 1980s was Ted Turner’s seven-hour Portrait of the Soviet Union, shown in the United States on the CNN founder’s TBS Superstation. Even the New York Times,
in a March 20, 1988 review, deemed it an embarrassment, saying that
the three-part series “is possessed by the same spirit that once led
George Bernard Shaw to throw his dinner out the window of a Soviet
train — because food was redundant amid socialist milk and honey.”
Narrator Roy Scheider (Jaws, The French Connection)
read a script that would make the editors at Pravda blush: “The Soviet
Union, draped in history, born in a bloody revolution, bound together
by a dream that is still being dreamt. The dream of a socialist nation
marching toward the world’s first communist state....Once the Kremlin
was the home of czars. Today it belongs to the people....Atheist though
the state may be, freedom to worship as you believe is enshrined in the
Soviet Constitution....Modernization on a grand scale. A great
success.”
When Turner’s Portrait made it to the U.S.S.R. later that spring, Financial Times
Moscow correspondent Quentin Peel reported that Soviet television
“introduced [it] with the apology that the film gave an excessively
glamorous portrait of the country.” Somehow, Turner managed to create a
piece of propaganda that even its communist subjects couldn’t swallow.
While
the rest of the media elite would not go as far as the sycophantic
Turner, some reporters did push an embarrassingly pro-communist spin
that would soon be undermined by events.
“If suddenly a true,
two-party or multi-party system were to be formed in the Soviet Union,
the Communist Party would still win in a real free election. Except for
certain small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people
have been truly converted in the last 68 years.”
— CNN Moscow bureau chief Stuart Loory in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 1986.
“Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”
— Anchor Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, June 17, 1987.
“The
reality is that even if the communist state were to protect individual
rights aggressively, many of its people are not prepared to tolerate
diversity.”
— Dan Rather on the May 27, 1988 CBS Evening News.
“East
Germany is the Communist world’s vaunted economic success story,
hailed as proof that hard work, discipline and thrift can translate
Karl Marx’s theories into reality.”
— New York Times reporter Ferdinand Protzman in the May 15, 1989 “Business Day” section.
“Communism got to be a terrible word here in the United States, but
our attitude toward it may have been unfair. Communism got in with a
bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance....The
Communist ideas of creating a society in which everyone does his best
for the good of everyone is appealing and fundamentally a more
uplifting idea than capitalism. Communism’s only real weakness seems to
be that it doesn’t work.”
— 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney in the New York Times, June 26, 1989.
“Like
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev before him, [Vladimir] Kryuchkov
has taken the personal route, talking of his fondness for Bellini’s
opera ‘Norma.’ He swoons over the piano mastery of Van Cliburn, and
hints that he would arrange a Moscow apartment for the pianist if he
would only come here more often. Then he sighs over his exhausting
workday at Dzerzhinsky Square: ‘The KGB chairman’s life is no bed of
roses.’”
— Reporter David Remnick in The Washington Post, September 8, 1989. Two years later, Kryuchkov was part of the hardline “Gang of Eight” that attempted to overthrow Gorbachev.
“Marx
and Lenin are still revered heroes. Never mind that communism as they
conceived it didn’t work. Most Soviets don’t want to dump it, just
improve on it.”
— USA Today founder Al Neuharth, February 9, 1990 column.