Haemorrhoid commercials not for Moscow viewers

Press, 18 December 1986, Page 22

Haemorrhoid commercials not for Moscow viewers

By

CHARLES BREMNER,

of Reuters, through NZPA

Washington

Both Russians and Americans like big black cars, but in Moscow they do not sport licence plates proclaiming "I SUE 4U (I sue for you).” The plate on a lawyer’s limousine cruising a Washington street was one of many glimpses of contrast that struck a reporter who had just moved from Moscow to the capital of the other superpower.

Life in Washington after years in the Soviet Union is a curious mixture of contrast and familiarity. A journalist switching such assignments leaves a pre-computer culture where news is closely controlled to work in a seeming free-for-all of words and pictures, much of it electronically purveyed. After living where the telephone is regarded as an object of suspicion, and where no phone directories exist, it is a shock to be called by a computer trying to sell insurance — especially when the machine knows one’s first name.

After a country of

chronic scarcity, no credit cards and no cheque books, America presents a bewildering barrage of consumer choice.

Russians do not dream about, and might not care to, some of the products advertised on U.S. television.

Selecting haemorrhoid medicine or equipment for flattening the stomach are not issues for the Moscow viewer. Television there concentrates more on moulding the communist outlook.

The new arrival in Washington also has to adjust his social responses. “And how are you today?” — the friendly greeting of the American shop assistant — puts someone used to the surly indifference of the Soviet version immediately on guard.

But for all the contrast, life “on the banks of the Potomac,” as Washington is known in Soviet Journalistic cliche, has something in common with Moscow. Both cities are nervecentres of continental nations, each with vast bureaucracies, political elites and the media and academic worlds that

thrive on the fringes of power. “

Each country’s governing class lives with a sense of threat from the other superpower and often compares itself to its rival, though more so in Moscow than Washington.

The Americans display more confidence in themselves and their social system, while the materi-ally-poorer Russians often reveal a defensive sense of inferiority.

Pressures to conform in life-style and ideology are rife in both capitals, though differently expressed. Moscow is clearly more monolithic with its allpowerful Communist Party.

The values of Washington are influenced by the relatively uniform background of those who wield power — a high proportion are lawyers — and by two political parties that offer a comparatively narrow ideological choice by West European standards.

A look at the army of navy-blue pinstripe suits in rush-hour Washington gives the lie to some of the stereotype of American individualism versus Russian uniformity. American openness

compared with the Russian affection for secrecy is well illustrated by a look at the buildings at the heart of each capital. With its high brick walls, the Kremlin deters the curious.

The low railings and sweeping lawns before the White House make it appear open to’inspection.

Both Russians and Americans think of their capitals as untypical cities that do not reflect the country as a whole. “It’s good to be out where the real people are,” President Reagan told audiences in a political campaign swing for this week’s mid-term elections. Gorbachev has been telling people much the same in trips to far-flung regions over the last year. On the subject of provinces, one Soviet journalist in Washington noted that while Westerners complain that Soviet cities look much the same from the Baltic to the Pacific, America reveals the same uniformity to a visitor’s eye.

“From Alaska to Florida, you get the same hamburgers and hotels,” the Russian said.

For a reporter coming from Moscow, Washington

is a shock in news overkill.

While the Kremlin has lately adopted Western techniques, much reporting in Moscow remains an exercise in analysing meagre information from official sources.

In Washington, by contrast, the reporter finds himself at first confused by an overload of words, pursued by spokesmen and privy to the thinking of policy-makers who make little attempt to hide quarrels within their own administration. Moscow’s K.G.B. security police have nothing like the apparatus of spokesmen one can call at the headquarters of their adversary, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Both the Soviet and U.S. administrations share a common desire to manage the news they create.

Soviet officials have begun practicing the Washington technique of courting reporters and appearing on national television to project the Kremlin’s point of view. Some Soviet officials have been making themselves so available here that former Moscow correspondents joke that one must come to Washington to learn what the Kremlin thinks.