The Press: Junket a la Russe

With notebooks at the ready, seven top Russian journalists landed in Manhattan last week. They were the first Russian writers to tour the U.S. since Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, Izvestia correspondent, rambled through with two colleagues from Pravda and Red Star in 1946.

Publicly, at least, the objective of the seven journalists was a lot different from that of Ehrenburg, who lost no opportunity to explore the seamy side of U.S. life for propaganda purposes. Explained Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy, bestselling novelist and Union of Soviet Writers secretary who heads the group: “The main point of the program is to sell all that is best and all that the American people are proud of.”

“Good Coexistence.” One of the first trips was to Wall Street, where New York Stock Exchange President Keith Funston explained to the visitors how Americans can own the tools of production simply by buying stocks. When one Red journalist jestingly pointed out that Anatoly Vladimirovich Sofronov is a prosperous playwright as well as editor of Ogonek, one of Russia’s most successful magazines, a nearby broker quickly handed Sofronov his card, just in case he wanted to invest his money. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the journalists paid scant attention to the pictures. Instead they hobnobbed with a group of sixth-graders from Brooklyn’s Ethical Culture School who were being lectured on art. “This,” said Polevoy, “is the way to run a museum.” At Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Foreign Affairs Expert Boris Romanovich Izakov, who is on the editorial board of the monthly International Life, pointed out that Moscow University has 1,800 journalism students—all with free tuition. At Manhattan’s City Hall, Mayor Robert Wagner carefully explained how the city is governed by people of various cultures, creeds and colors. Izakov scored a point, saying: “Good coexistence.”

“Ask Mr. Molotov.” From the United Nations building to the United Press, the Stork Club to Harlem, one thing that most impressed the Russians was the lavishness of U.S. newspapers and magazines. Apparently recalling the skimpy Moscow papers, Polevoy marveled that Americans in a single week can turn out “magazines as thick as mattresses.” (Jolly Journalist Sofronov was introduced on one occasion as “the thickest editor of a thin magazine in Russia.”)

The visitors’ first close look at U.S. reporters at work came when they held a press conference in the Overseas Press Club. From some two dozen U.S. reporters, the Russians were tossed many a question too hot to field. Asked why the Russians jammed Voice of America broadcasts, one of the visitors finally cracked: “It is not worth the bother to liberate us.” When an Israeli correspondent asked about the disappearance of several Jewish reporters in Russia, Valentin Mikhailovich Berezhkov, deputy chief editor of the weekly New Times (who with Izakov acted as interpreter for the group), blandly suggested: “Ask Mr. Molotov.”

At week’s end, the Russians went on to Cleveland. There, a reporter asked them if they had seen any evidence that Americans were preparing for aggression. Replied Polevoy: “We have found no war-mongers.” When a reporter for Chicago’s Lithuania Daily News asked why his wife was imprisoned in Siberia, Editor Izakov angrily stalked out of a press conference, snorted: “Nonsense!”

The Russians kept to themselves what else they thought about the U.S. Because of the speed of the trip, one Soviet newsman said, they had no time to file dispatches to their magazines and newspapers. When they get back, they will not only write their stories, but contribute to a collective book on the U.S.