Ratifying Soviet Censorship

...It soon becomes apparent, if it was not already, that the workaday existence of the Western press corps in the USSR amounts to a frustrating battle against Kremlin stonewalling...

...Yet these publicly known Soviet efforts to shape Western news reports here are relatively minor compared to the continuous pressure of more subtle devices...

...It was thus deemed noteworthy when the Soviets seemed to be bending a bit at Geneva earlier this month...

...One of its more dramatic manifestations, it will surely be recalled, came during the 1974 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, when American television reports on dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov were blacked out in a blatant demonstration of the Soviet willingness to censor...

...numerous issues of Playboy...

...Similarly, a U.S...

...As I noted at the outset, however, there is no cause for euphoria...

...These are tip-of-the-iceberg instances of the Soviet attitude toward innocent no less than deliberate infiltration of Western information...

...Sporadic surveillance by the KGB remains routine...

...For although the Soviets lost their fight at Geneva to require foreign correspondents to submit to a "responsible journalism" test, they long ago won a prologue to "basket three" that applies a national sovereignty yardstick to East-West information and cultural exchanges...

...Soviet militia still guard apartment complexes housing Western correspondents (and diplomats), discouraging visits by Soviet citizens...

...But custom or tradition alone may be considered adequate justification for continued scrutiny of the Western press corps...

...They are an indication of the frigidity that may be expected even though the European Security Conference in Geneva has put the finishing touches on "basket three"- the category of agreements that pledges the United States, Canada and 33 European nations, one of them being the Soviet Union, to broaden cultural contacts...

...Typically, when American reporters were invited to the opening of the recent talks between Foreign Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev and Treasury Secretary William Simon at a Moscow government villa, Patolichev gruffly waved U.S...

...Most foreigners breeze through this ideological screening, but some don't...

...Far more revealing, the nasa public relations team negotiating coverage of the month's joint So-viet-U.S...

...In an attempt to sever the channels between the Western press and the Moscow dissidents, the Soviets last year pressured Italian and American news media to withdraw all of their particularly well-connected correspondents...

...Among other things, they appeared ready to ease visa requirements, "increase the opportunities" for access to news sources, and accept the notion that journalists should not be subject to expulsion for the "legitimate pursuit of their professional activity...

...The evidence suggests that the Kremlin anticipated at the start of the conference two years ago that it would have to trade off some concessions on the "free flow of information, people and ideas" for a concluding Helsinki summit formally recognizing Europe's existing frontiers-or, as one senior Western diplomat in Geneva put it, to bring about the day when all the Soviets' "World War II conquests are blessed...

...Still, the Soviets held fast to the end at Geneva on working conditions for foreign journalists...

...Just as for no apparent reason except that, as the Soviets explain it, the "ideological struggle intensifies in an era of detente," tourists at Sheremetovo Airport are being searched for pornography, political and otherwise...

...a French correspondent's copy of Michel Tatu's Power in the Kremlin...

...a U.S...

...Mark Hopkins, a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...

...Add to such circumstances the official permission necessary for Western journalists to travel outside Moscow, the re-entry visa required each time they leave the country, the reliance-in the case of television reporters-on problematical Soviet film crews, and the knowledge that the KGB and the foreign ministry maintain dossiers on their personal and professional lives...

...The concessions are not quite as liberalizing as one might think...

...Resident American reporters complained to no avail that while they were restricted to a press room at Moscow's Intourist Hotel, their Soviet counterparts were free to cover Cape Canaveral and Houston's space center...

...But even the pursuit of routine duties by journalists sets officials here bristling with unease, particularly if the correspondents involved are from Western Europe, the United States or Japan...

...The Western press corps in Moscow, including approximately 25 Americans, has long been a major conduit for general dissident and Jewish activist grievances that ultimately make their way to a mass Soviet audience via radio (BBC, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty) and thus manage to circumvent Glavlit, the Soviet censorship agency...

...Only when it became clear that Party General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev's personal objective of a Helsinki summit might not be realized, were Soviet diplomats instructed to soften their stand on such lingering, sensitive "basket three" topics...

...The result of all of this is that, in real terms, Moscow conceded very little during the negotiations on "basket three" that were concluded July 4. Neutral participants, admitting the vagueness of many of the resolutions making up the overall agreement, point to its moral force as its chief strength...

...In effect, this means that Soviet law, custom and tradition can be invoked to prevent what are considered to be ideologically objectionable activities...

...AS THE HELSINKI SUMMIT APPROACHES Ratifying Soviet Censorship BY MARK HOPKINS In the 20 yards between the baggage claim and customs counters at Moscow's Sheremetovo International Airport, new arrivals walk past a fluorescent sign that tells them in Russian and English they cannot bring military arms or opium into the Soviet Union...

...Not long ago, one American correspondent found himself in a Siberian KGB headquarters, innocently lead there by a vigilant Soviet citizen who saw him photographing the ever-present loghouses...

...newsmen out of the room as soon as the handshakes had been filmed...

...reporter's issue of the West German magazine Der Spiegel containing memoirs of the late Dubcek-era Czechoslovak political leader, Josef Smrkovsky...

...and an American traveler's paperback edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago...

...space mission was told flatly that American correspondents would not be allowed either at Soviet mission control near Moscow or at the Central Asian launch site...

...Almost simultaneously, in fact, it began erecting defenses against the more spontaneous, unregulated East-West contacts...

...In recent months, customs officers rummaging through baggage have confiscated The Joy of Sex...

...newsmagazine reporter known for his expertise in Russian affairs was denied entry into the USSR last fall, even though he was traveling with Henry Kissinger's press party...

...The Soviet media were enjoined to respond rapidly and directly to the free Western press...

...Bugging is so common in Moscow that it is natural to carry on sensitive conversations against the background of record players at high volume...

...Which brings to mind, of course, the Soviet law that provides a penalty of seven years in a labor camp and five in exile (within the USSR) for antistate propaganda...

...Next, the Soviets joined the Universal Copyright Convention, and it soon became apparent that the move was part of a scheme to put literary exchange within a controlled, governmental framework...

...Finally, pursuing a theme already introduced at the United Nations dealing with the sovereignty of air space and television broadcasts, they argued persistently at Geneva that every nation had a right to sift and select any material crossing its boundaries...

...It also warns against the import of "printed and other pornographic material," and of publications, films, records or drawings "economically or politically directed against the USSR...

...A series of coordinating meetings were staged, for example, among Communist bloc officials concerned with mass political education...

...Foreign correspondents are also commentators on a society that shares a good many of the industrialized world's flaws- certainly many more than Soviet officialdom wants exposed...

...Soviet dissidents know this law well, since they are regularly imprisoned under it...

...This arrangement reflects the overall pattern of Soviet news management...