Dateline Moscow

Why wasn't Leonid Brezhnev at the airport to greet Richard Nixon? Cracked Soviet Press Officer Yuri Cherniakov: "If Nixon had brought [U.S. Communist Leader] Gus Hall Brezhnev, might have showed up." Such light-hearted repartee between newsmen and Russians at last week's summit meeting said much about the reception for the 238 members of the U.S. press party. The Soviets did their best to one-up Peking's polite pampering of the presidential press corps three months earlier. China had offered new sights but no noteworthy contact with high officials. In Moscow the government exposed targets like Culture Minister Yekaterina Furtseva, who defended the regime against tough questioning about its treatment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jews in Russia.

At daily joint press briefings, Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler and Tass Director General Leonid Zamyatin provided pleasant if unenlightening responses to journalists' questions. One Russian reporter brought down the house by addressing a query to "Comrade Ziegler." The bustling White House press operation, the visitors' wide lapels, the Americans' brassy attitude toward officials of both nationalities--all these amazed Soviet newsmen. Exclaimed one Russian: "I thought such things only happened in Hollywood, but it's all true!"

There were the inevitable gripes.

The daily diet of treaty signings struck the newsmen as bland. Moscow-based correspondents protested that Washington reporters were botching pool assignments through ignorance; a pool dispatch on the state dinner, for example, noted that Nixon was introduced to "a bunch of bureaucrats"; they later turned out to be members of the all-powerful Politburo.

The New York Times seemed a bit miffed at not having been invited to a dinner at which Secretary of State William Rogers gave some background information to a number of reporters. Not all news organizations were represented, and there was no proof that the Times had been singled out for a snub. But the incident could be interpreted as a continuation of the Times-Administration flap. The paper recently published an Anthony Lewis dispatch from North Viet Nam giving credence to Hanoi's claim that the mining of Haiphong harbor was ineffective. The Times also initially down-played Washington's denials that the blockade had been pierced. Last week, Lewis belatedly climbed off the claim.

Cordial Lecture. With the President closeted in the Kremlin, the press all but overwhelmed Pat Nixon as she visited schools and subways, the circus and the ballet, and the giant GUM department store. Shoving matches developed between cameramen seeking closeups, and burly Soviet security men. Martin Schramm of Newsday was pummeled by a female usher when he tried to change his circus seat for a better view. One reporter complained that he could not see Mrs. Nixon's expression of pleasure at long range. "Use your imagination," said a security cop.

But these incidents were minor and unplanned; the Soviets are simply unaccustomed to dealing with crowds of aggressive newsmen. More significant was the Russian decision not to subject U.S. television film to the usual screening before allowing it to leave the country. When an NBC crew did some interviews at a railroad station, the police gave them a cordial lecture, pointing out that transportation centers are considered military facilities and off limits to photographers. NBC got to keep its film anyway. An ABC team shooting near the Kremlin was also accosted by a cop; he merely wanted to suggest a better camera angle. A security colonel com plained to the Christian Science Monitor that "I have to tell everyone 20 times to stand back," but while the summit lasted, the Russians seemed generally willing to indulge the whims of Western newsmen.

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