DOWNING1 V4N194
***** DOWNING ********** EJC/REC Vol. 4, No. 1, 1994 *******

POLITICAL CHANGE IN EASTERN EUROPE AND CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES
TO MEDIA COMMUNICATION: A CRITIQUE -- PART I


John D. H. Downing
The University of Texas at Austin


        Abstract:  This article offers a detailed
     commentary upon mediatic and related political
     changes in Russia, Poland and Hungary since the
     1980s, and critically examines a series of
     conceptual positions common in contemporary
     communication research and political science for
     their adequacy to explain the processes that have
     taken place.  The empirical issues examined
     include the relation between media and (a)
     economic processes, (b) international relations,
     and (c) the character of the soviet and
     post-soviet state.  Political science concepts of
     civil society, the public sphere and social
     movements are then reviewed, followed by an
     analysis of cultural production, media censorship
     and alternative media.  Finally, media
     communication theories current in U.S.
     communication research are critiqued, including
     agenda-setting, cultivation analysis, diffusion
     theory, gatekeeper theory, uses and gratifications
     theory, the four theories of the press, and media
     system dependency theory.


                        Introduction

     Events of recent years in Eastern Europe have typically
been described in breathless fashion, or more recently in a
bemused lament, as economic chaos and atavistic feuds swirl
through the region.  Somehow "freedom" has ended up at least
as messily as in the "West."

     Part of the problem in commonly held perceptions arises
precisely from their mediatic dimensions.  Watching young
Germans leaving the DDR in droves as their regime's
television vainly ran three hours a week of Western
videoclips to induce them to stay, watching the Ceausescus'
trial and execution while knowing Romanians themselves were
seeing it incessantly replayed on their sets, watching
Hungarian border guards snipping the barbed wire and Germans
pulverizing the Wall, watching the Polish Round Table
discussions on TV, the Velvet Revolution, Lithuanians
defending their broadcasting tower with their lives, Boris
Yeltsin standing on a tank:  because media were so involved
in these processes, and because we saw it all, sometimes
live, on TV, we have slid into a fusion of media and event,
dazzled by the fact that almost every one of these
happenings was in truth the very opposite to a planned
"media event" (Brinton, 1990; Turnley & Turnley, 1990).

     Almost.  We should have been alerted to the deeper
dimensions of the process by the fact that in apparently the
most decisive break with the past - the execution of the
Ceausescus - the past was at its most vigorous.  The very
least political change has taken place in Romania out of all
the former bloc regimes, and - symptomatically - although a
firing squad was what we heard, when the cameras actually
focused in on their inert bodies it was clear they had been
shot once through the back of the head in the time-honored
Stalinist mode.  Similarly, the massacre at Timisoara,
"proved" to our horrified eyes by rows of dead bodies on the
ground, was mostly a collage of corpses deceased from
natural causes, and staged for international consumption
(Lowink, forthcoming).  These actually were media events,
albeit of a much more grisly kind, and generated within a
grislier reality, than Daniel Boorstin had in mind as he
dissected the beginnings of news-hype and candidate-
packaging in the USA thirty years ago (Boorstin, 1963, pp.
45-46).

     To grasp what the changes in media and society in
Eastern Europe may teach us about the media-society
relationship in general (and there is much), we need to step
back and refocus our gaze away from our mediatic drama of
regime change.  Equally important, to understand media,
there as elsewhere, we need to steer away from media-centric
explanations.

     These are no small tasks, especially for those
unfamiliar with the specifics of the region.  I hope below
successfully to tread a line between assuming complete
familiarity and total unfamiliarity with those specifics.

     Initially we need to periodize three phases in the
changes:  the build-up to them, often of decades' duration;
the "moment" of regime change itself; and the post-Communist
conjuncture, insofar as the latter will stay in frame.  For
as well as change, there are, inevitably, crucial
continuities.  The current conjuncture is indubitably hard
to keep in frame, but the weight of the past is everpresent,
and - correctly understood - constantly sheds light upon
ongoing developments.

     Secondly, we need to acknowledge the specificity of
each nation, not only in the particular trajectory that its
regime change followed in the years 1985-91, but also in its
unique cultural history.  Although the Stalin and
post-Stalin models were followed in all these nations, and
although their legacy is still very evident in major areas
of life, the politico-cultural graft took quite different
forms in a number of respects because, largely, of these
unique cultural and historical characteristics.  My own
research has focused on Russia, Poland and Hungary, and thus
it is on these three nations that I shall concentrate for
the rest of this essay.  However, in the space even of a
long presentation such as this, there is little opportunity
to explore those specifics.  It may be at times that, for
lack of space to develop a book-length argument, I shall
seem to be slipping into an implied, but unintended,
homogenization.

     Thirdly, we need to relate media to a series of
processes and institutions in these nations, such as
economic forces, international relations, the State,
political movements, and cultural production as a whole,
steering away from media-centric explanations of media or
society.

     Fourthly, in doing so, we are ineluctably drawn into
debates on key concepts and interpretations of social
reality, whether of the State, social movements, civil
society, the public sphere, or the character of sovietized
societies.  These debates take place largely among political
scientists, sociologists and philosophers, yet a recurring
lacuna in their analyses is the absence - I am tempted to
say "structuring absence" - of any attention to
communicative processes.

     Finally, we need to review critically a number of media
theories for their adequacy to conceptualize these processes
in Eastern Europe.  I have in mind diffusion theory, uses
and gratifications theory, agenda-setting theory, gatekeeper
theory, cultivation analysis, and media system dependency
theory.  The problem with these approaches is the opposite
to those listed in the previous paragraph, for they are
tendentially media- or communication-centric.

     This is a truly mammoth task.  We are faced with (a) a
three-way split between events in Eastern Europe, (b) rival
interpretations of those events, and (c) rival conceptual
approaches in both communication analysis and political
science to the analysis of media, culture, economy and
politics.  But we also have some of the most fecund material
imaginable for the development of media communication
theory, material which transcends the current empirical
obsessions in our field:  television, Hollywood, political
news, and the latest developments in media technologies.

     This essay is then a ground-clearing exercise, an
attempt to single out the most heuristically productive
concepts and perspectives to interpret this tangled mass of
data.  It is, moreover, the "jalons" for a contracted book-
length treatment of these subjects in Sage's Media, Culture
and Society series, and thus I would greatly welcome
comments, criticism and illumination which might help make
the book version stronger.  (In that version, I plan not
only to critique, but also to propose ways to strengthen,
media communication theory.)

      Economic Change, Media, and Public Consciousness

     The financial relation between the former soviet bloc's
statized economic structures and its state-owned media is
not a conceptually complex matter (Kowalski, 1988; Jakab &
Galik, chap. 1; McNair, 1991, chaps. 2-3), although as we
will see below in the section on cultural production, the
regimes were not always quite as repressively media-
omnivorous as they may have desired or as is sometimes
claimed.  Nonetheless, there is no major controversy about
who dominated sovietized media as there continues to be
about media in capitalist societies.  What is complex, is
the relation between that media structure and the gradual
economic disintegration of the bloc.  It is to that
relationship that we will immediately turn, and subsequently
to the relation between media and economic change in the
current phase of development (early 1993).  In later
sections on international relations and cultural production,
issues will be discussed concerning private and state media
ownership in the current conjuncture.

     It is a commonplace now that the Soviet bloc economies
were at various levels of disarray and disintegration, some
such as Poland and Hungary even running giant deficits with
Western banks, and with not a single one evincing the
dramatic growth-rates of earlier decades (Magas, 1990, p.
66; Ramet, 1991, Tables 1 & 2; Koves, 1992, pp. 1-15).  The
causes were multiple, and cannot be solely ascribed to
bureaucratism, even though that was the overriding problem
of the economic structure.  (Nor do they vindicate the
extremely dangerous confrontational tactics of the Reagan
regime in its fierce military build-up.)  Nonetheless, this
economic stagnation was probably the primary cause of the
collapse of the regimes, even though it was mediated to the
public in numerous ways.

     This mediation/communication is necessarily our focus.
How was economic stagnation conveyed, given that Soviet bloc
media surely did not highlight the problem, and that real-
life comparisons between western and eastern living
standards were restricted to the relatively small percentage
of trusted Party members, diplomats and trade officials
permitted to travel?  Some evidence (e.g.  Gregory & Dietz,
1991; McGregor, 1991) indicates that widespread criticism of
the economic system was unusual, with objections being
rather to specific issues such as the lack of incentives or
of work-discipline.  We may compare the responses of a major
emigre survey conducted in the early 1980s (Silver, 1987,
pp. 114-115), which found that even of those asserting that
the USA had nothing whatsoever to learn from the USSR,
almost fifty percent were strongly in favor of having the
state control heavy industry (as opposed to 7% who had
something positive to say about collective agriculture).

     How, if there really were intense and universal
dissatisfaction with the previous economic system, should we
interpret the cynical and depressed public attitudes to
economic reform during the years of transition and since
(Urnov, 1991; Gregory, 1991)?  What should we conclude from
the attitudes of many Soviet workers to Polish Solidarity,
except in the Baltic republics and western Ukraine, namely
that Polish workers' militancy risked taking bread from
Soviet tables (Teague, 1988)?  Did this reaction have a
connection with the sour conviction of many Russians that to
their own considerable cost they were massively subsidizing
the other Soviet republics, not to mention foreign
dependencies such as Cuba and Vietnam?

     I would suggest that all these are indices of
allocative or policy perceptions and grievances, rather than
necessarily of opposition to the economic system as such.
If so, might that tell us that the media's role in the
situation was successfully to take economic stagnation off
the public agenda - a reversal of a standard interpretation
of media functioning (McCombs & Shaw, 1972)?  In this case,
Moore and Tumin's (1949) classic analysis of the stabilizing
social functions of ignorance would need to be brought into
play in conjunction with the agenda-setting approach.

     It may be argued, of course, that citizens were too
afraid to express systemic opposition, and furthermore that
the data above are Soviet rather than Polish or Hungarian.
Yet the period we are discussing is the late 1980s, when
many of the tabus of an earlier period had been lifted,
either through glasnost policies in the USSR, or in the
typically less constrained polities of Hungary and Poland.
It is fair to say that public attitudes to the economic
system in the latter nations were more critical than
generally to be found in the Soviet Union, but normally
among intellectuals rather than among the general
population, which had thoroughly ingested one truth at
least, namely that job-security was much higher in the East
than in the West.  Furthermore, it was well known that one
major cause of economic stagnation in those two countries
was the need to repay western banks' loans, a feature of
integration into the Western economic system.

     The picture we are facing demands that we explain
restricted information, distorted information, and - as we
shall argue - displacement, both on to generalized social
aggressiveness and onto ethnic targets.  Not such a
different task in itself from the responsibility of the
critical researcher into Western media, but harder because
of unfamiliarity and the absence of systematic study of many
aspects of the situation, not least of the audience
dimension.

     Let me sketch out what I consider a plausible analysis
of the role of media in conveying or not conveying the
realities of economic decline and the possibilities for
economic reform in these different nations, whilst
constantly keeping in mind that people experience economic
stagnation in different modes that may have little or no
media echo or amplification.  (The Bush Administration's
dogged refusal over 1990-91 to acknowledge that the United
States' economy was in serious recession, rarely challenged
in earnest by news media analysts, would constitute a
loosely parallel recent instance in the West.)

     The first reality which demands recognition is that in
Soviet bloc countries cash played much less of a role in
everyday life than in the West.  Savings were very high for
a substantial number of people for the simple reason there
was nothing much of interest to purchase.  Even the old
ladies who for a pittance swept the streets or sat
"supervising" metro escalators - a phenomenon often noticed
by western visitors - did so because they were generally
guaranteed accommodation as a result.  Furthermore, certain
basics such as bread and transport were heavily subsidized.
Thus inability to afford objects (or to meet
credit-payments) was not the source of economic discontent.
People complained about the quality of shoes or other
consumer items, but not about lack of funds.  Workers could
normally guarantee at least one solid, if unappetizing meal
a day at their workplace canteen, without having to buy it,
cook it or clean up afterwards.  The workplace was a
service- distribution node, not only for food, but also for
housing and medical care, in a way totally unfamiliar in the
West.

     We should not, however, forget how the Polish regime's
intermittent attempts to impose sharp price-rises acted as
the trigger for significant unrest in 1970, 1976 and 1980.
Furthermore, fast price-inflation in Hungary and Poland
during the 1980s, which did not really reach Russians until
about 1990, did at that point produce economic angst of a
type more recognizable in the West.  The 1980s Soviet emigre
survey already referred to found that 61% of the respondents
felt real wages had fallen over the previous five years up
till they left the USSR, but that shortages - "defitsit" -
were what upset people most (Gregory, 1987, pp. 259-260).
Furthermore, those most likely to be irritated with the slow
rate of economic advance were precisely those who had been
most successful within the system (Millar & Clayton, 1987),
the greatest beneficiaries in a sense of the historic trends
in mass education and urbanization that Lewin (1988) has
argued were the undertow of the Gorbachev phenomenon.

     Where I would argue the declining level of growth
particularly impacted on public consciousness was in fields
such as health care and environmental pollution.  The
appalling rates of infant mortality and of respiratory
disorders in industrial areas were only the most salient
indices of the failure of the senior regimes of the
socialist bloc to deliver a viable standard of living to
their citizens.  Such bitter personal experiences, including
the need to pay physicians substantial sums under the
counter ("on the left") to avoid endless waits for
treatment, surely impacted on people's feelings about their
conditions of life (for Soviet data, see Feshbach &
Friendly, 1992).

     At the same time, there was no comparison possible for
the vast majority.  Official media avoided these matters,
with Soviet infant mortality statistics even ceasing to be
published under the Brezhnev regime, and instead cynically
dwelt on such issues as the very real plight of African
Americans and Native Americans to try to displace attention
elsewhere.  The attempt was largely unsuccessful, and sadly
often led to the reverse assumption, namely that such groups
were in reality living high off the hog.  With the exception
of Poland, samizdat (i.e. carbon-paper-reproduced
typescripts - literally, "self-published," as opposed to
state-published) media had a generally weak circulation.
This is not to deny their significance in the longer process
of rebellion, but their puny voice does highlight the
absence of comparative information.  Foreign radio services
such as the BBC and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, and the
tales of a minority of travelers to Western lands,
circulating through relatives and friends, were the only
other sources.

     Thus in everyday life there were testing experiences in
absolute terms, yet without any clear yardsticks to know how
to assess them fully.  It is plausible that this had two
effects.  One was to accumulate a sense of frustration and
anger, no less real for being diffuse.  The second was that
the simplest target for this anger consisted of one's
fellow-citizens.  Hence, I would argue, the degradation of
relations in public, symbolized perhaps most tangibly by the
virtual class war between waiters and patrons in eating
establishments, or between store assistants and customers,
but at all events corroding any civility or trust between
members of the public.

     Kira Muratova's 1989 film _Askyenicheskii Sindrom_
(_The Aesthenic Syndrome_) portrayed this degradation in
graphic terms for Russia, and indeed it must be said that
the syndrome was more advanced there than in Poland or
Hungary.  A chance encounter in Budapest in the mid-1980s
tellingly illuminates both this difference, and the absence
of yardsticks.  A "believing" Communist couple from
Leningrad wandering around a Budapest supermarket expressed
to a friend of the writer's their deep perplexity at how
Hungary had managed just since 1948 to vault over the USSR
on the path to communism, because clearly there was more
abundance in Hungary than in Russia, and they well knew full
communism promised abundance...  In their case, the surging
frustration and bitterness of which I have spoken were not
evident, but confusion as to how to interpret Soviet reality
in the absence of yardsticks was present in full measure.

     Within this context, the proclamation of economic
reforms by these regimes, trumpeted repeatedly in the
official media, had I would suggest a dual effect.  We need
first to recall, however, that identifications of problems
in these economies had been relatively normal in the news
media from Brezhnev onwards, even though the problems were
normally flagged as issues now being grappled with in order
to perfect the system, rather than to change it.  As life
got tougher during the 1980s, the merits of reforms, the
visibility of reforms, the very purpose of reforms, evoked
deeper and deeper cynicism.  In the USSR for example, from
quite different political stances, both the weekly
_Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta_, later _Ekonomika I Zhizn_
(Economic Newspaper/The Economy Today - literally Economy
and Life), and the government daily, _Izvestiya_, ran
stories during the late 1980s on initiatives in radical
economic reform.  For the former, this was simply a nod in
the direction of then-current perestroika orthodoxy, while
for the latter it represented a strong, if conceptually
vague commitment to improve the economic condition of the
country.  Yet the stories reproduced in each newspaper
served to emphasize the rarity and thus the virtual
irrelevance of the economic changes actually underway.

     Secondly, the emergence of a highly visible class of
petty entrepreneurs, stimulated by the state (Avdeenko et
al., 1990; Zubek, 1991; Slider, 1991), led to yet further
anger, this time directed against the new private firms
("cooperatives") in the USSR and against businessmen driving
Mercedes and BMWs and living in fancy villas in Hungary and
Poland.  The regimes were widely seen as supporting the re-
emergence of licenced thievery.

     Thirdly, the attempt to substitute the economic signals
of a command economy - the plan, the telephone calls from
above to below - with the price-signals of a capitalist
economy, were repeatedly stymied by ineptitude, irresolution
and ignorance of the new rules of the game at all levels.
The phone-calls from above began to dry up, but were not
replaced by any other economic signals.  Drift, stagnation
and waste ensued on an unprecedented scale.

     In turn, since the regimes arrogated all power and
authority to themselves, they alone could be held
responsible for the entire mess and growing unfairness.
This concentration of responsibility on a single source, the
government, was arguably a potent solvent of those elements
of confidence that still persisted in the public mind.

     Thus the putative impact of official media silence as
the economic decline gathered speed, was actually to open
wider the already institutionalized gap between the State
and the general public that Gorbachev vainly sought to close
with glasnost policies and promises of "radical economic
reforms."  After the initial couple of years' heady
excitement of revelations, mostly about the Stalinist past,
the public began to be much hungrier for substantive
economic improvement than for glasnost.  The Brezhnev years
began to seem to some to have been tranquil, manageable, in
economic terms almost halcyon.  In Poland and Hungary, in
any case, the quite widespread current of thought that saw
their States as client regimes, had already served to
subvert their legitimacy:  economic hardships intensified
the slide because, as just observed, these states claimed
knowledge of, and the right to control over, the economic
process.

     Since the transition in regimes, the relation between
economic forces and media has become even more complex and
difficult to pin down with certainty.  On the institutional
level, the guaranteed financial and logistical support
assured by the previous regime to loyal media vanished, and
many media either collapsed or found their
readership/audience drastically reduced.  Large numbers of
new media ventures sprang up, many reflecting the similar
efflorescence of new political parties both large and
miniscule ("taxi-parties" as they were called at one point
in Poland, on the assumption the membership could fit
comfortably in a single taxi).  Many fell rapidly by the
wayside.  Some changed their title drastically, such as the
former Soviet magazine _Kommunist_, which is now called
_Free Thought_.  Others, such as _Komsomol'skaya Pravda_
(Young Communist League Pravda), retained their name and fed
their readers a dismal, heavily ironic survey of current
miseries.  Pornographic media have flourished, as have "How-
to" texts, business publications, personal astrology, and
pirated videos (Condee & Padunov, 1992; Lochon, 1992;
Karlinsky, 1992).  (Below, under the heading of
international relations, I will discuss the potential impact
of foreign media investment, for today it is impossible to
speak of these economies as in any way autochthonous, and
ever less in Poland and Hungary as statized.)

     Without endeavoring to chart this immense flux here,
the most obvious change in media economic coverage is that
today the media present widely different views on current
economic realities - or perhaps more precisely, on feasible
solutions to those realities.  It would venture too far at
this point to try to assess the likely impact of this sudden
plethora of perspectives on a population both unaccustomed
to it, and completely uneducated in the workings of a modern
capitalist economy, often visualizing the latter as a
glorified bazaar.

     However, that vast oversimplification in turn enabled a
very rosy picture to circulate in some circles of a more or
less painless transition to a "market" economy, which has
now bred in reaction very extensive disillusionment,
frustration and hopelessness.  In other circles "market"
negatively evoked the high prices of the small permitted
private sales outlets they only normally used to patronize
for special celebrations, along with with the vulnerability
of employment they knew to be a hallmark of Western
economies.  In the short term, a number of their fears were
amply realized.

     In general it would seem that over these years most
members of the public have become sated with change and
politics, deeply desirous of stability, and - in its absence
- of escape.  Among the media genres just cited that have
enjoyed strong popularity, Hollywood movies have been much
in demand, partly for novelty's sake, and partly for the
reason that they offer a comfortingly formulaic psychic
release from a rather unbearable economic reality.  Their
capacity is nil, however, to stimulate reasoned public
discussion over national economic goals and policies.

          International Relations, the Slide from
                Global Influence, and Media

     By "international relations," I do not mean the
exquisitely boring niceties of diplomacy, or of missile-
counts.  I mean, rather, the powerfully erosive effects of,
initially, the Solidarity movement in Poland and the Afghan
resistance, and then the development of glasnost policies in
the USSR, the piecemeal slide away from the Stalin model in
Hungary, the sudden virtual cessation of political signals
from Moscow to the client regimes from 1988 onwards, the
instantaneously accelerating ricochet effects of collapse in
the DDR, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, and perhaps
finally the obdurate stance of tiny Lithuania against Soviet
power.  In this concatenation of events needs also to be
mentioned the long-term erosion of effective influence in
the lands of Brezhnev's outreach over a decade and more,
from Egypt to Chile, and from India to Angola.  Even Vietnam
and Cuba, whose regimes stayed loyal until they themselves
were cut adrift, which increasingly functioned as burden
rather than as opportunity for the Soviet power structure.
(I am viewing these instances simply and solely in relation
to Soviet international influence, and not offering here an
evaluation of Pinochet, Landsbergis, Ahmed Massoud Shah,
Kadar, or any regime or movement in themselves.)

     Thus from the apogee of Soviet global influence,
reflecting the supposedly inevitable world trend toward
Communism, with its implicit boost to the traditional
nationalism of Russia - in the form either of being the
"elder brother" and core of the Soviet system, or of being
the spiritual heart of the planet - the final descent was
measured but unceasing.  What did that signify, over time,
to the power structures and the public of the Soviet Union
and its bloc?  How were these realities represented and
mediated?

     Furthermore, what were the effects of the "hard
guy/soft guy" stances of Reaganite "Star Wars" belligerence,
and West German Ostpolitik?  I am not suggesting these were
tidily coordinated, for German and U.S. interests were
different, but we should not underestimate their joint
influence on fracturing the cohesion, even the morale, of
the more perceptive members of the Soviet bloc hierarchy.
The question then is how if at all this erosion of morale
and growing uncertainty within the apex actually trickled
down to the general public, since it would not, clearly, be
reflected in Soviet bloc public media?  American
imperialists and German revanchists were regularly slung
into the same pigsty by the Soviet press, and bloc successes
and advances around the globe were continually feted.

     It is a complicated question to which there are no
answers immediately available.  We might hazard that a more
general political angst was fed by a combination of factors:
by select media, such as White and Red Tass (Smith, 1984,
chap. 14), by the nomenklatura's privileged access to
superior global news sources such as _The Financial Times_
or _Der Spiegel_, by the bulletins of foreign broadcast
stations (Shanor, 1985), by the stories told to their
families by people who had visited the "outposts," such as
Angola or Laos, especially by veterans from Afghanistan as
that war dragged on, and by the continuing role of rumor as
a mode of communication operating at all levels of Soviet
bloc life.

     In the end, it is no doubt true that the full picture
was only available to a tiny, trusted minority.  Yet in a
top-heavy power structure, the morale of the apex is likely
to be rather determinative of others' morale.  The apex
(verkhushka) in the Soviet Union consisted of the military
high command, the military industrialists, and the KGB and
Party hierarchies.  The system worked similarly in the other
bloc countries, albeit generally minus the national military
as a resolutely pro-Soviet force (Barany, 1992).  It is hard
to suppose that within that apex the evaluation of the
following issues had but a minor effect on the
disintegration of the system:  (a) the outdistancing of the
Soviet economy; (b) the consequent threat to military
competitiveness; (c) the decline of the Soviet empire; and
(d) the possibility of long-term revitalization though
foreign capitalist investment (the true promise of
Ostpolitik).  In other words, we need to diversify our
understanding of Soviet bloc "audiences."  This does not
simply mean adding such criteria as gender, ethnicity or
age-cohort, but expanding our typical western focus on the
mass audience in order to concentrate equally on the elite
audience.  In particular we need to recognize that our focus
on the economy and media in the previous section is
intimately related to our focus on international relations
in this one.

     The fact that these processes are even now inaccessible
to systematic empirical study does not mean that we should
bypass them in our analysis of the role of communication in
regime transition in Eastern Europe.  They are the obverse,
in a sense, of my remarks above on the modes through which
economic decline was communicated to and experienced by the
general public during the period of transition.  Together, I
would propose, these constituted the partial and
contradictory representation of present problems and future
options which steadily gnawed away at the Soviet elite's own
confidence in its rule, and at its already very limited
hegemony (in the Gramscian sense) over the Soviet Union and
the Soviet bloc.  The impact within the elite initially may
have been in the direction of tightening up internal
control, as was the case after the Prague Spring
(Kagarlitsky, 1988, 198ff.), and similarly in response to
Polish Solidarity (Ruble, 1983).  The fact remains that the
elite was acutely aware of these developments and their
portent.

     Today, the influence of international forces is
enormously different in the field of media communication.
Not only is radio jamming now history, but Radio Free Europe
has offices in some Eastern European countries, Western
media corporations have bought and are continuing to buy
into the media systems of most of these countries, and those
systems are now increasingly in question, whether in terms
of their prior professional mores or of their financial
viability.

     Assessing this switch is not a task performed with
great insight by a number of commentators.  The most
familiar verdict revolves around words such as "freedom,"
with a strong overlay of missionary zeal to bring these
benighted Eastern Europeans into the bright warm glow of a
prosperous, untrammeled Western media system.  Those Eastern
European media professionals prepared to dance to this
rhetoric are consequently feted by the missionaries as
serious, dedicated journalists, and sometimes even
attributed a (very dubious) past career of serious
opposition to their regimes.  At the same time, critics of
the Western system often grossly underestimate the problems
inherent in the previous media system in Eastern Europe, and
fixate purely on the pretentiousness of Western Media
Missionaries in proposing their own solutions to all Eastern
problems.

     I would suggest that the realities are more complex,
and require more sober analysis.  By the point at which the
regimes changed, with the economy in the kind of mess
already noted above, the financial and technical basis of
the press, in particular, was disastrous.  Rare were the
newspaper or magazine offices in which a computer could be
seen, and with a virtually bankrupt economy there was less
and less chance of bankrolling a newspaper which could not
pay its way.  Deprived of government subsidies and of
citizens' need to be seen to subscribe to the Party press,
many newspapers, magazines and journals went quickly into
the red and faced extinction.

     Film-making, equally, was immediately at risk of
virtual collapse, not only for wanted sources of capital
from the traditional government source, but also for want of
co-production money with western ventures.  Some of the
latter was forthcoming, but film-making slowed to a trickle
compared with the previous period.  Knowledge of marketing
and banking aspects of film production was minimal to non-
existent, a major factor that affected all media, not only
film.  Consequently foreign, especially American, films
flooded the market, both officially and in pirated videos
(Autissier et al., 1992, pp. 262, 291).

     The telecommunication infrastructure was also very
backward, not simply in numbers of telephones in businesses
(let alone homes), but also in the quantity and quality of
the lines and switches.  This in turn affected everything
from foreign trade to banking to news and information flows,
since telecommunicated data generally deteriorated sharply
because of the poor infrastructure.  The sheer number of
international lines was also extremely low by comparison
with western Europe.  And perhaps needless to say,
computerization of all kinds, except for some big military-
use mainframes in the USSR, was at a minimal level compared
to the other half of the continent (Adirim, 1991; McHenry,
1988; Splichal, 1992).

     The hunger for foreign investment in all these
infrastructural domains is hard to overestimate.  The main
question was, how far could that investment take place
without drawing in foreign control to an extent that
threatened national control over media and culture.  The USA
has a 25% ceiling on foreign ownership of a broadcast
station, as evidenced in the forced divestiture by US courts
of the Mexican owners of the former Spanish International
Network in 1986.  The problems of national control over the
system of public communication - be that control in private
or public hands, or a mixture - have repeatedly been raised
by media purchases in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary
(Jakab & Galik, 1991; Frybes, 1992; Lochon, 1992).

     For now let us simply acknowledge the acute dilemma of
maintaining a press system in particular, and a media system
in general, whatever its contents, in an economy on the
rocks.  The attraction is hard to overestimate of having
foreign investors sustain the survival of media, and not
least, for those working in them, having these investors
maintain employment for media professionals.

              The Soviet and Post-Soviet State

     Perceptions and theories of the character of the state
in the Soviet bloc nations up till 1989 vary widely -
including within those nations themselves.  While virtually
no one would apply the adjective "democratic" to the regimes
in question, there is still a basic split between what I
shall call the fundamentalists, who typically espouse the
term "totalitarian" when defining the soviet-type state
structure, and the pragmatists, who focus more on its
unwieldy mechanisms, lack of coordination, and internal
contradictions.  Rather as one pair of English humorists
described the contending forces in the English Civil War as
"Wrong But Wromantic" (the Cavaliers) and as "Right But
Repulsive" (the Roundheads), one may feel a certain
emotional affinity with the fundamentalists' radical
revulsion against the State's attempt to squelch people's
freedoms - even if the fundamentalists' moral fury did not
always extend to the cause of the dispossessed in other
lands, including their own.  One may also experience a
degree of irritation with those who phlegmatically, almost
amorally, seem to be temporizing with tyranny by pointing
out the soviet state's limits and the full complexity of
everyday existence and power relations in that system [1].

     Nonetheless, this conceptual and moral nettle has to be
grasped, since understanding media power without
understanding State power is impossible in any society.
Hough (1977, pp. 201-202), conversely, has been an unusual
voice among political scientists in observing that in
analyzing the state, "it is striking how rarely these
concerns [of how horizontal and vertical communication are
shaped] are placed at the center of comparative political
analysis.")  Thus in what ways did these states' relation to
their media system differ in their relation to media from
the British government's media policies regarding Northern
Ireland, or the Reagan Administration's attempts to restrict
the free flow of information to its own public (Schlesinger,
1989; Curtis, 1984; Downing, 1986; Demac, 1990)?  I am not
suggesting these policies were identical, but the
differences illuminate each media-state situation more
exactly.

     My own bare-outline proposal for understanding the
character of the Soviet state in what we now know to have
been its declining years, I will illustrate with
observations from five sources.  The first is Bukharin's
horrified anticipation of what Stalin's policies for rural
Russia and Ukraine would entail, namely "military-feudal
exploitation" (Cohen, 1971, 320f.).  This was no marxist
jargon, but a very precise forecast of exactly what
transpired:  (1) the dominance of the military in internal
affairs on many levels; (2) feudalism, both (a) in the exact
sense of the permanent quasi-corvee mode of extracting an
agricultural surplus, and (b) in the wider sense of the
extension of clientilistic power relations to every sphere
of society (Willerton, 1979 and 1987; Kennedy, 1991, pp.
216-221; Lampert, 1985, chap. 2), and (c) in the general
meaning of economic backwardness.  Bukharin's phrase conveys
the political and especially the economic reality of
Stalinism more accurately than "totalitarianism," which at
best signifies an attempt rather than a reality, and which
ultimately implies a drive for power as an abstracted
psychic charge, rather than as integrally related to a
political economy and culture.

     The second is James Millar's characterization of the
Brezhnev regime's policy as The Little Deal (Millar, 1988).
The term is derived from Dunham's (1976) term "The Big Deal"
(in turn borrowed from FDR), which she used to characterize
the gradual relaxation of certain types of behavioral
restriction in the last eight years of Stalin's life.
Millar in turn pinpoints the further decay under Brezhnev of
the furious and hideous years of Stalinism into a set of
structures from which a large element of the original
driving impetus had gone, namely the fear of extreme and
instantaneous repression, to be replaced by a series of
unofficial piecemeal concessions to those who were not
aiming at any of the nerve-centers of the inherited system
[2].  Similarly Shlapentokh (1986, 137ff.) writes of "the
gradual extinction of fear" among the younger generation,
leading ultimately to their "loss" to the system.  One could
roughly describe this mutation as a kind of reform
feudalism.

     The third source is former Soviet sociologist Vladimir
Shlapentokh's immensely perceptive, if sprawling, monograph
(1986) on the dual "pragmatic" and "mythological" levels of
mentality common in the latter decades of the Soviet Union.
By these terms he refers to the everyday activity of the
society, as opposed to the regime's mythological definition
of that reality:

     the leading role of the working class,
     internationalism, social and national equality,
     and socialist democracy make up the mythological
     part of the official ideology.  Planning,
     socialist property, Russian patriotism, science,
     education and the family represent values that are
     part of the pragmatic level of ideology (1986, p.
     37).

     This is not in the first instance an analysis of the
Soviet state, but dissecting that state's hegemonic
processes helps to explain the state's degree of effective
daily functioning.  Shlapentokh distinguishes (1986, pp.
183- 84, n. 11) this dual level of operation both from
Orwell's "double-think" and from Freud's concept of
rationalization.  "Double-think" implies mutually exclusive
views, whereas in Soviet society there was, rather, a
permanent discord between mythological words and pragmatic
deeds.  For Freud, rationalization obscures the truth,
whereas in Soviet citizens' awareness the truth does not
normally evaporate, except in the case of a small minority
of true believers, the "self-satisfied slaves" in
Sinyavsky's phrase (Sinyavsky, 1990, 145ff.).  The permanent
disjunction Shlapentokh identifies offers us an important
insight into how the Soviet state maintained itself for as
long as it did, and how concepts such as "legitimacy"
(Weber), "culture," "ideology," certainly "totalitarianism,"
and possibly even "hegemony" (Gramsci), do not penetrate
sufficiently some of the key elements of communication in
regime maintenance in the case of sovietized societies.

     The fourth, an important balancing element in relation
to the last two, is Amalrik's (1982, pp. 246-7) account of
how the KGB major who had been sent to arrest him suddenly
quieted and froze as he saw for the first time how the abyss
could open up and swallow someone if they were deemed guilty
of aiming at a nerve-center of the system [3].  The episode
perfectly reveals the continuing ultimate basis of the
system, namely repression, but acknowledges that for most
people this reality was no longer staring them in the face,
was no longer so supremely capricious as in earlier decades
- always provided they avoided known minefields.

     The fifth is Dusko Doder's analysis (1986) of the
forces behind the rise of Gorbachev, in particular his
recognition that the last Soviet leader owed his rise and
eventual promotion to Party chief to the KGB and the
patronage of Andropov, long its boss.  The role of the KGB
as king-maker - not an undisputed role, to be sure - and as
protagonist of limited reform, is not one that accounts of
its repressive actions have prepared us to expect.  Yet our
discussion of the apex (the nomenklatura, the verkhushka) of
the Soviet structure in the two previous sections should
lead us to expect this role.  The gigantic KGB was not
composed of totally like-minded, let alone reform-minded,
individuals, but its hierarchy may well have had the most
accurate and comprehensive picture of Soviet and global
realities of any institution, Soviet or non-Soviet.  A sense
for the urgency of economic rejuvenation was probably better
represented there than in the other three points of the
power-structure.  At the same time, this dimension of
Gorbachev's rise to power underscores the continuing massive
power of the police state apparatus in determining policy at
the highest and most strategic level.  And this structure
has yet to be systematically dissolved.

     These five observations do not exhaustively delineate
the character of the late-era Soviet State - how could they?
- but to my mind they will serve as the core of a successful
conceptualization of what that state had become by the
1980s.  This has deliberately not been a structural
description of the agencies and institutions of the Soviet
state, but rather an attempt to characterize its formative
genesis, the later development of its methodology of the
operation of power, and the role of communication in this
process.  (The client-states' modes of operation were in
turn officially modeled upon this one.)

     The key consequent issue for communication researchers
is the mechanisms by which those states dominated their
media.  For some, this can simply be reduced to one of flat
censorship, presuming all viewpoints to have been filtered
through a Party cell mesh that strained out every political
heresy.  For others, such as the present author, it is more
productive to see how dissent was managed, and was on
occasion unmanageable rather than simply expunged,
especially in the Brezhnev years in Russia, and during the
latter decades of Communist rule in Poland and Hungary.  It
is a topic which will be examined below in the section on
cultural production.

     A similar diversity of views to those on the sovietized
state exists vis-a-vis the successor State structures since
1989.  There is considerable disagreement currently
concerning the degree of continuity in modus operandi of the
State between the two phases.  That there is a considerable
continuity in personnel is not in doubt, but what this means
in terms of actual policies and procedures is less clear.

     The successor-regimes have tended to define
broadcasting, especially television, as appropriately
subordinate to the government of the day (Jakab & Galik,
1991; Mond, 1992), and there is considerable evidence that
the Gorbachev regime, despite being widely defined in the
West as rather liberal, operated in similar ways
(Vatchnadze, 1991).  Yeltsin's summary dismissal of Yegor
Yakovlev, former editor of glasnost flagship _Moscow News_,
as director of Ostankino Broadcasting in November 1992 -
over allegations of negative TV news coverage of Russian
troop behavior in ethnic clashes in North Ossetia - would be
a further case in point, as would the March 1993 resignation
under pressure of his successor, and as would the January
1993 resignations of the directors of Hungarian television
and radio (also under tremendous pressure).  Polish
broadcasting executives were perpetually being fired or
relocated by successive Polish administrations during the
years 1990-93.

     There are superficially plausible rationales for
clinging to the old authoritarianism, given the
unprecedented and enormous changes taking place which can
certainly generate problems and criticism more readily than
solutions.  However, in view of the overwhelmingly
commercial drive of most of the media corporations who have
entered these markets, there is at the time of writing the
disconcerting possibility that the media in each one of
these countries might settle down into a bifurcated system
of rather low-level entertainment media, on the one hand,
including various types of pornography (Karlinsky, 1992),
but with news media, especially in broadcasting, kept on a
very tight leash by the government.

     Theories of democratic transition - in other words, of
drastic changes in the form of the State - have been
developed in recent years, mostly based on the experiences
of Southern Europe and Latin America (O'Donnell et al.,
1986; Di Palma, 1990).  In general, the nearest these
authors approach to an analysis of communication or media is
in terms of general statements about legitimacy and hegemony
and the role of fear in repressive political climates.  A
further caveat is immediately in order concerning the
applicability of their studies to Eastern Europe, namely the
assumption that the political transition will automatically
be to some form of democracy.  A number of East European
countries may have at best a very long, even stalled
transition in that direction, notably Serbia, Croatia,
Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, the Transcaucasian and Central
Asian republics of the former Union, and not least Russia
itself.

     The literature cited above tends to concentrate mostly
on the perspectives and strategic behavior of various
political actors, whether of the elite or of the public.
They focus on such issues as how far hard-liners in the
elite are risk-insensitive, and doves, risk-aware; on
military, bureaucratic and police detestation of uncertainty
and disorder; on the excitement of the mutual discovery of
shared ideals among the atomized, repressed public; on the
role of conspicuous elite corruption in alienating the
public; on the effect of the culture of fear in deterring
hope for change; and on the conditions under which a section
of the elite may "secede" from the regime and form a
coalition with oppositional forces.  A theory of rational
choice is implicit in these analyses, but the role of
communication of any kind in the process of strategizing
choices, even within the elite, is only hinted at or
implied, never really examined.

     The only exception to this judgment is that there are
some very interesting insights in the "democratic
transition" literature into the social mechanisms of
awakening change in the public at the dawn of regime
transition - referred to by O'Donnell et al. as the
"resurrection of civil society" - which do have a strong
communicative dimension even though it is not traced out in
much detail.  The authors refer to the importance of public
political gestures by exemplary individuals - Walesa,
Sakharov, Havel, are names which come to mind in our region
- in testing the limits of the possible.  They note the
impact of satire and ridicule by artists and intellectuals
in small settings such as cafes, classrooms, bookstores,
apartments.  They emphasize the importance of informal links
with universities, literary journals, unofficial research
groups.  They stress the potential effectiveness of dress
and gesture as signals of dissent.  Their brief
observations, however, lead us directly into concepts of
civil society, the public sphere, and ultimately of
political movements, and their relevance or otherwise for
understanding the relation between media communication and
the state in Eastern Europe during the era of regime change.

             Civil Society, the Public Sphere,
                  and Political Movements

     The terms "civil society" and "public sphere" have been
in considerable vogue over the past few years, but both
suffer from the vice of being considerably vague as well.
As Norberto Bobbio has demonstrated (Bobbio, 1988),
historically the term "civil society" has frequently changed
its meaning, from signifying the antithesis of the state of
nature (Hobbes through Locke); the antithesis of the
despotic state (Kant); economic, judicial and administrative
structures intermediate between family and the state
(Hegel); capitalist economic relations (Marx); or the arena
of societal and cultural interaction outside the realm of
the state, the economic order and the family (Gramsci).  In
the period of regime change in Eastern Europe "civil
society" was often used by intellectuals as a kind of
mantra, signifying both a highly idealized view of
pluralistic democracy in western countries, and a normative
commitment to fostering that idealized model within and
against the Soviet bloc.  Some commentators on Eastern
Europe (e.g.  Helsinki Watch, 1986; Molnar, 1990; Rau, 1991;
Starr, 1990) have also used the term to refer to the growing
vigor of public dissent in the latter years of the Soviet
system.

     A conceptually related term deployed by some East-
Central European writers was "anti-politics" (Konrad, 1984),
to denote the spaces they were attempting to open up within
and against the Communist regimes.  In essence the term
signified the refusal, on the one hand, to engage in
"coquettish" (Ost, 1990, p. 39) negotiations for reform with
regimes that had shown repeatedly that they would never take
reform seriously; and on the other hand, to begin living
civic life so far as possible as though the regime's
ideology and restrictions were non-existent, to carve out a
space of honest interaction between citizens in the public
sphere.  Polish intellectual leader Adam Michnik described
the strategy as "anticipatory democracy" (Ost, 1990, p. 67;
cf.  Downing, 1984, pp. 23-24).

     The "public sphere" or "public realm" has also been
used in part as a close equivalent to "civil society" in the
Gramscian sense.  More commonly in recent years, however,
has been the Habermasian use of the term, based on his
somewhat idealized extrapolation from the initial processes
of public opinion formation in Britain, France and Germany
in his early study, only recently translated into English,
_The Structural Transformation Of The Public Sphere_ (1989).
Subsequently the kernel of this notion resurfaced in his
concept of the "ideal speech situation," in his _The Theory
Of Communicative Action_ (1984, 1987), functioning
explicitly as a normative goal-cum-yardstick for democratic
structures and procedures.  Whereas in his early study he
wrote of the "refeudalization" of public life in the
twentieth century, in his later work he writes of the
"colonization of the life-world" of the public by both
economic and governmental forces, against which the public
has come to react by organizing various types of
oppositional social movements.

     In this writer's use (Downing, 1988), the term
"alternative public sphere" is deployed as a way of
understanding the alternative media of social and political
movements, and the new spaces those media open up for
debate, reflection and organization around crucial issues
neglected or distorted by mainstream media.  Arato and Cohen
(1992, chap. 10) argue that the term "civil society" is most
productively used to refer to the combination of public and
private (i.e. familial) spheres of life, namely those
dimensions of our existence not primarily dominated by the
logic and procedures of the State or of the economy.  (Their
quadripartite conceptualization of societal relations is
intended for analytical purposes only, as their analysis of
the feminist movement clearly demonstrates later in their
book.)  In turn the public sphere today is primarily
constituted in their view by social movements.  A major
analytical lacuna, however, is that - for reasons that are
obscure to this writer - Arato and Cohen rarely refer to
communication processes or institutions in relation to
movements or the public sphere.  I would propose, by
contrast, that we should see alternative media as both the
interior dialogue and outward self-expression of these
movements, and thus as central to any understanding of the
movement process itself.

     Before engaging in a discussion of political movements,
let me briefly summarize the argument of this section so
far.  It is that a nuanced analysis of the later soviet-type
state, and an acknowledgment of the strongly authoritarian
character of many of the successor regimes, are necessary
conditions for understanding the roles of media in each
situation.  Furthermore, that elements of the recent
analysis of state transitions in other regions help to
illuminate the process by which dissident and eventually
insurgent communication processes served to weaken the grip
of the soviet regimes.  In turn, certain definitions of
"public sphere" and "civil society" also contain in nuce
strong implications, typically not addressed explicitly, for
the significance of alternative media and communication in
developing the processes of regime transition.  Jakubowicz
(1990) offers a fascinating analysis of the operation of no
less than three different public spheres in late 1980s
Poland, namely the regime, the Catholic Church, and the pro-
Solidarity forces.

     The impact of popular movements varied considerably
between the three countries, with Poland's Solidarity
clearly exerting the most impact by far, arguably having
been, along with the Afghan resistance movement, the slow
detonator of the entire Soviet bloc's dissolution.
Notwithstanding the great insurrection of 1956, however,
Hungary's oppositional movements were miniscule by
comparison with Poland's (Ramet, 1991, pp. 100, 113-21).
The Soviet Union's were primarily ethnic and/or religious
(Tokes, 1975), though with an additional very powerful
environmental component during the 1980s, which emerged into
full force only once the Gorbachev regime's glasnost
policies had lifted the lid on public expression (Helsinki
Watch, 1990; Tolz, 1990; Babkhina, 1991; Sedaitis &
Butterfield, 1991).

     Migranyan (1991) has argued that in the specific
conditions of the Soviet Union, unleashing free expression
before making headway in solving economic problems was a
recipe for the chauvinist social movements and the ethnic
and national confrontations which scarred Eastern Europe
thereafter (cf.  Goble, 1991; Butterfield & Weigle, 1991).
The point is important:  in the USA, especially, there is a
powerful long-standing cultural optimism about the
instantaneous benefits of free speech.  The "public sphere,"
in other words, is thought to be automatically an
opportunity for positive and constructive speech, and
negative, poisonous speech will be purged of its effects by
fresh doses of the former erupting in response.
Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, inherited
cultural expectations are considerably more cautious than
this, and not necessarily as a result of elitist prejudices.
At all events, such a perspective acts as a brake on false
optimism cooncerning the automatic benefits of all popular
movements and the public communication in which they engage.

     Interestingly, workers' movements, although intense at
certain moments, such as the Tyumen oil field workers' or
the Russian and Ukrainian miners' militancy in 1989-90
(Rutland, 1991; Sedaitis, 1991; Bava, 1991), made far less
of a dent on the dissolution of the regime in the USSR or
Hungary, than in Poland.  This may have been partly a
product of the sheer physical expanse of the USSR and the
geographical distance between the centers of agitation and
Moscow, the concentrated center of State power, which
reduced the immediate visibility and communicative capacity
of the strikers.  Attempts to cling on to power by the old
Soviet regime through mobilizing so-called "workers' front"
movements were analogous only in name, and rather quickly
withered on the vine (Tolz, 1990, pp. 60-68; Sedaitis, 1991,
pp. 13-19).

     For political movements, although sociological research
frequently neglects this obvious reality, communication is
their lifeblood.  Typically they must create their own
communication strategies and radical media against the
silence or hostility of official media and repressive organs
of the State (Downing, 1984).  Western sociological research
on social movements has also been criticized, correctly in
my view, for having little or no sense for the role of the
State in the play of forces (Butterfield & Weigle, 1991, p.
184), and especially for implicitly integrating the
pressures exerted by social movements into a pluralist
model, as though they were interest-groups negotiating with
a state structure, itself presumed to be ultimately benign
(compare Hough's approach as outlined above).  This
optimistic view was much harder to find plausible in the
East than it has been in the West (unless, in the latter
region, you had been a member of an excluded group, such as
a person of color).

     There is currently a burgeoning literature on social
movements, seeking to establish their typical forms, phases
and modes of self-constitution (Touraine, 1981; Alberoni,
1984; Melucci, 1989; Dalton & Kuechler, 1990).  Regrettably
for our purposes, their empirical focus is almost
exclusively on recent Western European movements, that is to
say on peace, ecological, anti-nuclear and feminist
movements.  The aims, character and trajectories of these
so- called "New Social Movements" were radically different
from those in Eastern Europe, or for that matter from the
civil rights movement in the USA or the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa.  The insights of this research
need rather carefully sifting before they can be applied
outside their culture zone.

     As Arato and Cohen (1992, chap. 10) have argued, social
movement research has moved in three phases.  Initially it
was heavily influenced by traditional notions of the crowd
or the mob, a sea of irrational human beings swept up in a
fit of passion communicated from one to the other almost via
naked nerve endings, instinctually and hysterically.  The
second model, in conscious opposition to the first, defined
social movements as rational actors seeking to maximize
their influence by choosing the available methods of protest
and communication at their disposal (the "resource-
mobilization" model).  The third model, characteristic of
recent "New Social Movement" research on Western Europe,
examines the collective identity of the participants and
tries by this to establish what the factors are which lead
people to define themselves as, and to participate as,
members of a given social movement.  This approach
conceptualizes contemporary social movements as an ongoing,
almost cyclical phenomenon, and as an expression of
sectoral, pragmatic discontent, by contrast with what they
define as earlier movements (typically, labor movements)
that in their view set themselves a revolutionary target, or
pinned their hopes on harnessing the State to their goals,
or took for granted the automatic, ecologically sound
blessings of economic growth [4].

     In the section below I shall return to the notion of
political movements and alternative communication in Eastern
Europe.  For the moment, anchoring their importance for
media analysis is as far as I shall take the discussion.
Each approach has a different implication in this regard.
For example, the traditional "collective behavior" approach
to political movements derives from earlier definitions of
the "mob," and leaves us to infer an almost animalistic mode
of communication, either within the "mob" or from it to its
intended and accidental targets.  The resource-mobilization
model tends to be as hyper-rational as the collective
behavior model is hyper-instinctual.  It implies a political
chessboard, even if the movement in question lacks a number
of its opponent's pieces.  In this view, the capacity to
mobilize news media attention is a cheap resource, if it can
be successfully realized.  The quality and tenor of the
attention may be poor or negative, but mention may at least
bestow public existence on an otherwise barely known
movement.  In line with its rationalism, however, complete
clarity about both resources and the consequences of action
is usually assumed to be a part of the communication process
for the movement, indeed its foundation.

     The "New Social Movement" (NSM) approach tends more to
imply a view of communication as ritual behavior (cf.
Carey, 1975), as a process of subcultural exploration and
reaffirming of collective awareness.  Alberoni (1984) has
some interesting insights into the drama of becoming aware
of oneself in a new way as a result of being in
communication with an active social movement, insights which
dovetail suggestively with the analysis of the "culture of
fear" in Latin America analyzed by Corradi, Fagan and
Garretin (1992), and possibly too with the "cycle of
protest" in postwar Italy, as analyzed by Tarrow (1990).
Alberoni coins the term "the nascent state" to denote the
transitional condition in which individuals redefine
themselves as members of a social movement, and discusses
the importance both of the rediscovery of previously hidden,
denied history for social movements, and of "the
overpowering experience that a new beginning is possible
where truth is predominant rather than falsehood" (pp.
55-57).  These comments have considerable resonance in the
East European situation before the changes in regimes (cf.
Ash, 1990; Nove, 1989; Goodwyn, 1991; Melville & Lapidus,
1990, chaps. 2, 4; Eisen, 1990).  On the other hand, his
discussion of the "paradox of incommunicability" (pp. 82-83)
of social movements, namely the difficulty their members
have in explaining their commitment to those outside the
movement in question, seems more relevant to feminist or
religious movements, for example, than to the movements in
Eastern Europe.  It is relatively rare, however, for "NSM"
analysts to incorporate communication into their framework
[5].

     Cultural Production, Censorship and Samizdat Media

     The concept of cultural production is drawn here
particularly from the work of Hall (1980, pp. 27-28, 128-
38), as well as from empirical studies by Elliott (1972),
Schlesinger (1987) and Schlesinger et al.  (1983).  In
essence, the concept focuses on the mechanisms, large and
small, by which given contemporary cultures are generated,
sustained or subjected to decline, with particular attention
to the role of media and other communication institutions.
Rather, therefore, than looking at culture purely as
perspective, this approach seeks to ground the sources of
cultural perspectives and their durability or otherwise, in
a social, economic and political matrix.

     I argued above that the Soviet bloc states were already
in a long process of change and decay, initially gradual,
but inexorably accelerating.  I do not claim foresight of
the dizzy gallop of 1989-91, but the signs of increasing
internal pressure for change were there for anyone with eyes
to see.  Whether we are speaking of Brezhnev's "Little
Deal," or of Kadar's inch-by-inch relaxation of controls, or
of the Jaruzelski regime's increasing paralysis in Poland,
or of the subterranean revival of passionate nationalist
and/or religious sentiments across large tracts of the
region - and there were many more such indices -
"totalitarianism" scarcely conveyed the actual situation.

     Nor, similarly, did the simplistic analogue concept in
the sphere of cultural production, namely "censorship."  Not
only does this concept obliterate the role of various kinds
of alternative communication, to which we shall return
below, but it also negates the prime factor, the cement of
the system of cultural control, namely self-censorship.  As
in the West, but on a much greater range of issues, media
professionals primarily operated by their learned procedures
- learned in university, from their colleagues, and by
reviewing the output of their own publication or channel.
This self-censorship did not necessarily make the transition
to new types of media content any easier following the
regime changes.  Indeed, one of the problems many
journalists described to me in all three countries was to
get the mental censor out of their own heads, even though
the restrictions they had so long internalized were no
longer in force [6].

     The reaction of many western commentators to this
description of self-censorship as the glue of cultural
control is "Thought control - totalitarianism!"  But it is
distinctly unsociological to produce on the one hand a
metaphysics of sovietized media, while still continuing to
talk in secular educational categories about "trained media
professionals" in the West.  The range and type of issues
that were accepted as off-limits varied, as I have said,
very considerably, from what was off-limits in the West.  So
did the aesthetic quality of print and broadcast media -
though here again, western analysts tended to take their own
best examples as the yardstick, such as _The Economist_ or
_El Pais_, rather than _The National Enquirer_ or
_Bildzeitung_.  So, tremendously, did the penalties for non-
compliance differ, though execution was not among them after
Stalin's demise.  But the basic sociology - not the
economics - of cultural production was remarkably analogous
in both systems.  It depended for its daily functioning on
internalized norms of what was appropriate to cover or
produce, and what was not, so avoiding predictable, career-
threatening confrontation with media executives:  in other
words, official cultural production ran on self-censorship.

     An interesting comparison/contrast, for example, is
between elite sources of information in both systems during
the 1980s.  In the Soviet system, the elite received
accurate, up-to-the-minute, uncensored information via White
Tass and Red Tass (Smith, 1984, chap. 14; Antonkin, 1983),
and through being permitted to read the quality foreign
press.  In a different cultural sphere, there were
experimental and socially critical plays performed on a
secondary theatre circuit in Moscow and Leningrad, widely
and intensively patronized by the big city intelligentsia.
Not to everyone, admittedly, but accurate information and a
variety of perspectives were available to select elites.
The difference in the "West" is that such information is
often available to a somewhat wider elite, always provided
its members have the education, appetite and income to
consume it.  The high-priced specialist corporate bulletins,
financial reports, data-base services or remote-sensing
images, are not limited to a nomenklatura, merely to those
who can afford them and have the necessary instruction to
make use of them [7].

     The mechanisms, in other words, varied, but not
necessarily the restriction of quality information to
consumption by elites.  The Western system was much more
porous, but this did not in and of itself suffice to produce
an effective demand for quality information.

     The contrasts between the systems were more to be seen
in the parallel provision of often compulsory political
lectures in the workplace and elsewhere by Party, civil
defense and anti-religious activists (White, 1979;
Remington, 1988, chaps. 2-3), which had no analogue in the
"West."  Even so, these lecture-sessions were not
particularly successful examples of thought control.  Had
there not been rewards and sanctions attached to attendance,
and rewards for offering one's services as a lecturer, it is
most improbable that this parallel system of official
communication would have functioned in any way.  We may
compare the largely fruitless programs of the Houses of
Culture in Russia, Poland and Hungary (White, 1990).

     Shlapentokh's (1986) analysis cited earlier could be
read to suggest that the dual level of communication
eventually became so powerful that even some of the regime's
leadership finally concluded that this dual communication
was blocking economic and social development.  On this
reading, then, we should see Gorbachev's announcement of
glasnost communication policies, not as the utterance of a
maverick who had inexplicably been allowed to climb to the
top, but as the reaction of key verkhushka members to an
oncoming cataclysm they saw as inevitable unless preventive
action were taken.

     I would argue, therefore, that this more nuanced
understanding of the immediate antecedents of regime change
in the sphere of cultural production is necessary in order
properly to comprehend the present situation, whether in its
totality, or more specifically in terms of media and
communication developments.  A kind of paralysis would often
invade the analyst as she or he contemplated the conjuncture
in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, especially in the
cultural sphere.  Distinguishing strong undercurrents from
the whirl of flotsam and jetsam made reading entrails look
simple.  Only a clear understanding of the structures that
immediately preceded that period could shed proper light on
likely trends, societal or mediatic.

     Let us begin by commenting upon the societal dimension,
a dimension I have argued above to be impossible to
understand unless the "totalitarian" model is rejected or
drastically modified.  The communication roots of these
dramatic political changes go back a very long way.  People
did not begin, as in the film Network, by throwing open
their windows and shouting to each other "I'm as mad as
hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!"  Yes, there
were mass demonstrations, occupations, confrontations, but
they had long antecedents in the communication networks of
cultural and political dissidents, in the unsung activity of
underground political movements, in the embryonic
alternative public sphere.  Alberto Melucci (1989, p. 208)
has observed of social movements in Western Europe that

     a great deal of activity continues to take place
     during the invisibility phase.  The submerged
     networks of social movements are laboratories of
     experience.  New problems and questions are posed.
     New answers are invented and tested, and reality
     is perceived and named in different ways.

     In the Eastern European instance, this "invisibility
phase" included three types of communicative activity in
oppositional cultural production:  samizdat publication;
marginal media; and what in his study of Solidarity Lawrence
Goodwyn (1991, 110f.) has described as the transition from
kitchen table conversations to political organizing.  I have
mentioned samizdat first because it is a little better
understood in the West (e.g.  Blumsztajn, 1988; Haraszti,
1979, 1987; Hopkins, 1983; Downing, 1984, Part III; Helsinki
Watch, 1986; Helsinki Watch, 1990).  The term means
"Self-publication," in opposition to State-publication,
reflecting the situation where the State insisted upon a
publishing monopoly for itself.  Hough proposes (1977, p.
201) that both the Stalin and the Brezhnev regimes were
"more preoccupied with regulating horizontal communication
among the citizenry than with communications between the
citizens and the political authorities."  In light of this
regime priority, samizdat were indeed the stirrings of an
alternative public sphere, and were instantly perceived as
such by soviet bloc regimes.

     In the early days, samizdat publication meant typed
single-spaced sheets, without margins, often blurry carbon
copies rather than the original.  As in other spheres of
insurgency, the Polish samizdat were outstandingly
successful, perhaps building upon the long tradition of
underground publishing in that nation.  Later, especially in
Poland, the physical quality of the publications came to
approach that of official media.

     I hardly need mention that quite stiff sanctions
applied to producing, circulating, reading or possessing
such manuscripts, but a major index of the decay of the
regimes could be found in the progressive openness with
which citizens would initially display a samizdat text on
their bookshelf, then be seen buying it, then be seen
reading it in public.  Historically, Soviet samizdat began
to be an active media sphere following the post-Khrushchev
repression of literary expression; Polish and Hungarian
samizdat became active following the Helsinki Agreement of
1975, guaranteeing among other things freedom of expression,
to which the Soviet bloc regimes were signatories.

     In addition, with the wide availability of the audio-
cassette, "magnitizdat" began to circulate, making available
both Russian ballads with an alternative political edge, and
pirated Western rock music (Smith, 1984; Ryback, 1989;
Ramet, 1991, chap. 9).  With the arrival of the
videocassette, this process expanded still further (Boyd,
1990; Mattelart, 1992b).  In youth culture, especially in
the USSR, both Western popular music and the use of English
in graffiti signified a rebellion against the "line" that
honest, decent Soviet youth would automatically prefer
Russian music and culture, given that Russian was, if not
the language of the angels, then at least that of the
world's first Communist state (Bushnell, 1990).  Their
enthusiasm for both was equally a rebellion against the
Soviet bloc's closed frontiers for youth culture, the
hypocritical denial of its own internationalist pretensions.

     I will not proceed further with commentary upon
samizdat media, except to underline that very well-known
figures in the West, such as Sakharov, were only one element
in the total samizdat picture.  A whole variety of concerns,
religious, ethnic and nationalist, young people's,
environmental, peace-oriented, slowly began to be expressed
by these means (see also Tokes, 1975; Helsinki Watch, 1987;
Alexeyeva, 1987).  But their small number and circulation in
the USSR and Hungary should not blind us to their long-term
cumulative significance:  every political movement has to
begin from its specific context, with its specific resources
and self-understanding.  Samizdat media had no dramatic,
instant impact:  they represented a gradual burn into the
deep fabric of power.  Given the speed with which during the
glasnost era people seized upon hitherto banned
communications, we may infer that samizdat reflected a much
wider public opinion, even if they did not physically reach
it except perhaps by word of mouth.

     By the term "marginal" media, I have in mind not
alternative, but small-scale official media, such as monthly
and quarterly periodicals, minor specialized radio programs,
a few provincial publications, plays in small theatres (e.g.
Goldfarb, 1981; Condee & Padunov work in progress).  The
high estimation of the "writer" as prophet, especially in
traditional Russian and Polish culture, and the long list of
seemingly isolated literary figures who eventually wrought
considerable impact upon national consciousness, has
historically allocated to writers a weight usually reserved
for mass media in the "West" in the formation of public
opinion - even when their audience did not appear to exist
as such (Kagarlitsky, 1988, chap. 1).

     We might add to these marginal official media both
literary works published overseas ("tamizdat" - "Over There
Publication") and smuggled into the country, and also
foreign radio services such as the BBC or Deutsche Welle
(Shanor, 1985).  The full story of all these statisically
minor but nonetheless influential media has still to be
told, especially as regards the marginal official media.
Let me then give two brief examples, one from the USSR and
the other from Hungary.

     The Soviet example comes from a monthly magazine,
_Chemistry Today_ (literally, Chemistry And Life, Khimiya I
Zhizn).  It enjoyed at its height a circulation of 200,000,
quite small relative to the gigantic circulation figures of
required newspapers such as Pravda, but nonetheless
significant in that its readership generally read it (which
quite often could not be said for Pravda).  This little
outlet took a major risk in 1961 and published the full text
of the Lysenko Commission report.

     The significance of doing so takes a little explaining
to those unfamiliar with the region and its history.
Lysenko was the spurious genetics researcher canonized by
the Stalin regime in the 1930s as the emblem of its
self-propagandizing claim to be the most advanced scientific
culture - because proletarian-based - on the planet.  His
"solutions" to grain- yield problems also promised a
technical-fix way out of the feeble productivity of the
draconic collective farm system.  Perhaps needless to say,
scientists who disputed Lysenko found themselves without
jobs, imprisoned, and much worse still.  This was no typical
feud between academics.

     Lysenko was finally exposed and demoted only much
later, in the early 1960s, but because so many careers had
been made on his coat-tails, and so many destroyed through
his readiness to denounce those who upheld non-Soviet
genetics, the public acknowledgement of his exposure was
handled with tongs.  The Commission report was only planned
to be distributed to the select six thousand members of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences.  Hence, its unauthorized
publication by _Chemistry Today_ was a major breach of the
political rules.  Indeed, the magazine was only able to
survive such risky actions because it had one very powerful
protector within the Soviet hierarchy.  Without that shield,
or godfather, its staff would have been likely dismissed and
possibly some of them jailed.

     The Hungarian example is a Friday evening radio program
of the earlier 1980s on economic policy called Ballpark
(Duhongo - umlats above u,o,o), which attracted a mere 1-2%
of the audience.  Within this weekly half-hour, the
producers set themselves the task of pushing at the limits
of what could be broadcast.  They took current regime
slogans such as "political reform" and publicly queried what
they actually meant, or questioned whether simply repaying
foreign banks was the only way to deal with Hungary's debt
problem.  Again, this would be accounted very mild material
by some standards, but it implicitly disputed the regime's
competence in political or economic policy.  They discovered
the limits of the ballpark in 1986 when they allowed a
university professor to assert that the whole basis of the
new 5- year plan was flawed.  On meeting the director of
radio broadcasting on their way out of the building, he told
them "That's the last program you make."  Nonetheless, in
the duration of the program series, they felt they had
managed to stretch the limits of what could be said over the
air, despite many forced compromises that often nauseated
them, or generated a cynical, alienated hide around them.

     There is no space to develop this theme further, and as
noted, it should be expanded to examine peripheral stage
productions, science fiction, absurdist literature, and
still other communicative forms, all of which contributed to
maintaining a distance from the regime, almost by way of
occasional metaphorical gulps of fresh air, figurative
flashes of light through scratches on a painted-out
windowpane.  It is perhaps no accident that these instances
of minor communicative rebellion originate more from Russia
and Hungary, for the major communicative breaches always
tended to be initiated from Poland.  David Ost's analysis
neatly summarizes the overall dynamics and framework of
these half-tolerated endeavors to rebuild a civil society:

     ...although totalitarianism is a necessary
     tendency of a Leninist party state, it cannot be
     achieved. And so the Party continually swings
     between a totalitarian tendency and a reform
     tendency, which recognizes that the state must
     interact with civil society rather than try to
     extinguish it (Ost, 1990, p. 39).

     The third aspect of the communicative roots of the
regime changes, the transition from political atomization to
a collective political force, has also been little studied
to date.  Goodwyn's study of Solidarity (1991), already
mentioned above, and Roman Laba's (1991) analysis of the
same movement, are among the relatively few studies which
address issues of communication in the development of
grassroots opposition in Eastern Europe.  Both writers,
basing themselves on detailed sociological research on the
Baltic Coast when the first phase of Solidarity was at its
height, vigorously dispute the accuracy of popular Western
interpretations of the movement, namely that it arose
through the influence either of a determined little band of
Warsaw intellectual leaders (KOR, later KOS), or of Pope
John Paul II's 1979 visit to Poland, or a combination of
both.  Both writers emphasize the movement's origins in
"collective learning through historical experience" (Laba,
1991, p. 170).  "Slowly, incrementally, piece by piece, the
body of knowledge assembled through this unseen but
persistent struggle in Poland's mines, factories and
shipyards, acquired transforming potential" (Goodwyn, 1991,
p. 43, slightly edited).

     Such a process clearly implies communication of many
kinds, and indeed both Laba and Goodwyn frequently refer to
many types of communication strategy by the Baltic working
class:  the underground press, leaflets, couriers, the use
of loudspeaker systems in the shipyards to identify the
licence plates of secret police cars, using the carbon
copies of telex messages as news bulletins on notice boards.
Goodwyn notes in addition the role of informal
message-bearers, whether the merchant seamen of other
countries who visited the Baltic ports and by the very
quality of their clothes challenged the regime's claims to
have organized amazing advances for "its" workers, or the
truck-drivers who took the reality of the Gdansk and Gdynia
shipyard occupation strikes out to other parts of Poland.
Goodwyn's overriding theme, however, is the process by which
within the Polish working class itself - and not via papal
or intellectual interventions from outside its ranks - the
experience of fighting the regime was accumulated and
communicated (1991, pp. 105, 113-115, 175).

     Laba (1991, chap. 7) also focuses on cultural themes,
the blend of religious, national and egalitarian symbols
used by the Solidarity movement in its first phase, and the
ways they differed from the regime's.  Lech Walesa was
portrayed sometimes as Everyman, sometimes as anti-hero,
sometimes as trickster.  By contrast the regime's symbols
had always focused on masculinist imagery, aggressive
themes, dehumanization of the enemy, and supposedly
inspired, almost godlike political leadership.  Laba also
interprets the strikes as a communicative rite of passage in
which individuals "rejected social masks" - i.e. the roles
and rituals prescribed for them by the regime under the
sanction of fear - and engaged with each other freely in
public for the first time in many of their lives (1991, p.
132).

     It is to be hoped that more accounts will soon appear
which begin to flesh out these all-important communicative
processes in developing organized resistance in Eastern
Europe.  I have argued elsewhere (Downing, 1984) that
breaking down atomization and developing autonomy, an
alternative public realm, are critically important bases for
wider and more effective political movements.

     Let us now turn to the present.  In the current period,
as Condee and Padunov (1992; and forthcoming) have shown for
Russia, the speed is dizzying with which switches in
cultural production are taking place.  Not only are the
official publications of yesteryear either changing their
names or leaving the scene entirely, and not only are the
subversive icons of very recent times such as Solzhenitsyn's
_Gulag Archipelago_ now last week's mashed potatoes, and not
only is video piracy rampant, but as noted earlier a new
array of self-help, business, astrological and pornographic
publications are flooding the scene.  Similar trends are
visible in East-Central Europe (Karlinsky, 1992; Mattelart,
1992a, 1992b).

     The most significant war, as noted already, is over
broadcasting, specifically television (Mond, 1992; Frybes,
1992), where the instincts of ruling elites, whether the
Hungarian Democratic Forum, President Walesa or President
Yeltsin, are clearly in the Gaullist mold of asserting tight
government oversight of the airwaves, particularly news and
current affairs programming.  Smolenski (1991) has recently
provided a graphic account of the ongoing conflicts between
Walesa and Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading independent
newspaper.

     Furthermore, foreign corporate media interests have
begun to make substantial inroads (Springer, Murdoch and
Maxwell in Hungary, Hersant in Poland, and most recently at
the time of writing, CNN in Moscow and Russia).  While the
first flush of such enthusiasm for buying into the East had
faded a little by the close of 1992, the basic dilemma in
the East continued to be three- or four-fold, invigorating a
sclerotic media and telecommunications system with foreign
investment and training programs; running the risk of an
ocean of US cultural production with the consequent threat
of loss of local cultural heritage; and balancing between
top-heavy local control versus more fragmented but still
unresponsive international control over communication
practice and policy (Splichal, 1992).

     On the organizational plane, most media professionals
were not so much ideologically committed to the outgoing
system, as trained to be loyal to the power structure.  For
most, there was no definitive problem in switching from one
master to another - as long as there was a master to be
served, you served him (cf.  Viatteau, 1992).  A genuinely
independent media system remains a goal rather than a
reality in the West, but still the scope for some
independence is greater there than it used to be in the
East.  Many media professionals in the East did need
training to develop a measure of independence in their work.
Equally, of those who set out to be fierce journalistic
critics, a number needed to learn to distinguish between
personal attacks on public figures, and the analysis of
roles, processes and institutions.  Nearly all journalists
needed to be weaned away from the "publitsistyka" tradition
of newswriting in Eastern Europe, which from before the
advent of communist regimes had favored lengthy commentary
and opinion over attention to the specifics of current
developments.  Since there is less experience of trying to
develop a responsive, critical media system in the East, and
since a number of the problems there are unprecedented and
extremely difficult - "What are we supposed to do to manage
the transition, read Marx's _Capital_ backwards?" some wits
were asking - instant success is not to be anticipated.

     This brief overview of trends in cultural production at
the outset of the 1990s would be seriously incomplete were
we to omit the grave problem of the relation between media
and ethnic confrontation.  Whether this confrontation is
pacific, as in the former Czechoslovakia, mob-based, as in
the former East Germany or in Romania, or involves massive
military force, as in the former Yugoslavia and in the
Transcaucasian republics, the role of media in exacerbating
or mitigating such conflicts remains potentially very
important, but hitherto largely unexplored.  Nor should we
assume that anti-Romani or anti-Semitic currents, currently
less overtly expressed in other parts of Eastern Europe,
will necessarily become dormant - rather, they may become
much more salient.  The role of media in averting such
possible catastrophes is also in principle a potent one, but
not necessarily the priority among media, government or
transnational elites in the nations in question.

(This article is continued in the file "Downing2 V4N194".)
------------------------------------------------------------
Correspondence:  John D. H. Downing
                 Department of Radio-Television-Film
                 The University of Texas at Austin
                 Austin, TX  78712-1091
                 Telephone: (512) 471-4071
                 Fax: (512) 471-4077
                 Email: jdowning@emx.cc.utexas.edu
------------------------------------------------------------
                      Copyright 1994
   Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc.

     This file may not be publicly distributed or reproduced
without written permission of the Communication Institute
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