Roughing It in Russia

"Let's just try to finish the race on our feet, men," mumbled the New York Daily News's Frank Holeman. nodding sleepy-eyed over a glass of white Georgian wine in Sverdlovsk's Grand Urals Hotel. His sentiment was shared by all of the 73 U.S. newsmen accompanying the most tireless tourist ever to visit Russia: Vice President Richard Nixon. "[The other] tourists encountered along the way are regarded by now rather enviously as a happy, carefree lot," cabled the Washington Star's European Correspondent Crosby Noyes. "For them there are, presumably, no pre-dawn departures, no missed meals, no ghostly excursions into the night in search of elusive telegraph offices. Traveling with the Vice President is a progressive redefinition of roughing it."

The tour indeed had its trials. Despite a handsome time advantage in filing--seven hours in Moscow, eleven in Novosibirsk--many dispatches missed their U.S. deadlines because of interminable, often unexplained Red-tape delays. Correspondents found that the only sure way to get copy back home was by telephone: the Associated Press held one circuit seven hours--at $3 a minute, or $1,260 worth--to assure prompt coverage of Nixon's long talk with Khrushchev at the Premier's dacha outside Moscow.

The milling throngs that materialized at every vice presidential stop kept all but a handful of newsmen beyond earshot; in desperation the press corps resorted to a revolving pool system, generously shared notes and observations in a sort of socialized journalism. Leggy ex-Model Jinx Falkenburg, who came along as a correspondent accredited to Long Island's Newsday, reached Novosibirsk before her luggage, bravely showed up at the ballet theater in panties and a raincoat securely belted to hide the absence of skirt.

The Blue Pencil. Almost from the start, the Soviet censors reneged on the government's promise to pass all copy unscathed. Glavlit, the Soviet censorship agency, combed some of the outgoing cables carefully, eliminating, among other things, mention of its own blue-pencil activity. The American Broadcasting Co. was ruled off the international air in Moscow" for "tampering" with Khrushchev's lines in his famed kitchen debate with Nixon at the American exhibition--a charge that the U.S. State Department promptly rejected.

Russian TV viewers got a garbled version of the same dialogue. Many of Nixon's remarks were not translated at all; in Pravda the vice presidential contribution was cut to five sentences. Pravda edited Khrushchev too, but judiciously, e.g., his patently false boast that Russian workers could afford the U.S. exhibition's $14,000 demonstration home. Said the London Daily Telegraph: "There can be no doubt that the Russian version aimed at presenting [Nixon] as a feeble and defensive debater in the face of a righteous and rumbustious Mr. Khrushchev."

Chattanooga ChooChoo. For the most part, the Russian press played the Nixon visit against a backdrop of stories highly critical of the U.S. exhibition ("What the Exhibition Conceals"), and others decrying U.S. unemployment and deficiencies in the U.S. medical profession. Nixon's speech opening the exhibition was carried in full, together with some hot-tempered letters from readers: "It is not necessary to exaggerate, Mr. Nixon."

For all that, the tour had its positive side. Reporters mingled freely with the friendly crowds (the Atlanta Constitution's Editor Ralph McGill was recruited as witness to a Soviet wedding), gained new insight into the spirit of the Russian people--and into their industrial capacity: in a poll of his colleagues, the New York Times's James B. Reston found that most of them would take home the impression that the Soviet Union's industrial progress did not live up to its advance billing. In the general camaraderie, even the security police shepherding the press corps melted into human beings; after threatening to punch one cop on the nose, A.P. Photographer Henry Griffin began getting preferential treatment. At Sverdlovsk the hotel band broke into Chattanooga Choo Choo, inspired Hearst Columnist Ruth Montgomery to jitterbug with New Orleans Times-Picayune Editor George W. Healy Jr.

The world's capitals would be weeks and months adding up the diplomatic score of Nixon's trans-Russia tour. But for the visiting newsmen--many of them seeing Russia for the first time--and for the Russian people, the Iron Curtain would never be quite the same again.

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