The Sugar-Coated Pill

The Russian press has long held the distinction of being the world's dullest--a distinction in which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, one Communist who believes that party pills go down best with a little sugar, takes scant pleasure. No sooner had he taken over in the Kremlin than Khrushchev began trying to brighten up Soviet journalism: dull writing, he warned a conference of editors six years ago, "must be driven from the newspaper page." To do the driving, Khrushchev employed an able newsman: apple-cheeked Aleksei I. Adzhubei, now 35, who also happens to be his son-in-law.

Khrushchev established Son-in-Law Adzhubei on the staff of Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda, watched approvingly while Adzhubei, rising with predictable swiftness from cub reporter to editor, turned the doctrinaire voice of Communist youth into a reasonably lively paper. In reward, Adzhubei last May was named editor of Izvestia (circ. 1.800,000), official organ of the Soviet government--and it, too, began taking on a new look.

"Not All Black." From being Russia's second dullest paper (Pravda--circ. 6,000,000--official Communist Party organ, is incontestably the dullest), Izvestia became one of the sprightliest. Out went some of Tuesday's boring repetitions of what Pravda, the only-paper in Russia with a Monday edition, had said the day before. On the front page, once the unassailable domain of party catechisms, news stories surprisingly appeared, and the ponderous headlines (A CLEAR DEMONSTRATION OF THE UNITY OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE AND OF RALLYING AROUND THE COMMUNIST PARTY) became downright breezy (I VISITED THE VINNITSA SPY CENTER and BONN FLIRTS WITH MADRID). Pictures bloomed all over, and the subjects were gay: babies, dogs, water skiers and movie starlets.

With the boss's boy leading the way, others among Russia's leading journalists got the idea, began breaking old molds. In an unprecedented gesture, Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta last week agreed to run a 1,100-word letter from U.S. Author Charles Neider, defending The Autobiography of Mark Twain, which he edited, against a hostile review in the Russian literary journal.

And Pravda has come to print an occasional dissident word. Last week it not only published the text of U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter's speech before the National Foreign Trade Council but reprinted from U.S. News & World Report an interview with Iowa Corn Farmer Roswell Garst, who played host to Khrushchev during the Soviet Chairman's U.S. visit last September. Garst's frank talk about Russian agriculture (still primitive by U.S. standards) and Khrushchev (rough, tough and cruel, but "not all black") got by untouched.

"Tugging God's Beard." But although Russian papers have become easier reading, the press remains the servant of the state, and Nikita Khrushchev himself recently served up a blunt reminder of that fact. He appeared in Moscow at the first convention of the newly formed Union of Journalists of the U.S.S.R., where 750 delegates, among them Aleksei Adzhubei, solemnly dedicated themselves to a familiar cause: "To safeguard and multiply the Leninist traditions of partisanship." Beamed Khrushchev: "You journalists have been doing a fine job." But when wild applause broke out, he stopped it abruptly with an upraised hand.

"Don't let it turn your heads, lest you end up tugging God's beard," said Khrushchev. "Of course, our press has grown tremendously. Our journalists have grown. But there's no limit to perfection. Therefore in the future you must work, work and work to make our press the strongest and the most militant. I don't speak of truthfulness and idea content, because our press was, is and shall be the most truthful and the most intelligent press in the world." In other words, beneath that sugar coating there is still the same old pill.

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