When Pravda came calling on Manning Clark

During the last years of the USSR a journalist named Alexei Ivkin reported on developments in Australia for its official newspaper Pravda. Embodying the spirit of openness (“glasnost”) then sweeping his nation, Ivkin was a refreshing contrast to the dour apparatchiks usually sent out to cover Australia for Soviet readers.

The positive vibe generated by Ivkin was well to the fore when the Australian Jewish Times featured a profile of him in the spring of 1989. The article noted Ivkin’s freely expressed hostility to antisemitic groups in Russia and that he had left the blight of doctrinal bigotry behind. Aged 43, Ivkin was then living in a plush apartment in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Edgecliff. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he was quoted as saying, was “a wise man” who governed a nation which was “fed up with so-called ideology.”

A personal highlight was interviewing Professor Manning Clark.

Published in Pravda on 6 October 1989, its purpose was to enlist Clark’s help in answering a basic question for Soviet readers: What were the inhabitants of this remote continent really like?

Ivkin began by opining that Clark was Australia’s “most famous and most popular historian” but that he knew Clark was not the most widely known Australian. That honour belonged to Crocodile Dundee, as depicted on screens by Paul Hogan. The film was a great hit among Ivkin’s Soviet compatriots. They lapped up its bushwackery when a Russian-dubbed version began appearing in cinemas across the Soviet Union in 1988.