Journalist given a dressing down for report on Raisa

Press, 28 December 1987, Page 12

Journalist given a dressing down for report on Raisa

Andrew Wilson, the ‘Observer’ man in Moscow, finds there are still limits to glasnost

GEORGE Orwell would have found quite a lot to amuse him, in a sardonic kind of way, recently in Moscow — and a bit to cheer him, too. One doesn’t turn round an exStalinist police State in a couple of years. But Mr Mikhail Gorbachev has started the process; he means to go on with it (if time and colleagues allow) and one day — who knows? — the tadpole of glasnost may turn into the democratic newt. The trouble with the present stage, as Orwell would have observed, is its incompleteness. Things which were formerly an accepted part of the scene, now stand out starkly against the background of perestroika and new thinking (“for the Soviet Union and the whole world”). One of these is the ability of the Party and State apparatus to expunge a name — or, as happened at the end of last month, two names, in a context directly involving the “Observer.” At the end of November the “Observer” gravely discomfited the highest Soviet circles by printing allegations made by the former Moscow city Party chief, Mr Boris Yeltsin, against Mr Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. Most wounding was the charge that she received a high salary from the quasi-charity National Cultural Fund, and that by her lifestyle as “First Lady” she was creating what he called the preconditions of a personality cult. Next day, or rather evening (it was seven o’clock), I received a peremptory call to go and see the head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s press department, Mr Gennadi Gerasimov. At the Ministry’s deserted press centre I was led through the empty auditorium used for press briefings to the plushly

furnished room behind the stage, which an American colleague once lightly described as “where Gennadi dispatches his victims.” It was a brief and predictably frigid meeting. Mr Gerasimov said Mr Yeltsin had made no such allegations, that "Raisa” drew no salary for her work for the fund, and that the whole thing was a lie, for which I owed an immediate apology. I told him I had no doubt about the facts, or the standing and absolute integrity of my source — but that, of course, after 38 years in my job, I respected the freedom of Government information officers to deny stories their masters disliked. Mr Gerasimov abruptly left the room, and I was left to find my way out of the deserted building. For a week nothing more happened. None of the parties concerned ventured a public denial of what I had written, although various pieces of what seemed to be disinformation appeared. These included a document purporting to be a transcript of Mr Yeltsin’s October 21 speech to the Central Committee, which the recipient put aside as coming from a suspect source. Then on the next Saturday afternoon came another peremptory summons to call Mr Gerasimov. Why did it have always to be in the evening or at weekends? (I mention this only to illustrate the Soviet concept of the proper place of journalists in the hierarchy of power.)

As it happened, I was out of town, and our conversation — an almost verbatim repetition of what was said a week before — took place over the telephone at nine o’clock the next Monday morning. At this point, had I looked carefully, I might have seen Orwell getting out his notebook. During the day the Foreign Ministry called a snap press conference. As I was not told, I was not there. But I was able to read all about it in the following day’s “Pravda.” To be mentioned in “Pravda” it is normally necessary to be critical of things in the West. (I have been quoted when writing about the need for a perestroika in Western foreign relations.) But this time it was different There it was, all across page five, an angry denunciation of A. Wilson’s “impudent provocation,” as delivered by the Foreign Ministry press chief. Only, surely there was something odd? I looked for names. There was mine, all too often. Mr Gerasimov’s of course. And that of a paid official of the cultural fund, Mr G. V. Myasnikov, who had been wheeled in to support the proceedings. But where was Mr Yeltsin’s — or Mrs Gorbachev’s? (I found hers, finally, among a list of members of the board of the fund who, Mr Myasnikov said, received no emoluments — apart from himself and two others, whom he named). But there was no mention of Mr Yeltsin.

The gist of the whole report

was that Mr Wilson, with the worst of intentions, had accused the entire board of “enthusiasts for culture” of drawing large salaries — not that he had been reporting what one prominent Soviet personality had said about another. The “Pravda” account was

credited to the Tass news agency, which last week celebrated its seventieth anniversary, with the plaudits of Radio Moscow for its unvarying truth and accuracy. So one must assume that that was the way it was, including a volume of schoolmasterly advice from Mr Gerasimov himself on the ethics of ■journalism. I confess to having been a little depressed by the whole proceeding — although it is always salutary for a believer in the sincerity of Mr Gorbachev’s perestroika to see, from time to time, the system’s other face. I could even have supposed that all those good citizens bent over their “Pravdas” in the Metro would have been highly enraged if they had known the identity of the “impudent” foreigner in their midst.

But I need not have worried. In the street I unexpectedly encountered a working man I knew, and who I also happened to know was a member of the Party — Mr Yeltsin’s Party (and Mr Yeltsin remains a popular figure in Moscow).

He seemed not to have lost his old genius for reading between the lines, for, as we walked, he dug a gritted finger at the "Pravda” I was ' carrying, and gave me— could it possibly be? — the broadest of grins.