Professor discusses journalists in USSR
In the most recent installment of the Nevada Speaker Series, University of Nevada, Reno history professor Barbra Walker spoke to about 40 students in the Jot Travis Student Union’s Pine Lounge Tuesday about the relations between Soviet dissidents and the Western media.
The dissent movement in the former Soviet Union centered around gaining human rights for Soviet citizens though peaceful methods and arose from educated social circles in Moscow, Walker said.
All of Walker’s information for the speech came from her own research in Russia and the former Soviet Union over the past several years.
During the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. newspapers sent reporters to Moscow to keep abreast in Soviet issues. Often, these reporters became engaged with dissident groups who were struggling for human rights, Walker said.
Walker said these relationships were an important part of the Soviet dissent. Without Western media coverage, the Soviet government would have destroyed the dissident groups.
Walker said the relationship between U.S. journalists and Soviet dissenters was shaped by a cultural identity crisis the dissidents were experiencing.
“They were critical of their society and their state, feeling that it didn’t observe human rights, and they felt very alienated in it, so they felt very much like outsiders in their own society,” Walker said. “But at the same time they actually felt very loyal to it. Overall, they were more into changing it within the socialist model than revolutionizing it to capitalism.”
Eventually the dissident groups grew dependent on the journalists to carry letters, manuscripts and other objects across the Iron Curtain.
Journalists also met many dissidents in their homes, which Walker said was a traditional place for making alliances in Soviet society.
“But what U.S. journalists didn’t really understand was that traditionally, entering in the home is a very big deal in Soviet society, insofar as it meant more than just socializing – it meant alliance-building,” Walker said.
This confusion, combined with gift-giving, often led to hostility between the dissidents and the journalists.
The hostility arose when the journalists failed to show as much commitment to the dissident cause as the dissidents would have liked.
“They had very high expectations because those expectations had been raised by the way that some U.S. journalists were relating to them,” Walker said.
Some students at the speech were happy to listen to a subject unrelated to their major.
“It was really cool to see something that was not in music or biology,” said Ray Jacinto, a 20-year-old music performance and biology major.
After the speech, Walker took several questions, which she said showed the audience was engaged in her subject.
Many of the students present asked her to relate the topic of Soviet dissent to the situation in modern Russia and former Soviet states, such as Georgia.
“The number of questions showed that people were really engaged in the discussion,” said Timothy Taycher, organizer of the Speaker Series.
Walker was the second in a bi-monthly series of speakers who are coming to UNR. The speakers will speak in the Pine Lounge until the Joe Crowley Student Union opens in November, when the speaker series will move there.
In addition to the pending change in venue, Taycher said next semester there will be speakers every week.
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