The Press: Junket a la Russe

With notebooks at the ready, seven top Russian journalists landed in Manhattan last week. They were the first Russian writers to tour the U.S. since Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, Izvestia correspondent, rambled through with two colleagues from Pravda and Red Star in 1946.

Publicly, at least, the objective of the seven journalists was a lot different from that of Ehrenburg, who lost no opportunity to explore the seamy side of U.S. life for propaganda purposes. Explained Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy, bestselling novelist and Union of Soviet Writers secretary who heads the group: "The main point of the program is to sell all that is...