Moscow's lingering chagrin over Svetlana Alliluyeva's defection may have been mitigated somewhat last week by the spectacle of four earnest young Americans describing to Russian audiences their desertion from the aircraft carrier Intrepid as a protest against the Viet Nam war. "They're playing it big," sighed a U.S. official. Twice aired on Soviet television and displayed in Pravda, the self-proclaimed "patriotic deserters" were in Moscow in transit to a neutral country where they might "give all our strength to the struggle against the immoral, inhuman war."
The four enlisted menRichard D. Bailey,...
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