Those Moscow Correspondents

For most of her life, grave, prim-lipped Markoosha Fischer, Russian-born wife of U.S. Correspondent Louis Fischer, has been asking herself painful questions about her native land. She left Russia in 1915, swearing to stay away as long as Tsarism lasted. She was back from 1927 to 1939, to exult in Soviet Russia's growing pains. Last year, in a book (My Lives in Russia), she decided that "nothing but the truth" could restore honest thinking about the U.S.S.R.

In the December Common Sense, Author Fischer asks how much truth has come from U.S. correspondents in Moscow. She concludes that much of their wartime writing might have been signed by a Daily Worker editor.

They Wrote As They Pleased. Before the war, and especially before the 1936-38 purge, says Mrs. Fischer, the U.S.S.R. "inspired admiration in some [U.S. correspondents], dislike or indifference in others. But whatever they felt, they said so in their dispatches, and their readers knew exactly where they stood. ..." A newsman could condemn the "deification" of Stalin, the brutality of the secret police, the inefficiency of censors -- and still get along with the Government.

The purge, she argues, was partly to blame for a change in news coverage: plain Russian people no longer risked friendships with the correspondents, who had only tight-mouthed officials for sources.

"Some correspondents left Russia in disgust because they could not get the information necessary for their work. ...None of them were starry-eyed Stalinists. Why, then, were the words they ultimately used in their books, articles and lectures 100 percent apologies for the Soviet Government with no 'buts' added?"

Sneers & Smears. "First, they regarded their Moscow assignment as war work.... If the correspondent came home . . . he found that anyone who uttered a word against Stalin was immediately classed with Gerald L. K. Smith. ... He was afraid of such smears. . . ."

Author Fischer recalled that there were always rationalizations for keeping quiet ("I know. Their reasons worked on me."): Russia was fighting imperialism; she was saving Spain; she was fighting Fascism. Now there was the most effective shusher of all: " 'You must not do anything that will bring war with Russia nearer.' "

"The 100 percenters among the wartime generation of American correspondents in Moscow have been riding a wave of pro-Soviet sentiment," says Mrs. Fischer. "They are not profound think ers, they are not careful analysts. They are popularizers."

But she does not entirely blame "these freshmen in world politics . . . whose books litter the American market. . . . How can [the correspondents], amidst the thunderous noisy doubletalk on the left and the murderous noise of the reactionary right, hear the weak voice of the lonely few in the middle who hate totalitarianism, whether red, black or brown?"

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