Soviet Self-Criticism

"There is an old French anecdote about the Englishman who, having crossed the Channel for the first time, lands in Calais and observes that the first woman he meets has red hair, and thus quickly concludes that all French girls are redheads. He is a good example of the Soviet journalist."

Such a jeer at the Soviet press is common enough in the West; this time the quip appeared in Soviet Press, a monthly magazine that is circulated largely among Russian newsmen. The criticism had an added impact because the speaker was Ilya Ehrenburg, 75, one of Russia's best-known journalists. Ehrenburg admitted to his interviewer that while he spends more than half an hour a day reading the French newspaper Le Monde, he seldom devotes as much time to any Soviet paper. His explanation was blunt: "The Soviet stories are much more poorly written. Many important events outside as well as inside our country are not even reported. There is a congenital lack of curiosity on the part of the editors and a lack of skill on the part of the reporters."

Soviet journalists who are sent abroad, said Ehrenburg, rarely demonstrate any enterprise; they are content to feed back the cliches their editors seem to want. "How silly, for instance, to deduce 'excesses of capitalism' from the fact that in England there exist barbershops for dogs and in France there is even a restaurant for them." People who are kind to dogs, said Ehrenburg, are likely to be kind to human beings. "After all, we too are admonishing our street urchins to love cats and dogs instead of torturing them." It is just as bad, he added, for reporters to concentrate on slums in Europe and the U.S. "Such slums, unfortunately, also exist in the socialist countries."

Soviet journalists, said Ehrenburg, should imitate some of the better practices of the Western press. A correspondent, he said, should "speak the language of the country on which he reports, maintain close contact with all circles of society, keep his ear open to a variety of contradictory opinions, and only then sum up his impressions."

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