7. THE SOVIET QUARANTINE
The struggle between communism and capitalism was not restricted
to economics. America and the USSR clashed over ways of organizing
and thinking about politics and society. The mistrust on both sides
was pervasive. Reagan and his officials felt they could have no confi-
dence in Moscow until the Politburo lifted what Churchill had called
the Iron Curtain. The Politburo based its thinking on the premise that
seclusion was a guarantee of security. Walls and barbed wire were used
to confine citizens to their Marxist-Leninist paradise. The less they
knew about the outside world, the easier it would be to suppress the
potential for resistance.
Soviet exit visas were a coveted privilege. Foreign reporters could
work only under licence, and the authorities denied telephone and
telegram facilities to any journalist who dared to write negatively
about what he witnessed. A strict internal censorship was imple-
mented through a central agency known as Glavlit. Novels, poems,
symphonies and paintings had to obtain official validation before
release to the public. All newspapers belonged to the party or the
government and the general editorial line was centrally coordinated.
A few foreign communist dailies were put on sale in a limited fashion,
but solely on the understanding that their politics coincided with the
Politburo’s outlook. The purpose had been the same since Lenin’s time.
The party leadership wanted to impress on all citizens that its ideas
were just, democratic and progressive. Communism was depicted as
the exclusive repository of humanitarianism. Its spokesmen depicted
capitalism as the gravest threat to peace in the world. People were
taught to regard American power as reactionary and imperialist, and
‘class struggle’ was treated as underlying the conflict between the great
coalitions led by the USSR and America.
Since Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet leadership had relaxed the
ban on foreign literature which anyway had never been universally
applied. Glavlit and the party apparatus had always promoted classical