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News from Moscow

News from Moscow

Soviet Journalism and the Limits of
Postwar Reform
SI M O N H U X TA B L E
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Simon Huxtable 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948627
ISBN 978–0–19–285769–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
TJ Books Limited
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
Note on Abbreviations and References xi
References to Komsomol’skaia pravda Editorial Meetings and Articles xiii
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists: The Paradoxes of
Post-war Soviet Journalism 1
SE C T IO N 1 . 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 7 : R I T UA L S O C IA L I SM
1. Rituals, Routines and Ideology in the Late Stalinist Press 21

2. Satire, Sensations, and Slander: Criticism and Self-Criticism
from Stalin to the Secret Speech 54
SE C T IO N 2 . 1 9 5 6 – 1 9 6 4 : R OM A N T IC S O C IA L I SM
3. Far from Moscow: Heroic Autobiographies and the Paradoxes

of Thaw Modernity 93
4. From Word to Deed: The Communard Method and
Thaw Citizenship 123
SE C T IO N 3 . 1 9 6 0 – 1 9 7 0 : R E F O R M I N G S O C IA L I SM
5. The Institute of Public Opinion and the Birth of Soviet Polling 157
6. From Technocracy to Stagnation: When Did the Thaw
Freeze Over? 187
Epilogue: Thaw Journalism after the Thaw 217
Bibliography 227
Index 245
Acknowledgements
Researching and writing this book has spanned the vast majority of my academic
career. It is a project that began in youth and has ended in middle age. Looking
back on that process, one realises not only how much one has changed, but also
how much the final product owes to others.
This project began as a MA, then a PhD dissertation, at Birkbeck College. Sean
Morcom helped develop my ideas about the nature of Soviet society during my
MA and in the early stages of my PhD. I am indebted to Jessica Reinisch, who
heroically stepped in to supervise the project at a time when the entire disserta-
tion was still a pile of notes, offering excellent feedback and good advice through-
out. Polly Jones co-supervised the project in its latter stages and has continued to
provide comments, support and good humour ever since. I am also grateful to
Nik Wachsmann for reading and commenting on the dissertation in its latter
stages, and to Anna Pilkington and Olga Makarova, who let me audit their
Russian language classes at Queen Mary, University of London.
A number of funders made my PhD research possible. I am extremely grateful
to the AHRC for funding the project with a doctoral grant, as well as to the Royal
Historical Society, the University of London’s Central Research Fund and to BASEES
for funding various parts of the dissertation and its dissemination. I benefited
greatly from participation in Russian Archive Training Scheme (RATS), organised
through CEELBAS, for a first foray into archival research and many disturbing
encounters with a human-sized papier-mâché mouse. Sadly, that scheme is no
longer in existence, but I know that a whole generation of young scholars have
been grateful for a soft landing into the complex world of Russian archives.
My archival trips were enlivened by contact with many wonderful people. I greatly
valued the wry humour of Michel Abesser as we navigated the Komsomol archive
together, as well as our many conversations about late Soviet history over a beer
or at the Shawarma van. My flatmates on Prospekt mira, Andy Willimott, Jon
Waterlow and Alessandro Iandolo enabled me to navigate Moscow with bad
jokes, good conversation and much Baltika-7. Veterans of the Komsomol archive
Courtney Doucette, Mary- Catherine French and Adrienne Harris provided
invaluable support, good cheer and sometimes consolation, during my archive
trips. I would like to offer a particular thank you to Maria Menshikova for her
brilliant work as a research assistant in the final stages of the project. Chapters 1
and 4 have benefited greatly from her diligent digging in the archives.
My research would not have been possible without the support of archivists
and librarians in Russia and the UK. I would like to thank the librarians at the
viii Acknowledgements
British Library Newsroom and the Lenin Library in Moscow for their invaluable
help during this project. Galina Mikhailovna Tokareva, the now-retired archivist
at the youth section of the Russian Archive of Socio-Political History, ensured
that a little corner of a reading room on Profsoiuznaia would always belong to the
Komsomol. She nurtured a small group of mostly foreign researchers, even going
as far as to berate the cooks in the stolovaia when I expressed misgivings about
the kotlety. Her stories from the Soviet past (and strong opinions about the pre-
sent) provide some of the most enduring memories of this project.
This book has benefited from conversations with many people. Alex Boican,
Polly Jones, Alexandra Oberländer and Jan Plamper all offered detailed feedback
on chapters, and their comments and criticisms have helped make this a better
book. I would like to offer particular thanks to Kyrill Kunakhovich, whose pene-
trating comments greatly improved Chapter 5.
It has been gratifying to see a scholarly community emerge around socialist
media. Thomas C. Wolfe’s Governing Soviet Journalism placed the issue of Soviet
journalists on my agenda, and this book has benefited from many years of engage-
ment with his work. More recently, Christine Evans, Anikó Imre, Stephen Lovell,
Lars Lundgren, Sabina Mihelj, Dana Mustata, Kristin Roth- Ey and Natalia
Roudakova have contributed their own stimulating studies of socialist media, and
I have been lucky to benefit from their research, as well as participating in confer-
ence panels alongside them.
Over the course of this project I made many friends who reminded me why my
work was important, but also not to take it too seriously. My profound thanks to
Ana Baeza-Ruiz, Alex Boican, Josh Clayton, Jan van Duppen, Molly Flynn, Daniel
Levitsky, Sarah Marks, Raisa Sidenova and Tijana Stevanovic for their encourage-
ment over many years. Special thanks to two friends, both of whom I met while
on archive visits in Moscow. Dina Fainberg has been a source of intellectual
stimulation and friendship over many years. I’m so happy that our respective
books on Soviet journalists have finally seen the light of day. Anna Toropova has
been a true comrade during the many twists and turns that characterise a research
project and a life. I am incredibly grateful for her friendship.
My family have been unfailingly supportive, and not just during this project.
I’m so pleased to finally respond to the frequent question ‘how’s the book going?’
with a concrete answer. A special mention for my niece, Mia Huxtable, who might
one day grow up to write books of her own.
It’s impossible for me to adequately express my love and gratitude to Chrys
Papaioannou, a companion through the entirety of this project, which included
such highlights as tears at the complexity of Russian verbs of motion, impostor
syndrome, years of precarity and a research project that never seemed to end.
Without her incredible editing, sound advice and emotional support, I doubt
whether this book would ever have seen the light of day. I am incredibly lucky to
have spent the last two decades growing middle-aged with her.
List of Figures
1.1 Picture of a logging vehicle with the offending ‘swastika’ marked by

an official (Russian Archive of Socio-Political History) 26
1.2 Mock-up front page for a special edition commemorating the
80th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 1950 (Russian Archive of
Socio-Political History) 29
3.1 Komsomol’skaia pravda front page, May Day, 1960 90
4.1 The Komsomol’skaia pravda newspaper editorial office. The staff
of the Department of Letters work with incoming correspondence
(S. Lidov/Sputnik Images) 140
5.1 Glory to the Soviet People’s Great Feat! Komsomol’skaia pravda celebrates
Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, 13 April 1961, pp. 2–3 154
6.1 Soviet journalist Boris Pankin (Vladimir Savostyanov/TASS) 198
Every effort has been made to contact the image rights holders for this title. If any credit
has been omitted in error, we will endeavour to correct this in a future printing.
Note on Abbreviations and References
This book employs the following abbreviations in archival references:
HIA Hoover Institution Archives

GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii
RGANI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii
RGASPI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii
(Dokumenty Komsomola i molodezhnykh organizatsii)
TsGAM Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy
This book uses the conventional Russian archival subdivisions:
f. Fond (Collection)
op. Opis’ (Inventory)
d. Delo (File)
l. (pl. ll.) List (pl. listy) (Page/s)
References to Komsomol’skaia pravda

Editorial Meetings and Articles
Where possible, archival references contain a description of the source, the date
of creation, details of the archive and a reference:
Example: Kraminov to TsK KPSS, 26 Oct. 1954, RGANI, f.5, op.16, d.671, ll.34–35
The sole exception is for references to Komsomol’skaia pravda editorial meetings
(letuchki) which, for reasons of space, refer only to the date of the meeting, the
delo and the list. As the paper’s letuchki are all preserved in RGASPI, f.98, op.1,
this information is omitted from the reference.
Example: 13 Oct. 1954, d.131, ll.38–39
Similarly, when newspaper articles from Komsomol’skaia pravda are cited, the
name of the publication is omitted:
Example: V. Efimov, ‘Sovetskoe sotsialistichskoe gosudarstvo’, 1 Feb. 1950, 3.
Introduction: Reformers
and Propagandists
The Paradoxes of Post-war Soviet Journalism
On 25 February 1956, in the early hours of the morning, Dmitry Goriunov,

editor-in-chief of the youth newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, reached for his
heart medication.1 For the last four hours, delegates in the Kremlin hall at the
Twentieth Party Congress had listened with horror as Nikita Khrushchev attacked
his predecessor’s ‘grave abuse of power’, revealing Stalin’s role in the terror and
lamenting his deviations from a Leninist course.2 A week later, in an internal edi-
torial meeting, Goriunov’s colleagues were no less shaken. They knew the Congress
demanded radical changes in their working practices, but were unsure how to
proceed. For long periods, they sat in silence. Journalists’ confusion was under-
standable: for a quarter of a century the Soviet press had been a vital cogwheel in
Stalin’s ruling apparatus; now journalists and editors were being asked to overturn
their ways of thinking and working. In the years that followed, journalists at
Komsomol’skaia pravda reimagined the newspaper as a site upon which
Khrushchev’s, and later Brezhnev’s, priorities could be promoted and enacted. To
perform their role as propagandists journalists needed a new mode of address
which would offer space for readers to think about their place in the socialist
experiment and their relations with their fellow citizens. But as they considered
the future, journalists were forced to confront their complicity in the crimes of the
Soviet past. How could they regain readers’ trust after years of varnishing the truth?
This book begins in the rubble of post-war reconstruction and ends in the
messy aftermath of the Prague Spring: twenty-five years in which Soviet journalism
was transformed. Newspapers had always been recognised as a vital component
of Party rule: ‘a weapon’, to use Stalin’s words, that allowed the Party to speak
‘every day, every hour, with the working class in its own language’.3 As the country
began its long road to reconstruction in May 1945, the content of Soviet news
papers mocked these rousing words. Newspapers were full of sober resolutions
and formulaic editorials; ritual praise for the country’s leader often drowned out
1 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 273.
2 Ibid., 271.
3 Quoted in D. Dubrovskii, V. Dukel’skii, ‘Znaete li svoego chiatatel’ia?’, 5 May 1932, 2.
News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform. Simon Huxtable, Oxford University Press.
© Simon Huxtable 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857699.003.0001
2 News from Moscow
more readable stories. In early 1952, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Party Organisation

admitted: ‘Much of what we print on the pages of our paper does not satisfy our
readers . . . The pages of our paper are often filled with boring, grey material.’4 It
was a different story by the end of the 1960s when newspapers were speaking a
language very different to the dry scholasticism of late Stalinism. Enticing layouts,
reader-friendly features on technology, travel and nature, coupled with discussions
of morals and ethics, transformed the post-war newspaper, and helped overcome
a crisis of Party propaganda that had long afflicted journalists’ lives.5
The media, alongside the arts, had been at the heart of the Stalin cult; after his
death it emerged as a privileged space for rethinking socialism’s meanings. But
despite its centrality, the press appears as an afterthought in recent media histor
ies. While radio, television and cinema have been revealed as dynamic spaces for
reimagining post-war communism, newspapers have so far played second fiddle.
As the bright young things of broadcasting experimented with new technologies
and new formats, the press has taken on the appearance of grandpa in his
favourite chair, telling stories that people had long since tired of hearing. This
book is not an act of advocacy for the Thaw press, and it details many episodes in
which the press failed to live up to its lofty goals, but it does argue that news
papers, just like radio, television and cinema, were a site upon which burning
questions of Thaw socialism and Soviet modernity could be discussed. Who was
the socialist person: what did they believe, what should they believe and how
should they behave? Were there new ways for humans to relate to each other, new
paths to the future? And, even if the fundamental tenets of the system could not
be debated, could it be improved through new ways of organising industry,
different forms of education, and by exposing the lawlessness that bedevilled
everyday life?
News From Moscow is about the difficult process of de-Stalinising the press,
and shows how journalists at the country’s leading youth newspaper,
Komsomol’skaia pravda, imagined and reimagined the newspaper’s social and
political role during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I argue that journalists occupied
an ambiguous position in the cultural politics of the Thaw: they embraced their
role as Party propagandists and derived much prestige from disseminating its
messages, while also envisaging a central role for themselves as agents of social
change.6 As propagandists, journalists recast tired Stalinist codes, seeking out
new ways of turning dry resolutions into articles that could genuinely inspire. As
4 ‘Otchetnyi doklad partbiuro redaktsii Komsomol’skaia pravda’, 10 Mar. 1952, TsGAM, f.1968,
op.1, d.27, l.24.
5 On this crisis see David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination,
and Terror Under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
6 The term ‘propagandist’ may appear pejorative, but it is the way journalists referred to them-
selves. I use it in this book as a non-evaluative term to describe journalists’ work to further the Party’s
priorities.
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 3
activists, they tried to promote more long-lasting change by supporting and

implementing new initiatives which, so they hoped, would wipe away the vestiges
of Stalinism. These two orientations need not have conflicted; in practice, how-
ever, they often did, as journalists’ plans for building communism clashed with
the Party’s own ideas. Journalists were able to advocate for change—and were
often quite daring in their attempts to enact it—but such initiatives could only
succeed if their plans received the approval of a group of officials who were not
always receptive. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of intellectuals, journalists
were the ‘dominated fraction of the dominating class’.7 Their ability to set the
terms of debate and disseminate their ideas to millions gave them considerable
cultural capital. What they lacked was the political power to put these reformist
ideas into practice.
We know from countless memoirs and interviews that the Thaw generation’s
plans never came to fruition: that era of hope ended with the invasion of
Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Those accounts often lend a retrospective coher-
ence to a somewhat unclear set of ideas—the limits of post-war reform were also
the limits of journalists’ own outlook. If we try to untangle the threads we see that
many Thaw journalists held out hope for a better future: a path to communism
fuelled by the heady brew of human kindness, modern technology and Marxism-
Leninism. However, what emerges from these memoirs seems oddly decaffein-
ated, with journalist’s role as Party propagandists replaced with a vaguely
oppositional stance as defenders of the humanistic values. Such versions of the
past are not fabrications—this book provides ample evidence of those values in
action—but they often omit the fact that journalists saw themselves as servants of
the Party. For all the creativity journalists displayed in rooting out corruption,
creating forums for dialogue and devising schemes to drive the country forward,
journalists were committed to communist rule and saw the trumpeting of Soviet
achievements as an extension, not a contradiction, of reform. But as Thaw news
papers ventured more and more often into an ideological grey zone, journalists
soon found that their twin roles as propagandists and reformers were not always
compatible.
Overcoming the Past
Komsomol’skaia pravda was not in favour of The Thaw, the novella that would give
the post-Stalin decade its name. The paper’s review, published in June 1954,
argued that its distinguished author, Ilya Ehrenburg, was too concerned with the
‘dark sides of life’ and that the book’s characters were ‘spiritually empty, broken
7 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1993), 196.
4 News from Moscow
people’.8 The real task of literature, its author pronounced confidently, was to cre-
ate ‘life-affirming’ art which would ‘nurture a cheerful, brave youth . . . ready to
perform any feat in the name of the Fatherland and its people’.9 In private, jour-
nalists at the paper were no less critical, and claimed that Ehrenburg’s story had
been successful only because it ‘tugged on a person’s darkest heartstrings’.10 They
attacked his central metaphor of a thawing winter, and rejected his reading of the
past. ‘The chronology is wrong’, one journalist told colleagues: ‘In our country the
thaw started in October 1917.’11
Journalists’ harsh views on one of the iconic texts of the Khrushchev era shows
that they benefited from the Soviet intelligentsia’s battles for freedom but, when
push came to shove, they stood on other side of the barricades.12 Politically, Soviet
journalists stood somewhere between the artistic intelligentsia, committed to a
far-reaching programme of de-Stalinisation, and a technical intelligentsia which
was happy to trade political quiescence for scientific freedom.13 Journalists at
Komsomol’skaia pravda were certainly conscious of the need for deep and mean-
ingful change, but their priorities were tightly interwoven with those of the polit
ical elite.
The contested reaction to Ehrenburg’s story, which offered readers a hopeful
metaphor for a country emerging from the bitter chill of Stalinism, is also a
reminder that term’s meaning has long been disputed. After the Soviet Union’s
fall, the period’s protagonists weaved an optimistic narrative, focusing nostalgic
ally on liberals’ dashed hopes for a better future—hopes blown asunder by the icy
gusts of the Brezhnev era.14 Today, scholars are more critical of this idealised
story. While many historians have emphasised the positive changes of the period,
such as Khrushchev’s house-building programme and widespread improvements
in living standards, others have pointed to the period’s illiberal core, particular in
terms of attitudes to crime.15
8 ‘V zhizneutverzhdenii—sila nashei literatury’, 6 Jun. 1954, 2.

9 Ibid. 10 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, l.131. 11 27 Sep. 1954, d.131, l.112.
12 It should be borne in mind that the paper had been burned by its earlier support for Vladimir
Pomerantsev’s essay on sincerity, which resulted in censure from the Central Committee. Original
article: S. Bocharov, V. Zaitsev et al. ‘Zamalchivaia ostrye voprosy: Pis’mo k redaktsii’, 17 Mar. 1954, 3;
Central Committee response: ‘O publikatsii v gazete Komsomol’skaia pravda pis’ma v zashchitu stat’i
V.M. Pomerantseva ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, 24 Mar. 1954 in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura,
1953–1957. Dokumenty, ed. by V. Iu. Afiani (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 211. On the paper’s reaction to
this criticism see 7 Jun. 1954, d.129, ll.128–42.
13 On the liberal intelligentsia see Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience
and Memory on Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s
Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009). On the technical
intelligentsia see Maria Rogacheva, The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
14 Bittner, Many Lives, 5–7; Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd, ‘The Thaw as Event’, in The Thaw:
Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, ed. by Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 24.
15 Stephen Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home:
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 5
There is much to be said for the Thaw metaphor, however. Not only does it
capture the provisional nature of these changes, with the tantalising prospect of
spring counterbalanced by the threat of winter’s return, the term at least registers
the fact that a fundamental change occurred.16 Put simply, the Soviet Union after
the Thaw was not the same as the country that entered that process.17 While there
were still prohibitions, people spoke and lived their lives more freely; though
crime became a public obsession, mass terror became a thing of the past; and in
the midst of a Cold War, the country opened itself to the world. The term is par-
ticularly apposite for the cultural sphere, where exciting new possibilities for self-
expression were counterbalanced by the ever- present possibility of being
silenced—sometimes, as was the case for Ehrenberg, by journalists who did not
share their values.18 In this monograph, ‘the Thaw’ stands for a process of rapid
change—uneven, unsettling and radical—that challenged and recast the certain-
ties of the Stalin era. Journalists’ daily task was to smooth over those doubts and
present readers with an authoritative view of the world and of readers’ place in it.
The newspapers discussed in this book were, to recast Trotsky’s statement
about art, both mirror and hammer: they reflected wider political developments
and societal discussions even as they sought to sculpt them into a
revolutionary shape.19
The Thaw’s significance can only be understood with reference to the country’s
tumultuous early decades. In May 1945, weeks after the population celebrated the
raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda
were celebrating their paper’s twentieth anniversary. With a circulation of less
than 10,000 in 1925, the newspaper’s reach was initially much more limited than
the nearly 8 million copies printed at the end of the 1960s.20 Nevertheless, the
paper rapidly established itself as a mainstay of the country’s media. It had
Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015);
Susan E. Reid, ‘Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home’, Cahiers du
Monde russe, 47.1–2 (2006), 227–68; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees,
Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Brian Lapierre,
Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual
in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
16 This sense of impermanence was Ehrenburg’s intention: ‘short-term ambiguity amid a long-term
process’ as Bittner puts it (Many Lives, 3, see also 1–13 for useful background). For a detailed discus-
sion of the metaphor see Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 18–23.
17 Kozlov, Gilburd, ‘Thaw as Event’, 27.
18 Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1965); Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet
Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir:
Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Dina
Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982).
19 Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957
[1924]), Ch. 4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch04.htm [Accessed: 1
Aug. 2021].
20 ‘Tsifry pobed’, 5 May 1931, 1; Letopis’ periodicheskikh izdanii SSSR, 1966–1970 (Moscow:
Kniga, 1975).
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Title: Essays on things
Author: William Lyon Phelps
Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72395]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON

THINGS ***
Transcriber’s Note
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted
to the public domain. It uses an image of the Title Page of the
original book.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
ESSAYS ON THINGS
By WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
Essays on Modern Novelists
Essays on Russian Novelists
Essays on Books
Essays on Modern Dramatists
Essays on Things
Howells, James, Bryant and Other Essays
Reading the Bible
Teaching in School and College
Some Makers of American Literature
The Advance of the English Novel
The Advance of English Poetry
The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement
Human Nature in the Bible
Human Nature and the Gospel
Adventures and Confessions
As I Like It, First, Second, Third Series
Archibald Marshall
Happiness
Love
Memory
Music
A Dash at the Pole
Browning—How to Know Him
ESSAYS ON THINGS
By WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1930
Copyright, 1930,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved—no part of this
book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Set up and printed. Published September, 1930.
· PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ·
CONTENTS
PAGE
Sunrise 3
Molasses 8
Resolutions When I Come to Be Old 14
English and American Humour 20
A Pair of Socks 26
An Inspiring Cemetery 31
Ancient Football 35
Rivers 39
One Day at a Time 45
City and Country 51
Age Before Beauty 57
Church Unity 63
Political History 68
A Room Without a View 74
Tea 80
The Weather 86
War 91
Man and Boy 96
Ambition 101
Birds and Statesmen 107
Russia Before the Revolution 113
The Devil 119
The Forsyte Saga 124
Profession and Practice 130
London as a Summer Resort 135
What the Man Will Wear 140
Dreams 146
Eating Breakfast 151
The Mother Tongue 157
Our South as Cure for Flu 163
Going to Church in Paris 169
Optimism and Pessimism 175
Translations 180
Music of the Spheres 185
Dog Books 190
Going to Honolulu 196
Hymns 201
Old-Fashioned Snobs 207
A Fair City 212
Traditions 218
Spooks 224
Trial by Jury 230
Athletics 235
A Private Library All Your Own 240
The Greatest Common Divisor 246
The Great American Game 252
Ten Sixty-Six 258
Going Abroad the First Time 264
Spiritual Healing 269
Superstition 274
The Importance of the Earth 279
What Shall I Think About? 285
ESSAYS ON THINGS
I
SUNRISE
At an uncertain hour before dawn in February 1912, as I lay

asleep in my room on the top floor of a hotel in the town of Mentone,
in Southern France, I was suddenly awakened by the morning star. It
was shining with inquisitive splendour directly into my left eye. At that
quiet moment, in the last stages of the dying night, this star seemed
enormous. It hung out of the velvet sky so far that I thought it was
going to fall, and I went out on the balcony of my room to see it drop.
The air was windless and mild, and, instead of going back to bed, I
decided to stay on the balcony and watch the unfolding drama of the
dawn. For every clear dawn in this spectacular universe is a
magnificent drama, rising to a superb climax.
The morning stars sang together and I heard the sons of God
shouting for joy. The chief morning star, the one that had roused me
from slumber, recited a splendid prologue. Then, as the night paled
and the lesser stars withdrew, some of the minor characters in the
play began to appear and take their respective parts. The grey
background turned red, then gold. Long shafts of preliminary light
shot up from the eastern horizon, and then, when the stage was all
set, and the minor characters had completed their assigned rôles,
the curtains suddenly parted and the sun—the Daystar—the star of
the play, entered with all the panoply of majesty. And as I stood there
and beheld this incomparable spectacle, and gazed over the
mountains, the meadows and the sea, the words of Shakespeare
came into my mind:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen,

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Kissing with golden face the meadows green.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
It is a pity that more people do not see the sunrise. Many do not
get up early enough, many do not stay up late enough. Out of the
millions and millions of men, women and children on this globe only
a comparatively few see the sunrise, and I dare say there are many
respectable persons who have never seen it at all. One really should
not go through life without seeing the sun rise at least once,
because, even if one is fortunate enough to be received at last into
heaven, there is one sight wherein this vale of tears surpasses the
eternal home of the saints. “There is no night there,” hence there can
be no dawn, no sunrise; it is therefore better to make the most of it
while we can.
As a man feels refreshed after a night’s sleep and his morning
bath, so the sun seems to rise out of the water like a giant renewed.
Milton gave us an excellent description:
So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
Browning, in his poem, Pippa Passes, compares the sunrise to a

glass of champagne, a sparkling wine overflowing the world:
DAY!
Faster and more fast,
O’er night’s brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim,
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
The sunset has a tranquil beauty but to me there is in it always a

tinge of sadness, of the sadness of farewell, of the approach of
darkness. This mood is expressed in the old hymn which in my
childhood I used to hear so often in church:
Fading, still fading, the last beam is shining,

Father in heaven! the day is declining.
Safety and innocence fly with the light,
Temptation and danger walk forth with the night.
Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,
saith the Holy Book. The sunrise has not only inexpressible majesty
and splendour, but it has the rapture of promise, the excitement of
beginning again. Yesterday has gone forever, the night is over and
we may start anew. To how many eyes, weary with wakefulness in
the long watches of the night, or flushed with fever, is the first
glimmer of the dawn welcome. The night makes every fear and
worry worse than the reality, it magnifies every trivial distress. Mark
Twain said the night brought madness—none of us is quite sane in
the darkness. That particular regret for yesterday or apprehension
for tomorrow that strikes you like a whiplash in the face at 2:45 a.m.
dwindles into an absurdity in the healthy dawn.
Mark Twain, who had expressed the difference between the
night and the morning tragically, also expressed it humorously. He
said that when he was lying awake in the middle of the night he felt
like an awful sinner, he hated himself with a horrible depression and
made innumerable good resolutions; but when at 7:30 he was
shaving himself he felt just as cheerful, healthy and unregenerate as
ever.
I am a child of the morning. I love the dawn and the sunrise.
When I was a child I saw the sunrise from the top of Whiteface and it
seemed to me that I not only saw beauty but heard celestial music.
Ever since reading in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes the nun’s
description of her feelings while listening to Wagner’s Prologue to
Lohengrin I myself never hear that lovely music rising to a
tremendous climax without seeing in imagination what was revealed
to the Sister of Mercy. I am on a mountain top before dawn; the
darkness gives way; the greyness strengthens, and finally my whole
mind and soul are filled with the increasing light.
II
MOLASSES
Before both the word molasses and the thing it signifies disappear
forever from the earth, I wish to recall its flavour and its importance to
the men and women of my generation. By any other name it would
taste as sweet; it is by no means yet extinct; but for many years maple
syrup and other commodities have taken its place on the breakfast
table. Yet I was brought up on molasses. Do you remember, in that
marvellous book, Helen’s Babies, when Toddie was asked what he had
in his pantspocket, his devastating reply to that tragic question? He
calmly answered, “Bread and molasses.”
Well, I was brought up on bread and molasses. Very often that was
all we had for supper. I well remember, in the sticky days of childhood,
being invited out to supper by my neighbour Arthur Greene. My table
manners were primitive and my shyness in formal company
overwhelming. When I was ushered into the Greene dining room not
only as the guest of honour but as the only guest, I felt like Fra Lippo
Lippi in the most august presence in the universe, only I lacked his
impudence to help me out.
The conditions of life in those days may be estimated from the fact
that the entire formal supper, even with “company,” consisted wholly
and only of bread, butter and molasses. Around the festive board sat
Mr. Greene, a terrifying adult who looked as if he had never been
young; Mrs. Greene, tight-lipped and serious; Arthur Greene, his sister
Alice, and his younger brother, Freddy. As I was company I was helped
first and given a fairly liberal supply of bread, which I unthinkingly (as
though I were used to such luxuries) spread with butter and then
covered with a thick layer of molasses. Ah, I was about to learn
something.
Mr. Greene turned to his eldest son, and enquired grimly, “Arthur,
which will you have, bread and butter or bread and molasses?”
The wretched Arthur, looking at my plate, and believing that his
father, in deference to the “company,” would not quite dare to enforce
what was evidently the regular evening choice, said, with what I
recognised as a pitiful attempt at careless assurance, “I’ll take both.”
“No, you don’t!” countered his father, with a tone as final as that of
a judge in court. His father was not to be bluffed by the presence of
company; he evidently regarded discipline as more important than
manners. The result was I felt like a voluptuary, being the only person
at the table who had the luxury of both butter and molasses. They
stuck in my throat; I feel them choking me still, after an interval of more
than fifty years.
* * * * *
The jug of molasses was on our table at home at every breakfast
and at every supper. The only variety lay in the fact (do you
remember?) that there were two distinct kinds of molasses—
sometimes we had one, sometimes the other. There was Porto Rico
molasses and there was New Orleans molasses—brunette and
blonde. The Porto Rico molasses was so dark it was almost black, and
New Orleans molasses was golden brown.
The worst meal of the three was invariably supper, and I imagine
this was fairly common among our neighbours. Breakfast was a hearty
repast, starting usually with oatmeal, immediately followed by
beefsteak and potatoes or mutton chops, sometimes ham and eggs;
but usually beef or chops. It had a glorious coda with griddle cakes or
waffles; and thus stuffed, we rose from the table like condors from their
prey, and began the day’s work. Dinner at one was a hearty meal, with
soup, roast, vegetables and pie.
Supper consisted of “remainders.” There was no relish in it, and I
remember that very often my mother, who never complained vocally,
looking at the unattractive spread with lack-lustre eye, would either
speak to our one servant or would disappear for a moment and return
with a cold potato, which it was clear she distinctly preferred to the
sickening sweetish “preserves” and cookies or to the bread and
molasses which I myself ate copiously.
However remiss and indifferent and selfish I may have been in my
conduct toward my mother—and what man does not suffer as he
thinks of this particular feature of the irrecoverable past?—it does me
good to remember that, after I came to man’s estate, I gave my mother
what it is clear she always and in vain longed for in earlier years, a
good substantial dinner at night.
At breakfast we never put cream and sugar on our porridge; we
always put molasses. Then, if griddle cakes followed the meat, we
once more had recourse to molasses. And as bread and molasses
was the backbone of the evening meal, you will see what I mean when
I say I swam to manhood through this viscous sea. In those days youth
was sweet.
The transfer of emphasis from breakfast to supper is the chief
distinguishing change in the procession of meals as it was and as it
became. It now seems incredible that I once ate large slabs of steak or
big chops at breakfast, but I certainly did. And supper, which
approached the vanishing point, turned into dinner in later years.
Many, many years ago we banished the molasses jug and even
the lighter and more patrician maple syrup ceased to flow at the
breakfast table. I am quite aware that innumerable persons still eat
griddle cakes or waffles and syrup at the first meal of the day. It is
supposed that the poet-artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti ruined his health
by eating huge portions of ham and eggs, followed by griddle cakes
and molasses, for breakfast. To me there has always been something
incongruous between syrup and coffee; they are mutually destructive;
one spoils the taste of the other.
Yet waffles and syrup are a delectable dish; and I am quite certain
that nectar and ambrosia made no better meal. What to do, then? The
answer is simple. Eat no griddle cakes, no waffles and no syrup at
breakfast; but use these commodities for dessert at lunch. Then comes
the full flavour.
Many taverns now have hit upon the excellent idea of serving only
two dishes for lunch or dinner—chicken and waffles. This obviates the
expense of waste, the worry of choice, the time lost in plans. And what
combination could possibly be better?
One of the happiest recollections of my childhood is the marvelous
hot, crisp waffle lying on my plate, and my increasing delight as I
watched the molasses filling each square cavity in turn. As the English
poet remarked, “I hate people who are not serious about their meals.”

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News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism

and the Limits of Postwar Reform

Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the

Authoritarian Journalism: Controlling the News in Post-

British Media Coverage of the Press Reform Debate:

News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values

The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication Sixth

Student Radicalism and the Formation of Postwar Japan

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

Offensive Speech, Religion, and the Limits of the Law

News from Moscow

News from Moscow

1. Rituals, Routines and Ideology in the Late Stalinist Press 21

3. Far from Moscow: Heroic Autobiographies and the Paradoxes

1.1 Picture of a logging vehicle with the offending ‘swastika’ marked by

Note on Abbreviations and References

This book employs the following abbreviations in archival references:

HIA Hoover Institution Archives

This book uses the conventional Russian archival subdivisions:

References to Komsomol’skaia pravda

On 25 February 1956, in the early hours of the morning, Dmitry Goriunov,

2 News from Moscow

more readable stories. In early 1952, Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Party Organisation

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 3

activists, they tried to promote more long-­lasting change by supporting and

Overcoming the Past

4 News from Moscow

8 ‘V zhizneutverzhdenii—sila nashei literatury’, 6 Jun. 1954, 2.

Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists 5

Title: Essays on things

Author: William Lyon Phelps

Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72395]

Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON

At an uncertain hour before dawn in February 1912, as I lay

Full many a glorious morning have I seen,

So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed,

Browning, in his poem, Pippa Passes, compares the sunrise to a

The sunset has a tranquil beauty but to me there is in it always a

Fading, still fading, the last beam is shining,

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