When Viktor Berkhin, a reporter for the monthly magazine Soviet Miner, was arrested last July on charges of "hooliganism," cries of foul came from an unlikely Big Brother. None other than the mighty Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, rushed to Berkhin's defense with two articles setting out the details of his arrest, 14-day detention and the police search of his apartment. Pravda charged that Berkhin's only crime was that he had done his job too well, riling local authorities by exposing government corruption in a coal-mining region of the Ukraine. The paper concluded that the secret police had committed "gross...
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