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This article offers an account of being a Soviet journalist before and during glasnost. Soviet reporters' weapons are still the pen and the notebook--the cost of a personal computer is about the same as a reporter's lifetime salary. It was not a big deal to me when Mikhail Gorbachev, the godfather of glasnost, recently asked the Congress of People's Deputies for a moratorium on the new press law which the same Congress had accepted only half a year ago. If you read ten different newspapers of the Brezhnev era, you would have found no difference: they all had the same mother. Pravda sometimes publishes articles that absolutely contradict Gorbachev's speeches, although Gorbachev is still the general secretary of the party that he has almost dismantled. Three years ago the same Ogonyok, with Vitali Korotich as the editor, published the truth about Adilov--that he took bribes and shared money with the first party secretary of Uzbekistan, that he had personally killed more than ten people (it is not possible to know the exact number--too much time has passed).

This article discusses the increase of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet press has discovered the delights of the expose. It was also uncertain who had arranged for the tanks to be exported, and why, although the prime minister himself seemed to be involved in the deal, as was a joint state-private cooperative known as Automation-Science-Technology (with the Russian acronym ANT). Novoe Vremya correspondent Boris Balkarei tried to sort out the roles of Soviet government and party officials, ANT cooperative leaders, and a mysterious Sudanese businessman, who later sued the magazine for libel in a Russian court. Although Soviet TV and radio generally have continued to shy away from aggressive questioning of the government and party on national security and foreign policy stories, numerous newspapers and magazines took their lead from Ogonyok.