DE MICHIGAN JUL 19 1960 MAIN BEWARE! TOURISTS REPORTING ON RUSSIA AN ANALYSIS OF TOURIST TESTIMONY PREPARED FOR THE SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT AND OTHER INTERNAL SECURITY LAWS OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE EIGHTY-SIXTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION 48574 FEBRUARY 5, 1960 Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON: 1960 COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY JAMES O. EASTLAND, Mississippi, Chairman ESTES KEFAUVER, Tennessee ALEXANDER WILEY, Wisconsin EVERETT MCKINLEY DIRKSEN, Illinois ROMAN L. HRUSKA, Nebraska KENNETH B. KEATING, New York NORRIS COTTON, New Hampshire SAM J. ERVIN, JR., North Carolina JOHN A. CARROLL, Colorado PHILIP A. HART, Michigan SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT AND OTHER INTERNAL SECURITY LAWS JAMES O. EASTLAND, Mississippi, Chairman OLIN D. JOHNSTON, South Carolina JOHN L. MCCLELLAN, Arkansas SAM J. ERVIN, JR., North Carolina ROMAN L. HRUSKA, Nebraska EVERETT MCKINLEY DIRKSEN, Illinois KENNETH B. KEATING, New York J. G. SOURWINE, Counsel DOC. EX. PROJECT INTRODUCTION In its concern with the backlash of the Soviet-American cultural exchange program, which appears to have loosed a flood of Soviet propaganda upon the United States, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee solicited and presents herewith the views of a distinguished and experienced observer and writer, Eugene Lyons. Mr. Lyons has been studying and writing about Russia and world communism for more than 30 years. He began his journalistic career in 1920 as a reporter on U.S. newspapers, was correspondent in Russia for the United Press 1928-34, served as editor of the American Mercury and of Pageant, and is presently a senior editor of the Reader's Digest and a contributor to other leading magazines. He is author of a number of books, including "Moscow Carrousel"; "Assignment in Utopia"; "Stalin, Czar of All the Russias"; "The Red Decade"; and "Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia." He served, in 1951-52, as president of the American Committee for Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. A short article drawn from this material was published in the October 1959 issue of the Reader's Digest, under the title: "One Trip to Russia Doesn't Make an Expert." BEWARE! TOURISTS REPORTING ON RUSSIA (By Eugene Lyons) OPERATION CONFUSION At Idlewild Airport, back in 1954, about 30 reporters, cameramen, radio and television people crowded around a group of American college students just returned from a distant and presumably spinetingling journey. The brave travelers were questioned jointly and singly; some were signed up forthwith to write their adventures for newspaper syndication. In the next weeks many of them were further interviewed in the press and on the air. I was, myself, conscripted to help interview two of the vikings for a New York radio station. What remote and esoteric places had these youngsters explored to rate such attention? Deepest Tibet perhaps, or the Amazonian wilds? Nothing of the kind. The boys and one girl, editors of college papers, had simply spent 3 weeks, portal to portal, in a tame, guided tour of Soviet Russia. In the 37th year of the Kremlin dictatorship, a routine trip to its domain by immature students was still big news. In the nature of the case, the young people could report only general and superficial impressions. If you take the trouble to read their reports today, you will find them naive and, in the perspective of time, quite irrelevant to the Soviet reality. The two boys with whom I talked, for instance, assured me that the Russian college men with whom they conferred were honestly unaware of the existence of concentration camps in their country. This college-editor contingent was in the first wave of tourism to Russia after the death of Stalin. Since then it has become a raging flood. But still, now in the 42d year of the Communist regime, the returning pilgrims, especially if well known, are treated as if they had discovered some sunken Atlantis. This aura of wonder around tourists returning from Soviet Russia derives from the stubborn myth that the country, no matter how often explored and documented, remains "unknown," and therefore that the most recent the explorer the more important his report. Businessmen, legislators, clergymen, lady globetrotters, schoolboys-people whose views on other countries briefly visited would hardly rate a paragraph-therefore net acres of print and days of airwave time from brief sojourns in the land of Soviets. Actually, few historical phenomena have been so extensively and, on the whole, reliably described, analyzed, and annotated as the Soviet system. The libraries bulge with books on the U.S.S.R. by intelligent fugitives from its blessings, by long-time foreign correspondents and diplomats, by serious scholars. A number of great universities have splendid departments devoted to Soviet studies. Besides, the Krem |