Русские здесь: Фильм, помогающий Андропову

PBS’s “The Russians Are Here”: deliberate slander

Dear Editor:

After emigrating from the U.S.S.R. to this country five years ago and settling in New York, I have had more than one occasion to witness the high intellectual quality and profundity of New York’s Channel 13 programs. Yet the show “The Russians Are Here” on June 12 and 19 has left me perplexed and indignant.

The program has distorted the life image of an entire group. Tb begin with, we are not “Russians”: Soviet emigrants of the last decade are mainly ethnic Jews, and a more befitting Title would be “The Soviets Are Here.”

But the flaw of the show is not its title but the odd choice of the interviewees.

Not exactly. Certain people have built their careers on the development of class struggle. They were simply brought up on these ideas and find it hard to reject. Naturally, these kinds will try to do away with any witnesses who speak to the contrary.

This is why I don’t think the creators of the TV program were payed by the Soviet government, for example. But if I were in the shoes of that government, I would definitely reward them — for instance by giving them a chance to live for a couple of years in the same situation we were in before we came to America. They should live, not on the American dollars they made here, but on the rubles they earn there. And they should live, not by telling lies, but by honest labor—as honest as the face of that actress who moderated the show.

V. Livoff

New York

New York Tribune June 20, 1983

As a documentary writer (I have published 14 books about scientists in the U.S.S.R. and six in the West), I have been interviewing people for the past 36 years as the principal way¹ of collecting material for my books and articles. Within the past two years, I have interviewed about 250 recent immigrants from the U.S.S.R. for my new book on Soviet mores. My interlocdtors included men and women from 22 to 76 years of age, representatives of 18 professions — from writers and scholars to sailors and hairdressers.

Some were better, some worse off, some had attained peace of mind, some were still shaken emotionally, but of the 250 individuals I spoke with not one had failed completely to find his or her place in America, not one had become a parasite on the American community as a nostalgia-sodden bum despising the cultural and social achievements of the nation that has sheltered us.

Yet all the “Russians” in the Channel 13 show were precisely of that feather. We, the viewers, scarcely saw one positive story, one satisfied person. Such an effect could be achieved only in one way: The film-makers sought out for their interviews exclusively mentally unstable failures. All other categories of Soviet immigrants were unfit for their purposes.

One was ashamed to hear the “frank talk” of Russian-language writers discoursing on the screen about the futility of press freedom and the vital meaning of vodka for the Russian soul. This is not just a lie, it is deliberate slander.

As a member of PEN and vice-president of its section Writers in Exile, I am personally familiar with all Russian-language authors of any name and attest to the fact that 95 percent of them are happy to have found in America the freedom to write which they never had back home. I have recently returned from a congress of Russian-language writers in Milan, Italy. This meeting, titled “The Continent of Culture,” on May 21-22, was attended by 60 of my fellow-writers (including 15 U.S. residents), who all apoke about the joy of being free in a free world.

There is no nation and no community that would not include a certain number of individuals of the type so thoroughly selected by the creators of “The Russians Are Here.” Would it be fair to claim that murderers, arsonists and rapists from police reports provide a comprehensive image of the American character? Yet the conclusion about us suggested to the viewers by the Channel 13 film is no more fair. Even visually, the makers of the film tended to depict our ethnic group as a conglomerate of senile, ugly, immoral and generally repellent characters.

One wonders: Who stands to benefit from depicting the community of thousands of recent immigrants from the U.S.S.R. as a band of monstrous characters and ungrateful American parasites? And also: How did Channel 13 come to support the unseemly project so unmistakably reeking of politics?

If the leaders of Channel 13 have been misled or made an error in judgment, they could now easily correct the unfavorable public image conjured by their show by conducting an open discussion as to who indeed are those 270,000 Soviet refugees that have found haven in several countries, including the United States.

Mark Popovsky New York

New York Tribune

June 22, 1983