Foot Race In Moscow

To the five U.S. correspondents in Moscow, the meeting last week of Russia's Supreme Soviet was a quiet story--until Chairman Volkov stepped forward and read Malenkov's resignation. Led by United Press Correspondent Kenneth Brodney. the newsmen bolted for the door, raced down four flights of stairs, and ran across three large Kremlin courtyards to their cars. While they scribbled notes, Russian chauffeurs sped them over the city's slush-covered streets to the Central Telegraph Office. Brodney got there first, put through a phone call to London and scored a clean 19-minute beat in the U.S. with the news.

To keep the copy moving, U.P. held open a Moscow-London telephone line for 7 1/2 hours (at $1.65 a minute). Between bulletins, staffers talked about the weather, sports, food and anything else they could think of. Other newsmen tied up the three other telephone lines to London for so long that foreign diplomats in Moscow could not phone reports home to their governments. In Washington, the State Department got the news from reporters more than two hours before U.S. Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen got his official report through.

A Hint. The New York Times, which had already printed its last edition, got the wire-service stories in time to put out 24,400 copies of a "Late City Extra" with a 450-word bulletin dropped into Page One. The Times Sunday Magazine hastily pulled a Seventh Fleet picture off its front cover, substituted one of Bulganin, Mao and Khrushchev. The Russian censors, swamped by the flood of words, let many a piece of copy slip through which ordinarily might have been spiked; e.g., A.P. reported: "Muscovites questioned at random appeared bored at the news. 'What difference does it make?' one asked. Another said: 'It's all the same thing.' "

Although most editors had an inkling of internal tensions in the Soviet high command (TIME, Feb. 7), only three newsmen were directly tipped off. Publisher William R. Hearst Jr., his aide, Frank Coniff. and his chief European correspondent, Kingsbury ("Joe") Smith, on a brief visit to Russia got a tip from Khrushchev himself. In an interview three days before the change, for no apparent reason, Khrushchev mysteriously suggested they interview Bulganin, and added that "probably early next week" would be a good time to see him. They made no mention of this in their dispatches, instead reported: "Khrushchev . . . ridicules the Western reports [of] a split between him and . . . Malenkov."

On Order. The change touched off such a rash of punditing and often conflicting views that Scripps-Howard Columnist Frederick C. Othman wrote: "One consolation about this Malenkov blowup in Moscow is the undisputed fact that I personally know as much about it as any of the alleged Russian experts."

In Russia, newspapers and radio stations did not carry the news until hours after it was printed in newspapers all over the West. When it did appear, Communist editors had no trouble finding out exactly how to play the story. Over the Moscow radio came detailed instructions from the Kremlin to every editor: "Tomorrow's papers should publish on their first page the picture of the joint meeting of the Supreme Soviet with Mr. Molotov on the rostrum . . . Next should follow the Khrushchev speech. Underneath, the appointment of Comrade Bulganin . . ."

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