Anna Arutunyan

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles looking at the history of The Moscow News, from 1930 to the present day. The origins of Russia's oldest English-language newspaper go back into such dark recesses of the 20th century that one often shudders, turning its yellowing pages in the archives.

As a Soviet newspaper launched in 1930, it was no innocent bystander dutifully writing the first draft of history and objectively reporting on the often bloody events of the day. It quickly became Stalin's mouthpiece, and as such, its mission was not reflecting reality but helping to mould an alternative one. Over the next half-century and more, that reality would replace the one that The Moscow News took great pains to ignore.

And not just history judged their efforts severely. At the height of Stalin's terror, the Russian editors of the paper, all of them Old Bolsheviks, would be purged, one by one.

The first editor-in-chief, Viktor Vaksov, was shot on Stalin's orders in 1937, according to Memorial, the historical society that records the fate of the victims of Stalinist repression. A year later, Tovy Axelrod, the associate editor, was convicted of taking part in a terrorist plot, and executed in the NKVD's cellars at Lubyanka.

Mikhail Borodin, the next editor-in-chief, survived the terror of the 1930s - only to be arrested in 1949 during investigations into the so-called Anti-Fascist Committee plot. He died two years later in a Siberian labour camp.

The story of The Moscow News actually begins not in Russia, but 90 years ago - on the west coast of the United States, with an American left-wing journalist, Anna Louise Strong.

It was in the city of Seattle where Strong met and fell under the influence of a somewhat dashing Comintern agent, Mikhail Borodin.

Their meeting was to lead eventually to the founding of The Moscow News 11 years later.

A preacher's daughter, Strong was born in 1885 in a two-room shack in Friend, Nebraska, a prairie town of less than 2,000 people.

By dint of hard work and intelligence, Strong managed to take a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago at the age of 23.

Strong's first reported for the New York Evening Post on the Wobblies (the nickname for the Industrial Workers of the World, a left-wing union confederation). By the time she was in her early 30s, she was writing books, articles, and was actively involved in Seattle's first-ever general strike, in 1919.

It was at this point that the question of whether Strong was primarily an activist or a journalist first arose. "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move which will lead - WHO KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor," she famously wrote in an editorial for her newspaper, which was funded by the city's trade unions.

But the Seattle strike petered out after a few days. Disappointed with its failure, Strong became enamoured of the Soviet experiment. According to Tracy B. Strong, Anna Louise's great nephew and her biographer, it was at that point that she met reporter Lincoln Steffens, who had famously remarked of the Soviet Union, "I have been over in the future, and it works!"

He suggested that if she wanted to make revolution happen, she should go to Moscow to study the Bolsheviks' experience.

It was also at this time that she was introduced to Borodin. "I think she had a crush on him, actually, if you really want to know," Tracy Strong recalled in a recent telephone interview from his home in San Diego, California. "He was quite a romantic figure."

Anna Louise took the plunge and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1921. There, she wrote a series of books, including one about a typhoid epidemic that was sweeping the country. In a 1925 article, she heaped lavish praise on Leon Trotsky as the indefatigable organiser of the Red Army during the Civil War, and on his main rival for the leadership, Josef Stalin, who emerged victorious in the 1920s faction fight with Trotsky's Left Opposition.

In turn, Trotsky wrote a preface to one of her books, while Stalin later stood up for her in an editorial dispute at The Moscow News.

She met Borodin again in 1927, this time in China, where he was Stalin's top agent. In WuHan, Borodin was charged with the dubious responsibility of advising the nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-Shek, as part of Stalin's disastrous policy of supporting both the fledgling Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang in their battle for control against feudal warlords. The policy backfired when the nationalists turned on the Communists, massacring thousands of workers. Together with Strong, Borodin had to flee, riding in two trucks across the Gobi desert, north into Mongolia, and then into Russia. It was at that time, Tracy Strong recalls, that the two became close comrades.

Back in Moscow, Borodin was put in charge of managing a growing group of foreign specialists working across the Soviet Union. With most of them not knowing much Russian, Borodin and Strong revived an idea that they had several years previously about launching an English-language paper in Moscow.

"She went to Valery Meshlek, who was vice chairmen of the supreme council of national industries," said Tracy Strong. "She circulated the idea around Americans, and she finally approached the press officer of the foreign office, who was Joel Shubin, whom she eventually married. Shubin was supportive at the time."

With the blessing of the Soviet leadership, The Moscow News published its first issue on October 5, 1930. It shared its offices with Ogonyok, the famous periodical, at 11 Strastnoi Bulvar - just across the street from MN's more well-known later headquarters on Pushkin Square.

But almost as soon as the paper began, conflicts broke out between Strong and other foreign journalists on one side and the Russian editor-in-chief, Viktor Vaksov, and his deputy, Tovy Axelrod, on the other. In 1931, during a month when Strong was in the United States on a lecture tour, she noticed that the articles she sent to the paper were not being published. Nor were her telegrams answered. And when she returned to Moscow, no one met her off the train.

Nevertheless, Anna Louise threw herself into improving the paper's coverage. She started attending all the Party meetings and conferences, and would rush to the office afterwards in an effort to break the news before TASS did. But Axelrod insisted on always waiting for the official TASS transcript. Once incident underscored how deep the chasm between the two editors had become: When Strong tried to print a summary of a speech by Stalin, Axelrod said, "Who is to say what the gist of Comrade Stalin's speech is?"

In desperation, Strong tried to resign, but Axelrod would not accept it. Finally, she appealed to Stalin for help. Tracy Strong describes how a meeting in the Kremlin made a tremendous impression on Anna Louise.

"They go off to the Kremlin, and there's Stalin, Kaganovich and Voroshilov who are all meeting with her and her co-editor. It was a very high-up group of people. And Stalin says, ‘How does it happen that the comrade here complains you give her no authority yet you insist on keeping her name, saying it's an anti-Communist act to take it off the masthead?' First Anna-Louise thinks this will mean that Stalin will agree to her resigning. But then Stalin says, would the removal of her name not be a demotion? And she realises that Stalin wants her to remain on the paper."

In a 1941 account of those events, Anna Louise Strong would write:

"I expected to see some fairly high official at the party headquarters, and was rather stunned when the auto drove straight to the Kremlin and especially when I entered a large conference room and saw not only Stalin rising to greet me, but Kaganovich and Voroshilov too! It seemed overwhelmingly disproportionate.

"Later I realised that it was not my little problem that chiefly concerned them. I was one of several thousand Americans who had begun to worry them. We had come to the Soviet Union to work in its industries. We were reasonably honest and efficient, but we couldn't make good. Stalin wanted to know what was the matter with us in our adjustment to Soviet industry.

"By investigating my troubles he would learn what made us Americans click, or more often not click, in the Soviet land. But if he learned about Americans from me, I learned from him something equally important - how the Soviet Union is put together and how Stalin works."

Stalin decided that Borodin would be editor-in-chief, and Strong, together with Axelrod, would stay on as deputy editors.

The conflict was resolved, but it seemed that the direction the paper was supposed to take had been predestined. The first issue of The Moscow News had boasted: "Soviet power plus American technique will build socialism," captioning an illustration of the Five-Year Plan. The Western specialists lauded on the cover were encouraged to "help correct mistakes."

While initially more daring in tone, this established the substance of the paper. News items on page 3 almost invariably celebrated some Soviet feat that was "attracting attention worldwide."

To be fair, though, while Western countries were in the throes of the Great Depression, Soviet industry was recording real progress. In a July 1935 article, titled "War on the Pests that Harm Crops!" Strong quotes an American student: "Four years ago they wouldn't take Russian as one of the two languages required for a scientific degree. But now my professors tell me Russian is perhaps the most necessary language, especially in the study of farm pests."

But with little room for anything other than self-congratulation, Tracy Strong said, Anna Louise began to tire of the paper, even when it came under the editorship of her longtime comrade, Borodin. Her name appears alongside Axelrod's as associate editor through 1935, but in 1936 she leaves the paper and spends more time abroad, first as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, and later in China. By 1937, there is only one name under the masthead: Borodin's. During the terror of 1937-8 Vaksov and Axelrod both fall victim to the purges. As for Borodin, Tracy Strong suggests that he too was growing disappointed with the line that he had to toe.

In February, 1937, the paper ran entire issues dedicated to the "Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center," publishing the indictments of old Bolsheviks such as Karl Radek. A caption under a photo of sombre men with their hands raised reads, "Workers of the Hammer and Sickle Steel Plant, Moscow, voting for a resolution expressing their further steadfast support of the Soviet Government as a result of the facts revealed at the trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center."

In 1949, it was Borodin's turn. He was arrested and either shot or sent to labour camps, accused of being a "rootless cosmopolitan."

The purge was largely anti-Semitic. Borodin was born in Belorussia of Jewish descent as Mikhail Gruzenberg.

Strong eventually moved to Beijing, where she became friends with Communist leader Mao Zedong and died in 1970.

In Moscow, the authorities resurrected the paper in 1956, but it would take three more decades for the paper to shake off its role as a propaganda tool.

Ironically, it was the Russian version of Stalin's mouthpiece, founded by Borodin and Strong, which was later to be a key instrument in glasnost and perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union. ■

Next week:

From Khrushchev's thaw to perestroika.