Goodfellow from the Kremlin

Three months ago, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Sergeev arrived in Athens bubbling gracious compliments in fluent Greek. The first Soviet ambassador to Athens since 1947, Sergeev had a tough assignment: to dispel the bitterness against Soviet Russia that still lingers from the Communists' bloody, two-yearlong civil war (1947-49) against the Greek government.

In a few weeks Sergeev traveled the length of Greece from Salonika to Crete, glad-handed everyone, did everything but kiss babies. He invited 500 prominent Greeks to the embassy for a Russian film premiere, feasted another 500 on roast suckling pig and caviar washed down with champagne and vodka.

In November, having set the stage, Sergeev prepared his biggest coup: he invited ten eminently respectable, topnotch Greek editors, politicians and educators (plus one fellow-traveling newsman) to visit Soviet Russia and see the proletarian heaven for themselves. Last week they were back after 25 days, and twelve of Athens' 14 newspapers were carrying their combined story, "What We Saw in the Soviet Union."

Unfortunately for the ambassador, the ten non-Reds turned out to be no innocents abroad. They were as interested in what they were not shown, and why, as in what they did see. They admired the cleanliness of the people and the orderliness of the queues. But Gregory Kassimatis, onetime Labor Minister, a staunch Liberal, was appalled, after touring two Red showplace factories, by the lack of industrial safeguards to protect the workers. All were conscious of being tailed at all times by security agents. When one tourist asked to pop in on a worker's home, he was told: "The Russian home is a sanctuary, and to enter it would be a sacrilege." Helen Vlachou, editor-publisher of Greece's No. 1 newspaper, Kathimerini, was impressed by the beauties of Moscow but depressed by the "civilian army of robots that walk the streets, colorless, drab and ugly. Where are the people that would give this city life, joy, happiness, a smile in this regimented society?" Ambassador Sergeev might well have thought twice about trying to fool the Greeks on the meaning of democracy, since they invented the word.

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