NATIONS: Brooks, the Bandit

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In his dispassionate, objective but hardhitting assessment of the Soviet regime last fortnight (TIME, July15), Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times made one point (among many completely valid ones) which may have been slightly in error. He said: "Although they [the Soviet leaders] have access to an enormous mass of information from abroad, they lack the experience to analyze it."

Last week the Kremlin showed that it has at least brains enough to know which kinds of outside criticism are most damaging, and which are least so. The Stalinists ignore, or pass off with an occasional snarl, the tirades of chronic Russophobes in the U.S. (usually lumped together as "the Hearst-Patterson-McCormick press"), knowing that their hysteria and exaggeration diminish their influence. But since Atkinson's effort was a fair-minded piece for fair-minded readers of an extremely influential paper, the Moscow puppet press exploded.

Pravda's No.1 hatchet man, David Zaslavsky, came out swinging savagely. He tried to pin on Atkinson the practice (Pravda's own practice, incidentally) of reckless and scurrilous fiction-mongering. He portrayed him as a "commercial traveler" for a typical capitalist newspaper enterprise, whose only job was to produce, by fabrication or distortion, the sort of news his bosses wanted to print.

Other Soviet-style billingsgate: "Foulest of words . . . ancient and hackneyed gossip ... phantasmagoria of phrases . . . delirium of an impudent person . mercenary from head to heels . . . this savage . . . bandit . . depraved souls . . . product of the Stock Exchange and black market . . . scum. . . . How can you influence him? Such persons are not even beaten, so as not to stain one's hands."

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Totalitarian dismay in the face of a free press is not confined to Communist countries. Last week the head of ^ the rightist Greek Government, fat, cigar-smoking Premier Constantin Tsaldaris, was in London and gave a press conference. A correspondent confronted him with the UNRRA statement that supplies to Greece would be stopped because of political discrimination in handing them out, whereat Tsaldaris lost his temper and shouted: "Iff a lie, it's a slander! What right have you got to ask about the internal affairs of Greece?" The reporters began chanting "Freedom of the press!" and the Premier yelled and babbled until Greek officials hustled the audience out of earshot. One of the Greeks put his hand to his head and mumbled: "Oh, my God."