The Press: Letter to the Russians

Under the collar of Moscow censorship, the necks of frustrated American and British newsmen grew hotter & hotter. Most of them were very, very tired of the stalls and rebuffs they met in trying to send out what news they could get under Russia’s peculiar “freedom of the press.” The New York Times’s able, soft-voiced Brooks Atkinson found “humorous stories … especially difficult to get approved. [They] arouse inordinate suspicion.” And it was not that the correspondents were anti-Russian ; one of the complainers was Anna Louise (I Change Worlds) Strong, onetime editor of an English-language Communist paper in Moscow. Against Russia’s box-rigid censorship, they found it hard enough to get at the truth; they found it impossible to get the whole truth out.

To ease their burning necks, ten members of the Anglo-American Correspondents Association decided to make a formal, Dutch-uncle protest to the Government. The idea came from Canadian-born Eric Downton of Reuters, president of the Association, who arrived in Moscow four months, ago, after wartime service as a lieutenant on a Canadian corvette on Atlantic convoy. Brooks Atkinson, an old censor fighter, helped polish the protest. Every member of the Association, including Anna Louise Strong, approved the unanimous protest, which was addressed and sent to Foreign Commissar Viacheslav M. Molotov. Excerpts:

“. . . The Soviet Union is the only one of the great Allied powers that retains astrict wartime censorship of news written by foreign correspondents. . . . Censorship in peacetime of all dispatches relating not only to military affairs, but to politics, economics, cultural affairs and to every aspect of life . . . destroys the value of foreign correspondents in a free world and has created a general distrust abroad of all news emanating from the Soviet Union. “Soviet censorship … is dictatorial and arbitrary. . . . Some censors are insufficiently acquainted with the English language to understand the material submitted to them … are often uninformed.

Apart from its effects upon modern journalism, Soviet censorship prevents the development of understanding and the promotion of good relations between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.”

The Association’s closing request: for “the same conditions for free reporting that Soviet journalists have in Great Britain and the U.S.”

Last week they got Molotov’s answer. In his opinion, the protest was “not solid.” (Correspondents wondered if he had picked up some jive talk in the U.S. last spring.) And since it was not solid, Mr. Molotov “did not find it necessary to give it his attention.”

Much to their surprise, correspondents were allowed to file the whole story. And then the collar of Russian censorship was buttoned up again.