[trwired]

> As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"

Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.

[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_October

[2] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gierek

[msanlop]

I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then

[0] https://youtu.be/20-dt24F6sM?t=1641

[p0w3n3d]

What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the iron hand of authorities was loosening and more and more forbidden words were tolerated, up to the 1989 Round Table event when Poland was freed (not before strong military repression happening in 1981)

[paganel]

> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.

That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).

[int_19h]

I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well.

Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia. There should be an obvious Russian transcription of his originally Russian name. Азимов for the family name, according to Wikipedia.

So it existed but was changed when being translated back, for political / antisemitic reasons?

[int_19h]

That's the thing - "Isaac" is not a Russian name, but rather a Russian Jewish name, and is normally spelled "Исаак" (and pronounced something like ee-saah-k), which is indeed exactly how it was spelled in his birth certificate. It is also a very recognizably Jewish name - e.g. it would often be used in Russian political jokes on the subject.

And then you have USSR with its periodic antisemitic campaigns. The relevant one here is the one that started under Brezhnev in late 1960s, which is also when sci-fi in general became more popular in the USSR prompting more translations. So, publishing an author whose first name is Isaac would immediately draw attention from the censors. Seeing how anything Western was already on shaky grounds - sci-fi being allowed in the first place because it would often critique contemporary Western societies - translators played it safe by transcribing the American English pronunciation of "Isaac" into Russian, which made it Айзек (Ayzek). Which helpfully looks nothing like Исаак (Isaak), and doesn't "sound" Jewish at all to Russian ears.

This translation stuck, and it's how he is commonly known in Russian to this day.

[tehjoker]

In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system.

Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.

[nozzlegear]

I don't think this is true at all, but I guess maybe we can get wishywashy about how you define "mainstream networks." Taking a couple examples from some quick googling for essays written by one of my favorite economists/commentators, Noah Smith:

1: China Is a Communist Success Story. Kinda. (2015) — He talks about how China’s state-owned enterprises and central planning have achieved huge economic growth, and says that while central planning has its limitations, China’s approach shows that it can work to a certain extent.

2: Xi Jinping vs. Macroeconomics (2023) — he analyzes Xi's shift of Chinese resources from the real estate sector to advanced manufacturing, and concludes that it's an attempt to address economic imbalances by promoting high-tech industries. Smith suggests that under certain ideological frameworks (like China's), that kind of policy could be seen as a sound response to economic challenges.

¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-30/china-is-...

² https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-vs-macroeconomics

[tehjoker]

There are exceptions, but this phenomenon is well documented. I would also ask if you really think these two pieces are really representative of the opinion in the mass media, which I would barely characterize Smith as.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78912/manufacturing...

https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Reality-Politics-News-Media...

[myrmidon]

> In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks

"Not allowed" by whom? There is a big difference between silencing journalists and a branch of the entertainment industry self-selecting for some current "meta-consensus" (dependent on their target consumers).

Personally, I think calling Putin a dictator is stretching it a bit, but I have come to realize that honest, independent media is an absolutely essential cornerstone of an "actual" democracy: As soon as political leaders can prevent their mistakes from being reported to their voters, the whole thing becomes a farce.

You see a similar facet of this problem in the US, but not because governments have secured media control, but because the media landscape has completeley stratified (with a very strong partisan bias), and a lot of voters are basically never exposed to reporting "from the other side" at all (and are saturated with appropriate "outrage-bait" all day instead).

If you are talking about Russia, then I'd say that highly critical/adversarial reporting in the west is to be expected; this is basically "play imperialist games, win imperialist prices". Just compare WW2 era US messaging/reporting on axis power (before it even got involved itself).

But I'm curious about your perspective. What do you think should the US press say about the "east" that it does not?

[BrandoElFollito]

Not to mention that people were traveling to the west quite a bit (especially to France and the US), VCR tapes were broadly shared and they had this dichotomy of communism and the church reigning each one on everyone.