Amerikai Magyar Értesítő, 1983 (19. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-03-01 / 3. szám
1983- március Amerikai Magyar Értesítő 17.oldal How the press floundered in reporting on Andropov THE EVENING SUN Monday, February 21, 1983 When yuri Vladimirovich andropov was merely head of the KGB, his image was that of the stereotypic hard-line “police boss." His major accomplishment, according to C L. Sulzberger, writing in the New York Times in 1974, was “a fairly successful campaign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidenee." Nor was he viewed as much of an admirer of foreign _ culture. In 1980, Harrison E. Salisbury wrote in the Times that Andro- Edward Jay Pov “has been working for three years on schemes to minimize the EoStein mingling of foreigners and na” tives . . . Now Andropov’s hands _______________have been freed to embark on all kinds of repressive measures de signed to enhance the purity’ of Soviet society.” Completing this picture of a tough, xenophobic, wavethrottling cop, Andropov was physically described, in another Times story, as a “shock-haired, burly man.” Andropov’s accession to power last November was accompanied by a corresponding ennoblement of his image. Suddenly he became, in the Wall Street Journal, “silver- haired and dapper.” His stature, previously reported in the Washington Post as an unimpressive “5 feet, 8 inches,” was abruptly elevated to “tall and urbane.” The Times noted that Andropov “stood conspicuously taller than most” Soviet leaders His linguistic abilities also came in for scrutiny. Harrison Salisbury wrote, “The first thing to know about Mr. Andropov is that he speaks and reads English.” Another Times story took note of his “fluent English.” Newsweek reported that even though he had never met a “senior” American official, “he spoke English and relaxed with American novels.” Confirmation of his command of English appeared in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post. Time described him as reportedly “a witty conversationalist,” and “a bibliophile” and “connoisseur of modern art” to boot. The Washington Post passed along a rumor that he was partly Jewish. (Andropov was rapidly becoming that Cosmopolitan Man.) According to an article in the Post, Andropov “is fond of cynical political jokes with an anti-regime twist . . . collects abstract art, likes jazz and gypsy music,” and “has a record of stepping out of his high party official’s cocoon to contact dissidents.” Also, he swims, “plays tennis” and wears clothes that are “sharply tailored in a West European style.” The Wall Street Journal added that Andropov “likes Glenn Miller records, good scotch whisky Oriental rugs, and American books.” To the list of his musical favorites, Time added “Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Bob Eberly,” The press was less successful in ferreting out more mundane details of his life. Where, for example, was he born'’ The Washington Post initially reported that he was “a native of Karelia,” a Soviet province on the Finnish border. The New York Times gave his birthplace as the "southern Ukraine,” which is hundreds of miles to the south. And Time said he had been born in “the village of The common conceit of newsmen yielded a 'media Andropov' Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus.” His birthplace was thus narrowed down to an area stretching from Finland to Iran. There was also some vagueness about his education. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had “graduated” from an unnamed “technical college,” but U.S. News & World Report had him “drop out” of Petrozavodsk University, while Newsweek awarded him a diploma from the Rybinsk Water Transportation Technicum. Where had he learned music, art, poetry, Hungarian, German and English? Harrison Salisbury suggested that he picked up English as a “young man," but the Christian Science Monitor contended that he learned it from a tutor, whom he saw three times a week when he was well into his 40s. Time reported him to be a widower. There is no mention, however, of whom or when he married, or whether his wife had shared his interest in jazz, American novels, scotch, telling anti-regime jdkes, dancing Viennese waltzes and visiting liberal dissidents. The press does, however, furnish a vivid description of his home life at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt — where, according to Hedrick Smith’s book, “The Russians,” Brezhnev himself resided The scene there seems to have been quite lively, a combination of salon and recital hall. According to the Washington Post, Yuri Andropov is "a perfect host.” On some occasions, he would invite “leading dissidents to his home for well-lubricated discussions that sometimes extended to the wee hours of the morning,” after which he would send his guests home in his own chauffeured car. Alternatively, according to Har rison Salisbury in the Times, he invites foreign visitors to his country home. Salisbury writes, “A casual visitor to his country house . . . found him listening to an English- language Voice of America broadcast ... It was a longstanding habit.” Andropov’s library, according to an earlier Times story, also included “Valley of the Dolls,” by Jacqueline Susann and “How Green Was My Valley,” by Richard Llewellyn. Time described his apartment, with the precision of a classified ad, as “five-and-a-half rooms,” with such “outstanding features” as “a stereo system” (for jazz), a “sofa” (for dissidents) and “a cabinet of highly polished wood" (for eyes only). These items, wrote Time, were “gifts to Andropov from the late Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.” The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, reported just as authoritatively that Andropov’s home “was furnished with Hungarian furniture, the gift of Janos Kadar, Hungary's Moscow-backed leader...” The varied descriptions of Andropov’s apartment and his Renaissance style of life come principally from a sin? ;le source. His name is Vladimir Sakharov, and he is ully credited by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time and others for the descriptions of Andropov’s taste in American jazz and novels, his preference for imported liquor and furniture, and his "strange attraction for Western culture.” (Sakharov, who is usually described as a “KGB defector,” is not related to Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and human-rights activist.) There is, however, some question about the provenance of Vladimir Sakharov as a source. For example, the Wall Street Journal not only identified him as a “for mer KGB agent,” but also said he had defected "this year” (1982) and stipulated that Andropov was “his for mer boss.” In fact, Sakharov did not defect in 1982: He defected 11 years earlier, on July 11, 1971. Sakharov was never actually in the KGB, though he does recount two efforts to recruit him; at the time of his defection, he was a 26- year-old diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. And in his own two lengthy accounts of his experiences, he never claimed to know Yuri Andropov. The first such account appeared in John Barron’s “KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents,” published by the Reader's Digest Press in 1974. Sakharov had been put in touch with Barron on Feb. 1, 1972. Barron writes that in 1964, when Sakharov was 19 years old and a schoolmate of Andropov’s son Igor, he attended a "sexual orgy” at the Andropov apartment, where he “wound up sleeping with a girl in the bed of the man who now heads the KGB.” It is from this single visit that the descriptions of An
