The Press: Write It in Plain Russian

As the official—and only—Soviet news agency, Tass had dutifully reported the spankings which have lately stung many a Red backside, from the shoemakers to Shostakovich. Last week, it was Tass's own turn to go to the woodshed.

The trouble with Tass, said a critic in Moscow's Culture and Life, is that in covering the "main events of international life [Tass dispatches] contain much foreign and special terminology which is not understandable by an ordinary collective farmer." Culture and Life didn't say so, but the inference was that Tass had picked up such bad habits from its capitalistic brothers.