By John Moody
Soviet readers understand that Pravda, the newspaper founded in 1912 by Vladimir Lenin, is the official voice of the Communist Party and that its role is to support, not to second-guess, the Soviet leadership. Its pages are usually filled with stories of happy workers, overfilled production quotas and bumper crops. Last week, however, Pravda dropped the rosy prose in favor of a strong slap at Soviet incompetence, confusion and cowardice. The newspaper's target: the management of the Chernobyl power plant, the site of one of history's worst nuclear accidents last April 26. In language usually reserved for criminals, the newspaper announced that the plant's director and chief | engineer had been dismissed for their lack of leadership and discipline. It also reported that six officials had deserted their posts after the accident.
With that bare-knuckles bulletin, Pravda seemed to be at pains to demonstrate its enthusiasm for the campaign of glasnost, or openness in the Soviet media, begun last year by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. As party leader, Gorbachev is the final arbiter of all the news that is fit to print or broadcast. While no one believes the Kremlin leader will stand for Western- style criticism of government policies, some eager Soviet journalists clearly interpret glasnost as a mandate to tell it as they see it.
Evidence of the new climate is everywhere. The government newspaper Izvestiya, for example, now runs a column called ''Echo'' that is devoted to the results of public opinion polls. Soviet television news, long criticized for stodginess, is using more film clips and bolder graphics to illustrate its reports. The weekly journal New Times has retooled its layout to feature more color pictures and catchier headlines. Says New Times Editor in Chief Vitali Ignatienko: ''I sense a new mood here. The staff at all levels is discussing how to do things better, to find new ways to achieve new goals.''
The Chernobyl disaster tested official willingness to entrust the Soviet people with unpleasant facts. At first, the mass media was as wary as the government about admitting the magnitude of the calamity. For ten days, Soviet TV and newspapers passed on brief, vague official statements that raised more questions than they provided answers. Then, someone at the top--many observers believe it was Gorbachev--lifted the lid on information. Soviet reporters interviewed evacuees, doctors, cleanup workers and hairless radiation victims. Photographers hitched rides in air-force helicopters to snap overhead pictures of the crippled facility. TV Correspondent Alexander Krutkov became an overnight media darling with his piercing on-the-spot dispatches. Krutkov was violating the Index of Information Not to Be Published in the Open Press, a guide that lists taboo topics such as earthquakes, fires, explosions, military accidents and air crashes in the Soviet Union. Politically savvy editors have long regarded the index as a bible.
With Gorbachev's apparent blessing, that duplicity is slowly giving way to cautiously critical reporting on domestic problems. By Soviet standards, the leading muckraker is the Moscow regional newspaper Sovietskaya Rossia. Last . year, soon after Gorbachev began calling for more openness, the newspaper began a series of articles attacking the entrenched bureaucrats who run the capital, blaming them for the deplorable state of the construction industry. As a result, Moscow Party Boss Viktor Grishin and the city's longtime mayor were removed from office just before the Communist Party Congress last February. The campaign to retire aging officeholders continued at last week's session of the Supreme Soviet, at which it was announced that the conservative Culture Minister Pyotr Demichev, 68, had been relieved of his position before a successor was named.
Candor, however, has its limits, as the editors of Pravda discovered earlier this year. In February the paper printed a letter from a reader demanding to know why party officials enjoyed perks such as vacation homes, chauffeur- driven cars and access to well-stocked private stores. For its efforts, the paper received a public rebuke from Yegor Ligachev, the party's ranking ideologist, who criticized unspecified ''mistakes'' by Pravda's editors. Apparently, some things are still too sacred to criticize.
Reported by James O. Jackson/Moscow
Copyright 1986 Time Inc. All rights reserved.