Reading Revitalized? The Perestroika Project and its Aftermath

In the first three chapters we have had occasion to observe that reading came to the forefront of public debate in Soviet Russia at times of attempted social transformation. In the 1920s, and then in the Khrushchev era, print culture was called upon to perform a mobilizing and educative function. Glasnost offered a particular variation on this perennial Soviet theme of cultural revolution. In the 1980s the task was no longer to make Soviet society literate, as it had been in the 1920s, or simply to help it acquire the reading habit, as had been the case under Khrushchev, but rather to improve the quality of reading in Soviet society. 1 The Soviet mass reading public was no longer to be kept in forced ignorance of its own history, and of the social and economic problems facing its country: it was to be provided with the information that the elite intelligentsia, thanks to samizdat and informal networks, had possessed since the 1960s. Perestroika in the cultural sphere was, in fact, nothing less than the attempted ‘massovization’ of the Soviet intelligentsia. The early stages of glasnost were outstandingly successful in this respect: an enthralling public debate began on most aspects of Soviet history and society; the circulations of the major journals shot up from hundreds of thousands to millions; Soviet society did indeed seem on its way to becoming ‘civilized’ and ‘intel-lectualized’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.