From personal experience, I can say that Yury
Shchekochikhin was not an easy person to talk to, even when in a friendly,
informal environment. Once, right at the end of the 1980s, during a party
at my home I called him a "hero of the era of stagnation." He
held it against me for a number of years afterwards.
Insulting Yury Petrovich, of course, could not have been further from
my mind. What I wanted to say then and will repeat now is the following:
There would never have been any perestroika or glasnost had it not been
for
the fact that, during what we now refer to as the Khrushchev thaw and
the
Brezhnev stagnation, centers of free-thinking and opposition to the system
had sprung up in society -- in official bodies, including the mass media
--
not attacking official ideology but the system's more loathsome routine
features.
One such center was Komsomolskaya Pravda, an organ of the Komsomol
Central Committee and officially the third most important daily after
Pravda
and Izvestia, where Shchekochikhin launched his journalistic career back
in
the days when my father, Boris Pankin, was the editor.
The KP of the 1960s and 1970s that I remember was like one big family.
Journalists not only worked together, but they also socialized together,
had
picnics, went to watch soccer or ice hockey matches together -- and wherever
they went, they took their children with them. Older children got on easily
with the younger KP journalists, and many of us went through the school
of
"Aly Parus."
Today, I can't even remember whether I first got to know
Shchekochikhin through his articles or in person.
Inna Rudenko, a KP columnist and member of the paper's editorial team
in those days, describes what Aly Parus was: "In the mid-1960s, a
secondary
school teacher visited the newspaper and brought with her three senior
pupils who had put together a 'scandalous,' in her view, stennaya gazeta,
or
wall newspaper.
"People started to read it, and on the spot they decided to hire
one
of them, 10th-grader Alexei Ivkin. He became the 'captain' of Aly Parus,
a
page in the paper especially for school children. It was produced entirely
by school children and, moreover, not a single grown-up article went into
the paper, unless it had the children's stamp of approval.
"Shchekochikhin came to Aly Parus right at the beginning of the
1970s.
He was always on the move, attending hippy gatherings; he knew all the
leaders of all the youth groups and brought them to our editorial offices.
He had a column in Aly Parus titled 'Letters From Behind the Bike Sheds.'
I
remember how your father used to type up the letters himself on his
typewriter, he was just itching to get them on the page posthaste."
My father recalls: "The strongest recollection I have of the young
Shchekochikhin is that after almost every publication of 'Letters From
Behind the Bike Sheds,' I would be summoned to the Komsomol Central
Committee and told to stop publishing the ideologically offensive column.
Paradoxically, the person who dragged me over the coals was later trumpeted
to the world as one of the main architects of perestroika."
And to conclude, the recollections of Alexei Ivkin, whom
Shchekochikhin replaced in 1972 as captain of Aly Parus, when Ivkin was
called up to serve in the army: "From a very early age Yura, through
his
journalistic passions, became acquainted with the seamier side of life.
However, I cannot recall him ever using obscene language, even when in
a
state of some inebriation -- until he became a State Duma deputy."
Thank you, Yura, for being a friend to us all.
Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media
professionals (www.sreda-mag.ru)
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