Foreign Correspondents: The News from Moscow

For Western correspondents in Moscow, getting the news has always involved threading a labyrinth of uncooperative and inaccessible officialdom. Did the recent change in the Soviet high command make things any better? Last week, after spending seven days in Moscow talking to 18 “officials and editors,” the New York Times’s Associate Editor “Scotty” Reston cabled a two-column “news analysis” with the pregnant, telltale observation: “The people who have power are not available for discussion, and the people who are available have no power.”