Soviet press quotes U.S. sources on politics

the Soviet Zone, form a second category of German refugees. In the third group are those who, for one reason or another, were permitted by the Soviet Zone authorities to join their families in the Federal Republic of Germany.

(5) another pletely clear;

Seventy-five per cent of the 19,705 who succeeded in fleeing, defying the death strip and the wall, are young people under 25 years of age. Of these, 1,633 were serving in the “People’s Police” or the “National People’s Army” at the time of their flight West.

Beyond this fortified and guarded eral Republic of Germany.

During the same to have been killed munist regime. Of elsewhere along the

three-year period, 105 are known in their attempts to flee the Comthese, 53 were killed in Berlin, 52 Iron Curtain.

Most of the flights thus far have been from the Fast Zone rather than from the Eastern Sector of Berlin. Flights from East to West Berlin are still possible because the Communist government of the GDR has not yet completed work on border obstruction within the city limits of Germany’s historic capital. While the Communist authorities, for various reasons, will most likely fail to install as wide a prohibited zone within the city as they have between the Eastern and Western borders of Germany outside of Berlin, their apparent objective seems to be to achieve some variant of the 5-kilometer-wide prohibited zone that runs along the i,381-kilometer (858-mile) boundary between Fast and West Germany. All GDR citizens are banned from this prohibited border zone, except those who have always lived there, and these are confined to the easternmost belt of this zone. They are not allowed to move from the belt of the zone in which they live to another of the belts into which the prohibited zone is divided, without a special permit. Control and strength of fortifications increase progressively over the six belts into which the prohibited border zone is divided, the closer these belts approach the arbitrary border between East and West Germany. The six belts of the prohibited zone are: (I) the 5oo-meter-wide (I yard = .g14 meter) protective strip, up to 4.3 kilometers inside the prohibited zone, where only low-growing crops are permitted, so that the guards may have an unobstructed view of all movements; in this belt a g p.m. curfew is in force, and farmers who work the land there, do so only after receiving written permission from the frontier guards;

25-meter-wide

observation

strip,

com-

(6) the lo-meter-wide death strip, plowed and harrowed to reveal footprints, heavily fortified with extremely wide, high and thickly entangled barbed wire. border is the Fed-

Pravda Condemns Extremism Commentator Vladimir Bol’shakov concludes his “international feuilleton” entitled “Keeping up with the Joneses” (Pravda, August 13, 1964, p. 4), in which he satirizes the “rightist trend” of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, with the observation: “Extremism in politics is a dangerous thing.”

Soviet Press Quotes U.S. Sources on Politics A standard Communist method for impressing the Soviet reader with the credibility of its propaganda line is to resort to the method of “quotology’‘-the selective citation of quotations of opinions by unimpeachable authorities from the non-Communist side of the ideological barricades. To gain credibility for whatever they are saying about the United States and its foreign policy, Soviet mass media cite appropriate selections from authoritative American sources, either as direct quotations or in paraphrase. During the months of July and August the two main Soviet daily newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiia, quoted such authoritative journalistic media as New York’s Time and Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, Look and the Saturday Evening Post no less than 30 times. Even the tongue-in-cheek spoofing of an &-t Buchwald was usually presented with the studied solemnity of a court transcript, and the observations of such a cohunnist as Walter Lippman were cited as if they were the final judgement of a supreme tribunal. Also quoted were such favorite “friendly Americans” as Senators Morse and Fulbright and, of course, that greatest living sage of the “rapidly disintegrating” and “imperialist” West, Lord Bertrand Russell.

(3) the 6-meter control strip, secured by the first barbed-wire fence, where only the guards and their dogs are allowed and where the watch-towers, equipped with machine-guns, searchlights and flares, are located;

Most of the articles used by the Soviet press were condensations of the originals, selectively used, with appropriate comments from the Communist view point. For instance, Zzvestiia, July 12, in reproducing the article “Big Brother Is Listening” from The Saturday Evening Post, pointed out in the introduction that “the reader can once again see for himself the true character of the ‘democratic freedoms’ behind the bourgeois iron curtain . . .” Zzvestiia gave that article 45 columninches, an impressive amount of space in a six-page newspaper. Twelve days later Zzvestiia carried a condensed translation of a fragment from Wise and Ross’s “The Invisible Government,” lifted from Look. This occupied 62*/2 column-inches, or more than IO percent of total space available in that issue of the Soviet official government organ.

(4) the 25-meter barbed-wire barrier;

57i/e

(2) the igo-meter security strip forms the adjacent belt, which has been denuded of all trees and houses and all other impediments to unobstructed observation; farmers work in this belt only under constant guard;

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minefield

strip,

with

a thicker

The CPSU daily organ, Pravda, August 15, published column-inches of an article in The Progressive by COMMUWSTAFFAIRS

Senator Wayne Morse (Dem., Oregon) attacking American policy in Vietnam. Both Pravda and Izvestiia, August 18, published that part of a Senate speech by Senator J. William Fulbright (Dem., Arkansas) which, the Soviet editor explained, “is devoted to criticism of Goldwater’s foreign policy aims,” giving it as much space as Pravda gave to Senator Morse’s critique of administration policy. “Naturally,” the Zzvestiia editor observed, “Fulbright’s speech carries the imprint of the electoral interests of the U.S.A. Democratic Party and its foreign policy views, which are not always in accord with the true picture of the contemporary world.” During July and August Senators Morse and Fulbright shared with Walter Lippman the Soviet accolade of being repeatedly called the “voices of reason” in American foreign policy. A C. L. Sulzberger New York Times column, “Should the Old Label Be Changed?” was headlined by Zzvestiia, July g, “Is the Trouble in the Packaging?” It was interspersed with comments from the editor “clarifying” the translation: Translation of N.Y. Times Text: A U.S.I.S. survey report stated with regret that the more our propaganda advertises the virtues of capitalism and attaclcs socialism, the less we are liked by the whole world . . . The confusing semantics lead to the deterioration of relations with society. . . .

Izvestiia’s “clarification”: The trouble of course is not in the confusing shades of meaning! Capitalism is a dying system. Socialism is an upcoming system, which is becoming more firmlv established. and the future belongs to it. What is so confusing about this?

In summarizing the article, the Izvestiia editor concludes: “Sulzberger and those like him are unable to take their medicine. He seeks those at fault in the sparse undergrowth rather than in the dense woods of capitalism. He complains that . . . ‘no advertising firm would insist on advertising a good product in a demonstratively repulsive manner.’ But the point is, Mr. Sulzberger, that the product itself is rotten and no advertising can possibly help it!” In covering the presidential elections, the Soviet press once again tries to use the public pronouncements of well-known Americans against Senator Barry Goldwater. Thus, in addition to Senator J. William Fulbright’s speech mentioned earlier, Pravda featured two articles by Drew Pearson which described the San Francisco Republican convention. In one of these, taken from the Washington Post, Pravda, July 20, quoted Pearson, as follows: “The roaring, stamping crowd, shouting ‘We want Barry!’ drowned out the scion of the Rockefeller family in San Francisco. This crowd reminds one too much of the Nazi meetings in Munich, where cries of ‘Heil Hitler!’ resounded.” Zzvestiia, July I, carried a “feuilleton” by Art Buchwald on Goldwater and his radical anti-Communism, and its August I issue described a Fulbright interview on NBC, in which Fulbright castigated Goldwater’s urging of total victory in the “cold war.” Reporting American policy in Southeast Asia, four articles in addition to Senator Morse’s were cited in Pravda, August 15. A quotation from Walter Lippman’s column in the New York Herald Tribune which appeared in Zzvestiia, August 12, perhaps best summarII

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JULY-AUGTJST,~~~~

‘izes the trend of the other articles-“the involvement of American armed forces in a large land war in Southeast Asia would have catastrophic results for the United States.” During this two-month period there was not as much material as on previous occasions concerning the civil rights issue, poverty and injustice in America, quoted directly from U.S. mass media either by Pravda or Zzvestiia. Strange as it may seem, the two longest articles on civil rights appeared in Literaturnaia Gazeta (The Literary Gazette), chief Soviet newspaper dealing with literary matters. One of these articles, in its July 25 issue, paraphrased passages from both the New York Times and Herald-Tribune. The other was a story by Roger Kahn in the Saturday Evening Post, June 13, “A Harlem Sketchbook: White Man, Walk Easy.” Literaturnaia Gazeta, August 27, titled it “Harlem-Reportage From The ‘Black Ghetto’.” Both occupied about IO percent of space in that day’s newspaper. Pravda, July I I, on the other hand, seemed to be content with one article on the Canadian Negro, “Between A Slaughter House And The City Dump” by Raymond Daniel of the New York Times, while Izvestiia, July 31, reported on the poverty and unemployment problems of the American Indian from an article by Stan Steiner, “Reservations of Poverty,” taken from the New York Nation. One of the latest items to catch Soviet attention as a possible propaganda weapon was the American novel Seven Days in May by F. Knebel and C. Bailey. The Soviet Ministry of Defense took pains not only to translate it into Russian, but also to publish it on a mass scale. Several installments have already appeared in Izvestiia, beginning on August 29.

Communist Trade Union Policies in Africa While the recent conference of the All-African Trade Union Federation (AATUF) at Bamako in Mali (June I o-14) undoubtedly strengthened that organization, it also dealt a further blow to the concept of a genuinely Pan-African trade union body along genuinely tradeunionist lines. As AATUF’s politically ambiguous character and aims became clearer, the suggested merger with the African Trade Union Confederation (ATUC) became less feasible (see: Communist Affairs, I, 6/5-6). An article in the Basler Nachrichten of June 24 stated that the Communist-front WFTU (World Federation of Trade Unions) observers at the conference were very active behind the scenes, as WFTU was not indifferent to how the conference would end. This conference had been convened by the AATUF for the purpose of founding a Pan-African Trade Union Federation. In the past, efforts to unite the two rival African trade union organizations (AATUF and ATUC) had failed because the AATUF, founded in 1961 in Casablanca and closely connected through its leadership with the WFTU, in consonance with the latter’s tactic to neutralize the non-Communist ICFTUs influence in Africa, insisted that member organizations of the planned Pan-African Trade Union Federation

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