‘He protected us’ Remembering Yassen Zassoursky, the journalism scholar who midwifed Russia’s post-Soviet free press

Yassen Zassoursky helped shape generations of Russian journalists. Earlier this month, he died at the age of 91. Before becoming the president of the journalism department at Moscow State University (MSU), Zassoursky served as dean from 1965 to 2007. Students who graduated during his tenure now occupy positions across Russia’s political spectrum, from liberal intellectuals like Sergey Parkhomenko and Dmitry Bykov to United Russia State Duma deputies like Pyotr Tolstoy and Alexander Khinstein. Andrei Richter was a long-time professor at MSU’s School of Journalism who now serves as an adviser at the OSCE Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media and as a professor researcher at Comenius University in Bratislava. At Meduza’s request, he shares his thoughts about Yassen Zassoursky’s life and legacy.

Yassen Zassoursky has been a household name to tens of thousands of Russian journalists for years (and not just because he led the country’s top journalism department for more than four decades). We’ve had our share of long-term leaders! But that’s not the point here.

Yassen Nikolaevich Zassoursky managed to create an academic laboratory for free journalism while maintaining the facade of “forging ideological personnel,” even while his windows looked amicably out towards the Kremlin. This laboratory housed experiments that were “dangerous” (for Zassoursky, most of all) with lectures on sociology by Yuri Levada and Boris Grushin, literary criticism by Andrei Sinyavsky and Galina Belaya, and American studies by George Gerbner. Russian and Western literature essentially became the foundation for developing critical thinking in future Soviet journalists, and that included turning a critical eye toward the reality around them. The best teachers in the journalism department were always the literary critics.

Under Zassoursky, the department and its graduates became points of pride for the Soviet leadership, and officials would even tout publications like Literaturnaya Gazeta to foreign visitors as evidence of the USSR’s intellectual clout. This prestige may have allowed Zassoursky to shelter his colleagues and protégés from what, at other institutions, would have had dire consequences. 

As Perestroika’s changes started to take effect, Zassoursky’s department was one of the first places where the shackles of Soviet workers’ doublethink began to fall away. Late in the winter of 1988, I saw Professor Zassoursky for the first time. Almost by accident, I ended up in this enormous, loud room, full of teachers, graduate students, and undergrads, at a meeting of the foreign journalism and literature department. It went on for about four hours and was formally dedicated to international students’ write-ups of their internships in socialist countries. After each presentation, Zassoursky smiled ironically and asked the speaker just two questions: “And do they read the renewed Moskovskiye Novosti in the country where you interned?” and “Did they screen Abulazde’s Repentance?” Students were thrilled and proudly recounted tales of Cubans storming movie theaters and East Germans envious of Soviet Glasnost. I sat in a corner on a threadbare couch with bated breath as I listened. This was it: the alma mater of the free press!

My graduate years in the journalism department coincided with some of the most interesting years in Russia’s history and journalism. Mandatory weekly faculty meetings turned to engaging discussions of ways to develop “bourgeois” and “communist” journalism and consequently the advantages of new Soviet media compared to theory and practice under Stagnation and Stalinism. Zassoursky was always the one to set a critical tone, sometimes in the form of a pointed question or a story about his latest overseas business trip or meeting with Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner.

Professor Zassoursky always encouraged graduate students’ enthusiasm and helped us widen our horizons. His office overflowed with foreign books, newspapers, and magazines; it became an alternative library for us. Painstakingly, we were the first to translate Western guides on journalistic theory and practice, so that he could triumphantly present them to new media leadership. These texts covered topics such as public television and environmental and investigative journalism. Colleagues gathered in his office to write the law on mass media, and it was also the birthplace of the radio station Ekho Moskvy. MSU’s journalism department freely hosted talks by Boris Yeltsin, Vitaly Korotich, Anatoly Sobchak, and foreign ambassadors. In those years, Zassoursky’s international connections and status helped us increase contact and exchanges with foreign journalism programs and journalists, primarily from America, Germany, France, Italy, and Scandinavian countries. At conferences, we discussed the Western model of independent media, including its economic aspects.

It may not have been his most important service, but Zassoursky also used his credibility to protect us as we sought out new approaches and worked to overturn existing dogmas. In early 1991, I remember the editor of Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta brought Zassoursky an article I had written on how the Soviet media were covering miners striking in the Kuznetsk Basin. My editor had said, “We can’t publish this — I’ll go to jail.” The article drew risky parallels between Soviet rhetoric and arguments in right-wing English newspapers. “Don’t worry, you won’t go to jail!” Professor Zassoursky told him with a smile. 

One cold December Monday in 1991, three days after a turbulent defense of my dissertation, I went back to Professor Zassoursky’s office. He greeted me with, “So what do you think of Minsk, our new capital?” When he saw my bewildered expression, he laughed, “Where have you been for the past three days? You haven’t heard that, over the weekend, the Commonwealth of Independent States replaced the USSR, and Minsk was made the capital instead of Moscow?” For the next hour, we stood in front of the enormous map of the Soviet Union that hung over his desk, discussing the best locations for the capital: Kyiv, St. Petersburg, or even Kharkiv. Geopolitics and a sense of new, practically ceaseless change enthralled us. What would happen next? What else was coming? 

Many things changed, although there was more work to do than ever.

For all those years, I was pleasantly surprised by the full academic freedom and stability that reigned in the journalism department, whichever way the winds might blow in the Kremlin. And Zassoursky was the primary guarantor of that freedom. 

His humanity and sensitivity as an administrator were no less amazing and admirable. After all, the positions of dean and department chair are ultimately administrative roles. Zassoursky was all the more impressive here, having grown up in the already distant Soviet past with its bureaucratic conceits and arbitrariness. 

Finally, I always marveled at his truly youthful enthusiasm and endless thirst for new knowledge in education and media technology, as well as his unexpected research interests. 

Zassoursky became less involved in the department’s operations during the final years of his life. His wife’s illness and then death slowed his step. But he never stopped worrying about what became of his kids. 

He gave far fewer interviews. Before Zassoursky died, his favorite phrase seemed to be, “This is a disgrace!”

In one of his last recorded interviews (a conversation with Radio Liberty correspondent Roman Super, titled “Journalism Is in Jeopardy“), Zassoursky said, “Watching [Russian] television to find out what’s going on in the world is useless. […] You’ll end up in blinders.”  

He taught us all a valuable lesson — a valuable life lesson. He set an example. And what did we do with it?