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Times Watch for February 5, 2004

Seth Mydans in Stalinland

     Seth Mydans profiles the last surviving resident of the central Russia village of Isupovo, a man who pines for the good old days under Communist rule.

     In Thursday's "All Around, Dying Villages, Lodging the Forsaken Old," Mydans gives a history lesson on the post-Communist decline of village life: "The movement from the villages has been under way for decades, but has found a new impetus since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collective farms, state enterprises and defense-industry plants that provided rural jobs and services have shrunk or disappeared, leaving stranded settlements behind."

     He then says of 76-year-old Vladimir Bykov, the lonely villager: In his younger years, Mr. Bykov was a soldier, a janitor and a plumber, and the world wasn't such a bad place." Bykov grew up under the reign of Josef Stalin, the tyrant responsible for the deaths of an estimated 20 million people. The world wasn't such a bad place?

     It's one thing for reporter Mydans to humor a lonely old man in an interview--quite another to take his words as the final statement of a historical epoch without providing context, or even mentioning the names Lenin or Stalin.

     Yet in his story Mydans lets Bykov ramble on about how good things were back then: "When the collective farm was here you could get a sled or roofing or any kind of nail you wanted. Now everything is coming apart. That's all. Little by little it's all coming apart."

For the rest of Mydans' dispatch from Isupovo, click here.

• Communism | Seth Mydans | Russia | Soviet Union

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org