Granstand Play

Ever since the dramatic climax of the Kasenkina affair (TIME, Aug. 16 et seq.), the U.S.S.R. has looked ridiculously like a man who has lit up an explosive cigar. But last week the Soviet Foreign Office shaped its singed eyebrows into a frown and did its indignant best to act as though some capitalist had thrown a bomb.

Moscow managed to sound almost abused in answering the announcement that Jacob Lomakin, Soviet consul general in New York, was being ejected by the U.S. It rejected the State Department's accusations on the grounds that they were "unfounded and contrary to fact." The Soviet note blandly explained: "Since Kasenkina is in a hospital virtually under prison conditions ... statements described to her cannot be considered as deserving any confidence . . ."

Then came the grandstand play. The Russians decided to close all their consulates in the U.S. and to deny the U.S. the privilege of consular representation in the U.S.S.R.

Heavy Breathing. State Department officials listened to all this heavy breathing with utter calm and, in the cases of some career men, with ill-concealed grins. In her muscular attempt to save face, the U.S.S.R. was abandoning two excellent listening posts, one in San Francisco and one in New York. The U.S. was losing next to nothing: merely the privilege of maintaining an isolated consular outpost in Vladivostok and of endless negotiation for a second consulate in Leningrad.

Russia had had big consular staffs in the U.S. (40 in New York, 13 in San Francisco), and her representatives had been allowed complete freedom. But U.S. Consul Scott Lyon had a staff of only two in Vladivostok. Soviet officials trained floodlights on the consulate at night, refused to let the U.S. officials travel. The U.S. Office of Foreign Service referred to Vladivostok as the "end of the line" and, regarding the job's conditions as comparable in strain to the loneliness and frustration on a lightship, changed the consulate's staff every six months to be sure nobody buckled under. Consul Lyon, married in the U.S. last June, had assumed his post but two days before the order came to close.

A Jovial Man. The musical comedy aspect of the affair reached its climax at week's end when Consul General Lomakin sailed for home on the Swedish American Line steamship Stockholm. He waved to photographers with the jovial air of a man who might be seeing them again. (He can claim re-entry because he is a member of the United Nations Subcommittee on Freedom of Information and of the Press.) Before sailing, he told a steamship official that he was to become Andrei Gromyko's adviser at the U.N. General Assembly in Paris.

Few U.S. citizens were amused. Said the New York Times: "Moscow's reply is ... another demonstration that the Russian government is not interested in objective, or what it calls 'technical' facts, but only in concocting its own 'political' facts to further its own aims. As long as the Russian government persists in that practice, a real understanding with Russia will be well-nigh impossible."

After days of negotiation last week three reporters (who had drawn lots for the chance to represent the press) were permitted to interview Soviet Schoolteacher Oksana Kasenkina. From her bed in Roosevelt Hospital she reiterated the reason for her perilous three-story jump: "I did not want to kill myself; I wanted to escape."

She also cleared up a minor mystery--why had she written a letter to Consul General Lomakin after her first escape to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy's farm? "I wanted to speak to them as human beings in order to see that proper arrangements [for staying in the U.S.] could be made. When they came, they were not human beings at all, but arrested me."

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