Let Freedom Ring

Between New York and Moscow, words like "slave" and "phony" flew back & forth. The New York Times's pugnacious managing editor and Sunday columnist, Edwin L. (for Leland) James, and the Communist Pravda's choleric co-editor, David losifovich Zaslavsky, were locked in battle.

James had started it. When a Soviet delegate to the U.N. Economic and Social Council solemnly asserted that only in the Soviet system was there a free press, James exploded: "Propaganda gone crazy." Zaslavsky retorted with half a page of invective in Pravda. James came back this week with a challenge: "There are some millions of your own countrymen in ... concentration camps. . . . Why not exercise your freedom by giving the world a picture of these camps. . . . [If you do] I would be willing to apologize for calling you a phony."

Of course, neither Zaslavsky nor any other Soviet journalist could accept the challenge. And, anyhow, Zaslavsky had already told the world almost everything it needed to know about the Soviet press. Some of it was in his latest anti-James outbursts ; the rest was in his own life and works.

The Party Line. Sitting at his cluttered desk, scratching a dim pencil against a pad of sleazy paper, old (68), squid-faced Zaslavsky knows his own position perfectly. Like most other responsible editors on Soviet Russia's 7,000 newspapers and 360 magazines, his is a party assignment. On pain of party inquisition he is bound to it. Even before the printers get his copy, censors see it. The party line has to be remembered, and the implacable, pervasive MVD (Secret Police). Deviation is dangerous.

Zaslavsky knows little about U.S. newsmen except what he has read in Upton Sinclair, Morris Ernst or heard from occasional contacts with ex-PM Publisher Ralph McAllister Ingersoll. But he knows all about Zaslavsky. He wrote:

James is on the chain of his boss, Sulzberger.* At the present time we cannot consider James's words as his own -- they are really the voice of his master-owner -- we hope he gets full freedom. But it will come to him only if he replaces Sulzberger as owner, or in case what he calls the Russian conception of press freedom triumphs everywhere.

Staring across Zaslavsky's desk is a plaster bust of Lenin, molded in sternest mien. Zaslavsky remembers -- and well --that even before Lenin had a political party he founded a newspaper to promote revolution, assigned its correspondents:

1) to report only what would spread social discontent; 2) to be ready always to serve as a nucleus of active revolutionaries.

Wrote Zaslavsky:

We understand very well why the biggest agencies, the Associated Press, the United Press, and International News Service so fiercely seek complete, unrestricted freedom for their irresponsible information --a full unlimited right to penetrate all nations, have their agents everywhere buy everywhere what they need, sell everywhere things that are profitable for them.

Day Into Night. Zaslavsky was not always a Lenin idolator. In the year (1900) when Lenin founded his first illegal news paper, Zaslavsky, too, had become a revolutionary. But he chose to join the Jewish General Social-Democratic Union -- known as the Jewish Bund. Though both re mained revolutionaries, from 1903 onward he opposed Lenin's methods. In 1917, thirteen days after Lenin's seizure of power, Zaslavsky's opposition twanged toward its angriest pitch : "Lenin has taken power to become the genuine autocrat of Russia. ... So far only the bourgeois press has been extinguished. . . ." Twenty-one days later: "In Petrograd the Bolsheviks are closing up the press with sadistic cruelty indeed." Thirty-three days later: "Preliminary censorship! All fools and scoundrels have protected themselves by this instrument." Lenin had answered: "Capitalism purchases the Zaslavskys in its own interests!"

In 1917 Zaslavsky's scream against Lenin only brought Lenin's censors in greater, more ferocious force, to hound him from cellar to cellar. He changed the name of his newspaper from Den (Day) to Noch (Night) and then to Pol Noch (Half-night). But before long, darkness engulfed it altogether. Darkness also engulfed a number of his Jewish Bundist colleagues. It was then that Zaslavsky "reexamined his political beliefs" and threw himself on the mercy of his erstwhile enemies, the Bolsheviks. He became one of them, and has since been among their most zealous servitors.

On Zaslavsky's desk, near Lenin's plaster head, is a ceramic crocodile, the animal that weeps fake tears. Last week Zaslavsky finally finished his sermon to Edwin L. James and the U.S. press:

No matter how angry James gets . . . we stand for the broadest freedom of the press which serves the people and belongs to the people. We stand for an honest press which is conscious of its responsibility. Such is our conception of the freedom of the press, and that is the conception of genuine democracy.

*Arthur Hays Sulzberger is president and publisher of the Times, but not owner.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.