RUSSIA: On this day: 8 March

President Reagan delivers "Evil Empire" speech.

On 8 March 1983, in his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, U.S. President Ronald Reagan introduced the term “evil empire” to describe the Soviet Union.

Reagan exhorted the audience to “pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness – pray they will discover the joy of knowing God.” He subjected the Soviet leaders to criticism, as the embodiment of the “darkness” and reproached the “aggressive impulses of the evil empire.”

The Soviet Union, for its part, accused the United States of being the center of imperialism, holding out for world domination; it was the Soviets’ duty to fight this in the name of communism.

In Moscow, the Soviet press agency TASS said the use of the words “evil empire” only proved that the Reagan administration “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”

Reagan, however, genuinely believed that all he had done was call a spade a spade, the only right thing to do under the circumstances; any euphemisms would signal the concession of the free world to totalitarianism. His approach to the problem was vastly supported by conservatives, but was showered with criticism by pacifists. The latter viewed such an attitude as perfectly capable of triggering a nuclear war between the two superpowers.

The “evil empire” concept received a warm welcome in Europe, threatened by the strengthening of the Soviet foreign and domestic policies that General Secretary Yury Andropov* brought with him. In the USSR, Reagan’s formula was favored by the dissident movement, and particularly, by the academician Andrey Sakharov **. It was also popular among Soviet émigrés.

During his second term in office, three years after the phrase “evil empire” had first been pronounced, Reagan paid a visit to the new reformist General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office in 1985. When asked by a reporter whether he still thought the Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” Reagan admitted that he no longer did. The time when he used the term was a “different era,” that is, the period before Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms. Still, throughout his career, Reagan’s antagonism against the Soviet regime, with its absence of democratic institutions, persisted.

*Yury Andropov – General Secretary of the Communist Party from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later. A hardliner and former head of the KGB, he is renowned for his brutal suppression of political dissidence.

**Andrey Sakharov – an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

RUSSIA: On this day: 6 March

Cover the first issue of «Pioneer truth»

March 6, 1925, was the day Pionerskaya Pravda (The Pioneer Truth) was first issued. Its title replicated the name of the main Soviet print medium, Pravda, as did numerous other newspapers. Pionerskaya Pravda was designed in the image and liking of the Komsomolskaya Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Komsomol organization, and was used for similar purposes. Both the Pioneer and the Komsomol organizations were junior bodies of the Communist Party, hence their main goal was to ensure that the younger generation would become good devoted communists when their time came.

Pionerskaya Pravda has always been popular with teenagers, each of them finding something to their taste. For that reason, in the 1970s and 1980s the paper’s circulation rose to 10 million issues. Since Pionerskaya Pravda still remained a propaganda medium whose motto read “helping the Pioneer organization and the school to raise political awareness and communist spirit in the younger generation,” many schools were required to subscribe to the paper and expected to discuss every issue at special debates and club meetings. Kids did not normally respond to the propaganda part, but genuinely felt for their starving peers from Africa and enjoyed taking part in the Pionerskaya Pravda-supervised charity drives out of sheer humanity, not political bias. Pionerka, as it was lovingly called, initiated international correspondence with teenagers from other socialist countries, and Soviet pioneers enjoyed their international friendships. Pionerka received about 200 thousand letters from young children all around the Union each year.

Young pioneers were welcome to try their hand at journalism, side by side with experienced professional journalists. The paper also provided informational and promotional support for all-Union and international youth activities: contests, sport matches, arts and crafts exhibitions and was hailed by many prominent Soviet writers who published their addresses (open letters) on its pages.

In the 1980s, with the advent of perestroika, the format of the newspaper was changed to fit the new youth lifestyle. In the era marked by a total absence of information, Pionerka became a real getaway for teenagers. Now, the pages of the paper gleamed with celebrity stories and lyrics for pop songs, which, in the absence of the Internet, made the paper precious for fans. The last page of every issue contained a chapter from a new teenage novel. It was published in installments, becoming a kind of written TV series. It was a very smart move which made kids look forward to the next issue. Sometimes, as part of a contest, authors would ask the readers to finish the story for them, and winners were awarded.
The Pioneer organization ceased to exist, but Pionerka still maintains a certain niche, though having lost its past popularity.

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