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15 Journalists and Diplomats
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15 JOURNALISTS AND DIPLOMATS The intelligentsia was used to thinking one thing, saying another, and writing something else again. — . , “Setting Russia’s History Straight” Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers. We had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time. It is not something I am particularly proud of, but that is the way we lived. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender. — Among the Russians accustomed to thinking one way but writing another were journalists and diplomats stationed outside the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, thousands of them worked in the United States and other countries around the world, and it is fair to ask if they too were influenced by their years abroad. This is complicated somewhat by the commonly held belief that all Soviet correspondents abroad, as well as many of the diplomats, had intelligence connections or obligations to report to the GRU or KGB, a factor that colored their written perceptions of the West and their reporting to Moscow. That view is voiced by Raymond Anderson, a former New York Times Moscow correspondent; who wrote about his subsequent assignment in Egypt: I did get to know some very competent Russians in Cairo, half of them listed later in John Barron’s book [on the KGB] as “operatives.” but there was no clue at the time. They did their journalism jobs. They were good colleagues and none ever lied to me. They gave me some bits of information that helped me at critical moments on deciding what was going on in Egypt. The information was correct. No one ever tried to recruit me. but I always assumed that each and every one was staff KGB or at least reporting to the KGB so I kept my distance.1 According to Mikhail Kroutikhin, a former TASS bureau chief in the Middle East, TASS reporters abroad were a mixed crowd,“some % were‘pure’ journalists, . Raymond Anderson, e-mail to author, October , . John Barron, The KGB Today, The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, ). another % belonged to the GRU (Main Intelligence Department, General Staff), and % were with the KGB.”2 “None of us,”adds Kroutikhin,“was under any illusion about the difference in life in the USSR and in the Middle East, meaning both the conditions of everyday life and human rights and freedoms”: Cynicism was a natural part of our existence, as well as hypocrisy (active participation in the Communist Party, which made us eligible for foreign assignments). That was the way educated people in the USSR survived in the totalitarian environment. Very few of us seemed real hardcore believers in the advantages of Soviet-style socialism. This is why membership of intelligentsia in the CP was limited (while workers could enroll easily, quotas existed for admitting people with university educations). Recalling his youth in Moscow, Kroutikhin continues: All contacts with foreign culture were instrumental in forming a new mentality in the Soviet people and bringing closer the fall of the totalitarian empire. We were eager to grasp at anything foreign that came our way—the World Youth Festival, foreign films, the first foreign entertainers such as Yves Montand who visited Moscow in the late s, etc. Few people in my youth traveled abroad, but those who did almost immediately abandoned most of their illusions. In his own case, says Kroutikhin, his views were not changed by his service abroad. They changed earlier, at age seventeen, when he began to study English and “was carried away by the cultural vistas the knowledge of that language opened for me. I spoke English better than my schoolteacher and read lots of foreign books.” As a consequence, he continues,“We did not see the Soviet Union differently from our stations abroad, simply because we saw it with the same eyes when we were at home.” For his daughter, however, he adds, “the revelation came as the light on the Damascus road for St. Paul:“She was six. It was her first evening abroad, in Tehran in , and she had been tasting such beverages as Up and Coke and Fanta for the first time in her life. When we were falling asleep, we heard her whisper, from her bed in the next room, the names of the beverages. I guess it was the moment her patriotism ended forever.” As noted above, Oleg Kalugin, the KGB officer who studied at Columbia University in –, returned to New York as a correspondent...