The Press: The Voice of Amerika

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In the basement of the U.S. Embassy in Prague last week, the first issue of a slick-paper, LIFEsize, Czech-language picture magazine lay stacked in neat piles. This month, when the U.S. State Department's Amerika hits newsstands and mailboxes in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, traditionally pro-American Czechs will get their first real glimpse of the U.S. since the Iron Curtain fell 15 months ago.

If the Czechs enjoy their monthly look at Amerika as much as their Russian neighbors do, it will be a sellout. For more than four years, Amerika has been the only U.S. magazine widely circulated in the U.S.S.R. At ten rubles ($1.23), the 50,000 copies of Amerika's Russian edition get thumbed by about 1,000,000 So. viet citizens. In the first Czech issue of Amerika, readers will find 72 pages of reprints from the Russian, ranging from the 4-H Clubs to Radio City, and from Thomas Jefferson to James Thurber.

Everybody's Happy. Most of Amerika's clear, simple stories are told in terms of "average Americans," avoid controversial personalities and political issues that might roil the Kremlin—or Congress. Not long after Amerika had stirred up such a storm on Capitol Hill by suggesting that the Midwest was poor and drought-stricken, slim, brunette Editor Marion Sanders, 43, took over. Since then, Amerika has provoked no senatorial tempers. Welles-ley-educated Mrs. Sanders is a doctor's wife and mother of two college-age youngsters. She knows no Russian and has never visited the U.S.S.R.; Moscow cold-shouldered her request for a visa last year.

The conditions under which Amerika is produced would daunt many another editor. Articles and captions for each Russian issue are written in English in Amerika's twelfth-floor Manhattan offices, then flown to Moscow for translation and censorship. There unpredictable Soviet bureaucrats sometimes take ten days, sometimes ten weeks, to approve an issue before returning it to the U.S. to be printed and shipped back to Moscow. This long, fluctuating deadline means that most stories and pictures must be "timeless Americana." But out of 3,000,000 words, Moscow has deleted only about 50.

Pravda's Unhappy. The real trick is not figuring out what the censor will dislike, but what ordinary Russians will like. Amerika's staff studies Russian newspapers and magazines, checks fan mail received by the embassy and samples reader opinion through State Department staffers in the U.S.S.R. Amerika's Russian readers think Peter Arno's school of humor vulgar and unfunny. Accustomed to treating Stalin & Co. with respect, they never laugh at jokes about U.S. Presidents and Senators. They prefer articles on science, the theater and industry, glimpses of U.S. home life. No. i on Amerika's hit parade: the life of Deanna Durbin.