“The Mystery of Prospekt Kutuzov.” Cover to the first issue of Sovershenno sekretno.>]; Iulian Semenov, “Sovershenno otkryto.” Sovershenno sekretno, no. 1, June 1989, 2.
Sovershenno sekretno, the first privately owned periodical in Soviet Russia since 1917, showcased a combination of transparency and sensationalism that became a distinguishing feature of journalistic writing in the post-Soviet period.
Perestroika
1989
This first issue of the monthly magazine Sovershenno sekretno (Top Secret), the first fully independent, privately-owned periodical in Soviet Russia since 1917, perfectly captures the emergent journalistic style and media discourse of the mid-to late 1980s, which combined investigative journalism—and a yearning for transparency and truth—with sensationalism and a keen fascination with sex and violence. Sovershenno sekretno was a creation of the best-selling author Yulian Semyonov, widely known in Russia as the creator of Stierlitz, the Soviet super undercover spy working in Nazi Germany from the popular Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). The magazine was published by the International Association of Crime and Political Fiction (MADP), also founded and directed by Semyonov, and four to six times a year it was sold in combination with the “almanakh” Detektiv i politika (Crime fiction and politics).
The front page of Sovershenno sekretno’s first issue (June 1989) displayed the quite graphic image of the lifeless body of Soviet actress Zoya Alekseevna Fedorova, who was found dead in her apartment in the center of Moscow on December 11, 1981, killed by a single gunshot to the back of the neck fired from a German-made Sauer pistol. The column provided a brief account of the unsolved case, while the heading promised a novella focusing on these events, “The Mistery of Prospekt Kutuzov,” that the magazine was planning to publish in several installments. In contrast with the somewhat grabby, entertaining-cum-macabre headline, Semyonov’s editorial on the second page switched, in both tone and content, to a much more poised and even-handed analysis of current events. The piece, entitled “Fully Public” (a wordplay on the magazine’s name—which in Russian means, literally, “Fully Secret”), presents a curious combination of Reaganism and Leninism, or Semyonov’s very specific interpretation of both, and the “the fight against bureaucratism” that was one of the main rallying cries of perestroika. Looking at some of Sovershenno sekretno’s early issues, one is struck by the combination of serious reporting and in-depth political analysis with salacious stories and true crime. The magazine alternated articles about serial killers and unsolved murders with scholarly essays by prominent Russian economists and political scientists, literary and philosophical sections with previously unpublished pieces on and by such authors as Nikolay Berdiaev and Yevgeny Zamyatin, and political commentaries about Soviet dissidents and the origin of Solidarność in Poland and the emergence of national movements throughout the Soviet bloc. Both the magazine and its literary attachment–Detektiv i politika–used the genres of crime and spy fiction, political fantasy, and sci-fi as an underlying thread that connected popular entertainment with investigative journalism–and this reflected larger cultural trends during perestroika. In part due to a lack of affordable alternatives, crime novels or detektivy were one of the main forms of popular entertainment throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. At the same time, during perestroika, violence and chernukha themselves became implicitly associated with sincerity and truth, and with a moral mission of revealing and amending society’s darkest evils. As a consequence, the acute yearning for truth, transparency, and information characterizing media discourses in this period goes hand in hand, and often overlaps, with a keen fascination with transgression and the extreme. And the appearance of these new themes coincides with the emergence of new journalistic languages that, in contrast with the largely flat and hypernormalized language of the Soviet press, allowed for the use of personal, original styles and involved strong elements of irony and provocation.
Russia
Semenov, Yulian, Limonov, Eduard, and Evgenii Dodolev
Soviet Union
Semenov, Iulian. "Sovershenno otkryto." Sovershenno sekretno, no. 1, 1989.