Radio
The other Gorbachev
Noel Malcolm
Radio 4's Feedback programme has improved immeasurably ever since it was taken over by Christopher Dunkley of the Financial Times. All the arch humour of the previous announcers has gone — and with it, thank heavens, the Margaret Howard-style repartee between the pre- senter and those poor captive letters. I only wish the standard of letter-writer had improved to the same extent. Two weeks ago someone wrote in to suggest that the BBC should have a Letter from Russia as a counterbalance to Alistair Cooke, and last Friday a flood of correspondents nomin- ated Martin Walker, the Guardian's man in Moscow. The main reason put forward for his candidacy was that he had been criticised in the `right-wing press'. Others suggested the Russian spokesman Vladimir Posner, and Miss Megan Onions expressed a preference for any 'real Russian' with a deep voice which would make her throat tingle. Only one letter-writer, a Mr Leyland, fully grasped the logic of the situation. He pointed out that since Mr Cooke is a naturalised American, born in Britain, there is one obvious candidate for his opposite number: Kim Philby. But my own solution is more economical. We should send Mr Cooke to Moscow. Whether or not he is led to believe that he has been moved to Moscow, Idaho I leave to the discretion of the BBC; provided he is allowed his typewriter, his memories and the occasional letter from his daughter describing the snowfall in Vermont, he will continue to deliver the goods and all will be well with the world. At least we shall have dispensed with the wishfully foolish doc- trine that because things such as 'politics', `news' and 'public opinion' exist in the USA, they must all have exact counter- parts in Russia.
Last month the poetess Irina Ratushin- skaya was interviewed at length on Woman's Hour by Sue MacGregor. (She was Introduced, twice, as a 'poet'. Why is it, I wonder, that while the feminist forbids us to say 'he' when we could say 'he or she', he insists on calling poetesses and authoresses poets and authors?) Asked about the new policy of 'glasnost' (which in iny dictionary is translated as 'publicity') ,
she replied: 'I will believe in this when it would be facts, not only speaking.' Her release from prison has been one fact, at least, and I hoped she would talk about the facts of her arrest and conviction in the first
place. and about whether such things are
less likely to happen now. But she wasn't asked about that. Only at one point did she explain that 'they tried to make me refuse
all my beliefs.' She spoke movingly about friends of hers in prison who were told they
might be released if they signed papers asking for pardon. They refused, because to ask for pardon would imply an admis- sion of guilt. In other words, the fact of being in prison or out of it was of secon- dary importance; what mattered to them was their beliefs. But instead of asking about those beliefs, Miss MacGregor's questions concentrated on what it was like to be in prison. The details about solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and watered-down cabbage soup were full of human interest, but they might have been the same if Miss Ratushinskaya had been serving time for embezzlement or reckless dnving. Perhaps we sympathise too easily With suffering, and so find it too difficult to imagine that there can be other things Which matter more. Russians are better at imagining this: Miss Ratushinskaya under- stood this where her own sufferings were concerned, and Stalin, in some sense, had a similar view concerning the sufferings of others.
That is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of names, but one which was forced on me a few days later when Radio 4 broadcast an account of the show-trial of Bukharin in 1938. Ever since he was portrayed as
Rubashov in Koestler's Darkness at Noon,
Bukharin has had a good press in the West; we may need to be reminded that he was nine parts Stalin to one part 'dissident', and had happily endorsed policies of `liquidating' the bourgeoisie, the officer class and so on. In the brief snatches of drama- tisation in this programme he sounded like a Tory MP being questioned by a select committee. Half an hour was simply not long enough to present a trial of which the printed transcript runs to 800 pages, and most of the time was taken up by a commentary which seemed little more than a summary of the relevant chapter of Robert Conquest's book on the Terror. I listened with the official transcript in front of me and became more and more irritated by what happened to it in the programme. Not only were there simple errors of transcription (when Bukharin confessed to `preparations for terrorist acts' this turned into 'the perpetration . . .'), but also entire pithy exchanges between prosecutor and prisoner had been made up artificially from scraps of dialogue which were in fact several pages apart. When Bukharin reached the central statement of his alleged aims, the script cut him off after two sentences. Here it is in full.
This is not my defence, it is my self- accusation. I have not said a single word in my defence. If my programme stand were to be formulated practically, it would be, in the economic sphere, state capitalism, the prosperous muzhik individual, the curtail- ment of the collective farms, foreign conces- sions, surrender of the monopoly of foreign trade, and, as a result — the restoration of capitalism in the country.
Elsewhere in the transcript I noticed the name of a minor conspirator who was apparently very keen to carry out Bukhar- in's plans. He was called Gorbachev.
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