When Pravda came calling on Manning Clark
Published on 6 October 1989, its purpose was to help in answering a basic question for Soviet readers: What were the inhabitants of this remote continent really like?
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.
Ivkin asked Clark for his opinion on how far the film’s hero was truly a typical Australian. Clark explained that Mick Dundee represented a national myth as opposed to reality. Dundee embodied the common notion that true Australians were a tough no-nonsense people who drank and wise-cracked a lot and lived and worked in harsh remote communities.
Such a view, Clark said, was an invention. The typical Australian lived and worked in cities. Crocodile Dundee’s lifestyle was a dream fostered by urban Australia. Only on weekends did some Aussies manage to get into untamed nature and even then usually by car with a trailer and a comfortable tent.
When Ivkin asked about the Australian nation’s supposed inferiority complex and why important reality was always seen as elsewhere, Clarke noted that he had grown up at a time when Australia was an outpost of the British Empire. Its wars were our wars. The Second World War changed things. Australia had to turn to the United States. The old emotional bondage weakened. Peace brought industrialisation and mass immigration. Australia was a more diverse and confident nation. The old self-doubt that once haunted Clark began to lift.
Clark explained that Australians had long-cherished ideals of fairness and equality, yet genuine revolutionary movements were unlikely to appear. Australians tended to prefer caution and continuity to upheaval. They were a nation of homeowners, small proprietors and aspiring middle class families. They were conservative at the ballot box.
When Ivkin asked about Australia’s Aboriginal population, Clark’s tone grew grave. After generations of neglect, there was now a sense of guilt at the damage done to a rich Indigenous culture and a desire to preserve what had been nearly destroyed. Instead of confrontation and guilt Clark yearned instead for a “serious dialogue” to begin: “The history of relations between whites and Aboriginal people will be viewed not as a struggle between the innocent and the villains, but as a tragedy – one of those tragedies which, if faced honestly, can inspire good deeds and add wisdom and mutual understanding.”
Ivkin’s interview did not go unnoticed. But, in an intriguing twist of events, Pravda’s article received its most thoughtful scrutiny neither in Australia – where the language barrier in a pre-autotranslate era was a force to be reckoned with – nor in the Soviet Union. Instead it occurred in California.
Located in Stanford, the California Institute of International Studies analysed the Soviet press in its World Affairs Report. During 1989, it documented the shifts in Soviet propaganda and policy as the Iron Curtain began to collapse.
Clark’s Pravda interview fell within the remit of the World Affairs Report. The journal sunmmarised Clark’s opinions and extrapolated from them. Middle class respectability meant Australia had never been fertile ground for revolutionaries. Promoting small pro-Soviet groups in such a society was a waste of time. But faith in old doctrinaire creeds was dying in Australia. All the key points which were canvassed in the Clark interview cut across old-style Soviet orthodoxy: “It is not clear if Clark realised that he was telling the reporter that Moscow’s old propaganda and intrigue had produced no results.”
The World Affairs Report emphasised that Ivkin had reproduced all of Clark’s observations without comment. There was no attempt to uphold Moscow’s old party line. The Pravda interview was a highlight of glasnost in action.
Dr Stephen Holt is a Canberra-based historian and biographer. Ross Fitzgerald AM is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University.