The current deluge of alternate facts on social media has resurrected debate in our household about which apps we should ditch.
This preoccupation with truth revived memories of June 1974, when I’d completed two years of a four-year bachelor course in Russian and Arabic at the Polytechnic of Central London. Back from six months at Cairo University, which happened to overlap with the Yom Kippur War, I was signed up for an intensive month of advanced Russian at the Poly before our class was sent off to Moscow .
Our lecturer was a stranger to us, an emigré – perhaps from one of the Baltic states – with a sly and conspiratorial manner. I’ve forgotten his name, but I haven’t forgotten his fascination with the Russian painter Ilya Repin, nor Repin’s magnificent painting Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate.
Our lecturer’s (self-appointed?) job was to teach us how to read a Soviet newspaper, i.e. to read between the lines. We spent the month burrowing in the innards of Pravda (‘Truth’) and Izvestia (‘News’).
When I arrived in Moscow, I was surprised to know that I was a delegate to the Union of Soviet Associations of Friendship and Cultural Links with Foreign Countries. That was a surprise, but I supposed it must be true.
At any rate, I attended Russian classes at the Moscow Highways Institute in the mornings (see my certificate above) and knocked around the city in the sunny afternoons, sometimes stopping to drink a glass of kvas and read Pravda; the day’s edition was mounted in glass display frames in the streets.
On my last day I read in Pravda about something serious that had happened in Cyprus. I roughly understood that Turkey was involved, but the long news article was so convoluted – perhaps to disguise the fact that the USSR hadn’t yet established a stance on the matter – that I spent the day mystified. I arrived home to read in The Guardian that Turkey had invaded the north of Cyprus.
In today’s world of alternative facts, I’m reminded of a Soviet joke that our mysterious lecturer passed on to us fifty years ago: ‘There’s no truth in Pravda, and no news in Izvestia‘.
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If you’re interested in a dystopian read, have a look at my novel The True History of Jude, (featured in Best Reads of 2022 by Independent Book Review in the US) where I project forward to a time when truth is trash, when generative AI has turned on itself, when every warship is sponsored by one of the three mega consulting companies to which governments outsource their functions, and … when Australia has excised its own territory from itself and established itself as a virtual monarchy operating from the Bodleian Function Centre in Oxford. Think this is bizarre? Watch this space over the next four years.
Stuart Campbell author 