Download WaLergaLe: The Soviet Cover-Up

14XPost
l'eter Osnos
1 7 1974
WaLergaLe:
The Soviet
Cover-Up
MOSCOW — With, Vladivostok behind them, Soviet Communist Part
y
leader Leonid Brezhnev and his
lin colleagues have now madKrem
e the
transition to a new American Pres
ident, without ever telling the Soviet
people what really happened t o the
last man in the White House.
Were an analogous upheaval some-
Mr. Osnos is the Moscow correspondent of The Post.
how to take place in the Soviet lead
ship, the U.S. press would examine erits
reasons and implications to the last detail. The Kremlin's centrally-directed
and tightly-controlled information machinery, however, reports only
suits Soviet purposes. And in thewhat
ter of the late events in Washingmatthe selection has been particularlyton,
restricted.
As far as the vast majority of Soviet
citizens who get their news solely
the official media are concerned,from
one
day last slimmer Richard Milhou
Nixon stepped down as President ofs
the 'United States because of som
ething called "Watergate" and because
he faced the threat of "impeachmen
— terms for which no adequate Rust"
sian translation was ever supplie
d.
Nothing was specifically said then —
or since — about break-ins or cove
rups.
Shortly after the changeover,
e
high-level thought was evidently som
give
to publishing a full-fledged account ofn
the Watergate saga. At least one important, although limited-circulation,
Sov journal had such an article
in
I prepiet
aration in September. It
never published, and Sources atwas
magazine say it has been permanenthe
tly
shelved.
"To tell the whole story," a thoughtful Moscow editor said the other day,
"would have required that the seam
y
side of Nixon be exposed. For us to say
that he was bad would put a shad
ow
on all the agreements and achieve
ments of Soviet-U.S. relations in thepast few years. We are not prepared
to
do that."
Officially then, the Soviets passed
up the propaganda chance to show the
nature of corruption in the world's
most powerful democracy to maintain
the consistency of detente.
Critics of the Soviet establishment
offer another reason for the silen
ce.
Watergate-style excesses are routine
in
the Soviet Union, Roy Medvedev,
the
dissident historian wrote recently. The
system here, he argued, can hardly
vertise the consequences ofad"legitimate investigation of real abus a
es
of power."
At the outset, Watergate was regarded by the Kremlin as a min
or nuisance, an internal political disp
with no bearing on long-term poliute
cy.
When that belief exploded, the grow
ing controversy in the. United Stat was portrayed, on the rare occasiones
s
that it was mentioned at all,
as an effort by the opponents of dete
nte to
topple Nixon.
Then came the climax and som explanation had to be supplied. On ae television broadcast ,a few days after
resignation, Leonid Zamyatin, the the
director of Tass, the government new
agency, delivered himself of the views
that Nixon was forced out beca
use of
U.S. economic troubles, inter
ty rivalries in an election year and-par
the yellow journalism of the American
s.
His thoroughly misleading statepres
ment
remains the most detailed ever mad
e
here on the subject.
For those few instances in whi
Watergate comes up these days — ch
in a recent public lecture on inte as
tional affairs — the standard line,rnasides the points listed by Zamyatibenow includes references without expln,
nation to "a scandal." A careful read aer
of the Soviet press would have
noticed
a short item in the newspapers in September announcing Mr. Ford's pardon
of Nixon, the closest the Soviets have
come to indicating that the former
President himself had done som
ething
wrong.
Currently, Soviet journalists in the
know are telling their Am
erican
friends these days that Mr. Ford
Brezhnev got along famously at and
the
meeting near Vladivostok. "Brezhne
v
liked Ford's sincerity, openness and
informality," said one prominent editor.
None of that, of course, is bein communicated to the Soviet people, gwho
media steer Clear of the personal se
tails and judgments so importantdein
the Western press. Instead, the Soviets
have been told in long, fulsome repe
tiVe analyses of the "great contributition to the cause of peace" mad
e by
this latest_summit.
There has not been a word about the
role played by Mr. Ford or that-oth
erfellow he replaced, whose nam
e
doesn't even get mentioned anym
ore
in charting the history of detente.
From the Soviet standpoint one of
the advantages of this impersonal
approach is that it makes it easier to adjust to changes in foreign leadership.
Besides the resignation of Nixon, the
Kremlin this year has accommodat
the departure of Georges Pompidou ed
in
France and Willy Brandt in West Germany with no significant alter
of
the party line. So, the reasoningation
rently goes, as long as the poliappa
cy remains the same, what difference
should it make to the Soviet people
who runs the show in Paris, Bon
n or
even Washington?