Sardonic Man in Moscow

Because they live with the constant threat of expulsion for the slightest offenses--real or imagined--Western correspondents stationed in Moscow tend to turn out supercautious, colorless copy. Not CBS's Hughes Rudd. With characteristic zest, he breaks the general journalistic rule, and for some reason he is allowed to stay on. Ever since he arrived in Russia in February 1965, Rudd has twitted his hosts in sardonic, deadpan style. If the censor notices, he is obviously not annoyed; he either likes Rudd's jokes or he misses the point.

Either way, the dark, scowling observer goes unhindered about his offbeat reporting. He consciously avoids the stereotype of the foreign correspondent who deals only with high officials and sees himself as a minister without portfolio. Rudd concentrates on ordinary matters: synagogues and supermarkets, the horseradish gap, and the maiden voyage of the new luxury liner Alexander Pushkin. "The Russians say the ship is sailing almost empty because she has not been advertised in the Soviet Union," he said about the Pushkin, "but the fact is it's impossible for all but a handful of Russians to leave the country anyway. So there's no point in getting them excited about a boat trip they won't be allowed to take."

Last week Rudd reported that "the Soviets are seriously worried about getting young people to become salesclerks, of all things. In the old revolutionary days, such jobs were considered part of the bourgeoisie's diabolical oppression of the working class. But the party has found out that clerks are necessary after all--especially honest clerks--and an honest clerk in the Soviet Union is hard to find."

On a recent telecast, Rudd described in deadly detail a Soviet sports-instructors' course, "which lasts some four years and involves 4,000 hours of class' room study. The curriculum is one which might well strike an American gym teacher as impossible if not insane. The students are required to take the following courses: the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; the philosophy of Marx and Lenin; Marxist political economy; the fundamentals of scientific Communism; a foreign language; biochemistry; anatomy, including the dissection of cadavers; the history of pedagogics; the theory of physical culture; the organization of physical culture; and how to run a motion picture projector. After graduation, these young men and women will teach athletics in sports clubs, factories and schools, turning out those amateur athletes for which the Soviet Union is so famous."

An Eye for Foible. But overorganized sports training and underutilized superliners are merely reminders to Rudd that his whole world is awry. "From Moscow," he says, "the U.S. seems badly out of kilter. The Soviet Union, of course, is a vast booby hatch." It is no wonder that everywhere he finds more material than his journalism can handle. He is that rarity among reporters: a top-flight newsman who is also a first-rate fiction writer. Over the last 15 years, he has published several pungent and bitter short stories, now collected in a book, My Escape from the CIA (and Other Improbable Events) (Dutton; $4.95). Writing mainly of the human damage done by wars and economic depression, Rudd displays an unerring eye for man's foibles and hypocrisy. Says Paris Review Editor George Plimpton, one of Rudd's first publishers: "He is a wonderfully cynical student of human manners."

As a continuing student, Rudd, 44, has combined bouts of journalism with stretches of creative writing. After a Texas and Kansas upbringing and a stint as a Piper Cub pilot in World War II, he worked for several newspapers, including the Kansas City Star, the Minneapolis Tribune, the Rock Springs (Wyo.) Daily Rocket and Sunday Miner. Periodically, he took time off to study under Novelist Wallace Stegner at Stanford and Poet-Critic Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota. "Mr. Tate and I didn't really understand each other very well," he says. "He had to begin each seminar by explaining to me once again what iambic pentameter was."

In his writing, Rudd expresses a particular loathing for the America of greasy lunch counters and complacency, unvarying ranch-style homes and casual cruelty. In one short story, No Relief in Sight, he describes a drab and dreary Fourth of July which culminates in a fire that sweeps a fireworks stand and roasts the mercenary hawker to a crisp. "The thing that nags me about my own country," says Rudd, "is the terrible contradiction between promise and reality."

Sex As Is. But Rudd is too much involved with life to give up in despair. "He maintains a firm tension between terror and wit," says Novelist Philip Roth. For all his fascination with the macabre--in his stories innocent Americans die exquisitely hideous deaths--he does not indulge in the currently fashionable sex-and-sadism. "Sex seems to me one of the very few experiences which requires no explanation or examination," he says. "It just is, and that's fine." He says he is not sure he knows how to write a novel, but he is now at work on one. Its setting is the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains. Will it be a sunny piece of writing for a change? Not a chance. "Evian-les-Bains," says Rudd, "is the dullest city in the Western world, with the possible exception of Wichita, Kansas."

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