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The Press: Thaw in Moscow

4 minute read
TIME

In Moscow last week there were still more signs of a new relationship between Western correspondents and Soviet Russia’s top leaders. At a diplomatic cocktail party, Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov held the closest thing yet to a Western-style press conference. Instead of the usual Kremlin evasiveness, even at such informal occasions, Shepilov talked frankly with correspondents, did his best to answer serious questions. ILx-Pravda Editor Shepilov, who likes to boast that “I’m a journalist myself,” also had another change of heart. After recently bitterly criticizing the U.S. press (it ought to be muzzled), he was asked if he had any complaints this time. Smiled Shepilov: “No. None whatsoever.”

Yes. No. Yes. Other signs of more freedom for Western correspondents are evident everywhere. Dozens of Western newsmen are now admitted on temporary visas, get more freedom than the 13 resident American correspondents and their colleagues from democratic nations. In some cases the visitors can even phone out stories from their hotel rooms with no censorship at all. Gradually, the clamps on the residents are also slackening. They are no longer restricted to Moscow, easily get permission to travel outside, though they are still barred from strategic areas and Siberian slave camps. Censors no longer kill all references to “corrective labor camps,” government shortcomings and bureaucratic bunglings in the U.S.S.R., agricultural shortages and criticism of anything from the Stalin era.

Still taboo: all speculation that the Red army is nudging into power, reports of the public pot-tossing and private lives of the Presidium bosses and their personal disagreements with one another. Says the Times’s Welles Hangen: “Soviet censorship is becoming less severe, but it remains arbitrary and capricious.” For example, when the ouster of Internal Affairs Minister Sergei Kruglov was revealed in a back-page item in Pravda, the Times bureau filed a story at 6 a.m. labeling Kruglov’s successor as a Khrushchev man. It passed. That afternoon Hangen wrote a second-day story elaborating on the same theme. It was killed.

The Flowing Vodka. Actually, the biggest crack in the Kremlin’s poker face is the regular appearance of the Soviet bosses at parties where vodka flows freely, and Khrushchev and Bulganin make a production of slapping correspondents on the back, playfully rumpling their hair. Often as not, when MVD guards try to keep correspondents at a distance, Bulganin or Khrushchev brush the guards aside, booming: “Let the correspondents in. They’re our friends.” What with cocktails and confusion, B. & K. are sometimes misunderstood and misquoted. For this reason resident correspondents repeatedly urge Khrushchev to hold press conferences instead of parties. But though the “Krush-ers” blames the trouble on “those bureaucrats down the line who never think for themselves,” he has done little about it.

“Patience.” When United Press Cor respondent Henry Shapiro took his case to First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan months ago, he got the same brush-off. Said Mikoyan: “The trouble with you correspondents is that you are too revolutionary. You expect radical changes overnight, which is impossible. But you must admit that there has been much improvement lately. Just have patience.”

To Western newsmen “patience” still means that they have to write, letters requesting interviews with minor officials, that they must make elaborate arrangements for trips that usually become official guided tours. Furthermore, with no news conferences, correspondents still get their news by reading 30 newspapers a day, 30 journals a month for significant items tucked away on the back pages, e.g., the late Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky was downgraded in a few short sentences in the April edition of Soviet State and Law, and the resignation of Old Bolshevik Lazar Kaganovich as labor boss of Russia was recorded in a two-paragraph item in Pravda.

Working under such handicaps, correspondents must curb their competitive instincts, usually pool much of their information, especially that picked up at the diplomatic receptions. When one visiting newsman suggested that this procedure was out of line with “competitive American journalism,” a correspondent snapped: “We compete, all right. We compete against the Russians.”

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