SOVIET SPOKESMAN ON AMERICAN TV

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706630013-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 7, 2011
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: December 30, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706630013-9
ARTICLE NEW YORK TIMES U 14 Ul ON PAGEASJ ~PPE~Rj) 30 December 1985
Soviet Spokesman on American TWIT
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
Sgdal to me Ppw Yak rl
MOSCOW, Dec. 29 - Sines Vladi-
mir Poenar first appeared on Amer-
ican television in 1978 speaking flaw-
less English with a Brooklyn accent,
he has become one of the most visible
ro Union ever pis
in front of it miSoviet
rophon96
in doyens of appearances on ABC's
"Nightllne" and other Ameeic= pro.
grams. Mr. Posner has, by satsllife~
tton Moscow, defended t6a Soviet
positlaam everything fromhe shoot-
ing dawn of Korean Air Lines flight
007 In 1963 to Moscow's current objec-
tions to President Reagan's develop-
ment of a space-based misdie de-
fense.
Because of his idiomatic American
English, stylish appsrosne and
friendly demeanor, Mr.aPr has
played a key role in making Soviet
propaganda more polished and per-
suasive, Western diplomats said.
"He sounds exactly like an Amer-
ican," one diplomat said.
He added, "Posner fits perfectly
into Gorbachev's effort to project a
more appealing, modern image for
the Soviet Union." Mikhail S. Gorba-
chev is the Soviet leader.
In the process, Mr. Posner has
fueled a growing debate about how
often, and under what circumstances,
Soviet officials or spokesmen should
appear on American television,
particularly in the absence of recipr .
cal exposure for American represent-
atives on Soviet television.
Program With Donahue
Today, in his longest single appear-
ance, Mr. Posner was co-host of a pro-
gram with Phil Donahue called "A
Citizens' Summit," that brought 175
Russians in a Leningrad studio and
175 Americans in a Seattle studio to-
gether by satellite for a two-and-
a-half-hour discussion about their
countries and themselves.
The show, which will be broadcast
in a one-hour taped version in New
York on Saturday on WNBC, is ex-
pected to be broadcast on 79 stations
around the United States and also in
the Soviet Union, according to Ed-
ward Wierzbowski, one of the Amer-
ican producers.
He said the program was produced
by the King Broadcasting Company
in Seattle, a Massachusetts product
tion company called the Documen-
tary Guild and the Soviet State Com-
mittee for Television and Radio. Mr.
Donahue's company, Multimedia En-
tertainment, is distributing the pro-
gram-
Posner spent his adolesence in
the United States, living in Manhat-
tan for nine years when his father
worked as an executive for M-G-M.
How a family of Russian Jews who
converted to the Russian Orthodox
Church but were fervently pro-Com-
munist ended up living like wealthy
capitalists in a duplex apartment at
24 East 10th Street is a story Mr. Pos-
ner likes to relate.
Relaxing in his comfortably fur-
nished Moscow apartment on Chisty
Prospekt last week, he described the
odyssey between puffs on a Cuban
cigar, one of the benefits, he noted, of
living in the Soviet Union.
The bookcase in his study was filled
with English works, including "The
Final Days" by Bob Woodward and
Cart Bernstein, "World of Our Fa-
theta" by Irving Howe and "War and
Remembrance" by Herman Wouk. A
small American flag hung from a
desk lamp with a button stuck in It
that denounced censorship.
Mr. Posner said his father, Vladi-
mir Alexandrovich. was born in St.
Petersburg, now Leningrad, in a Jew-
ish family that had adopted the Rus-
sian Orthodox faith.
"My father, as a boy, was caught
up in the revolutionary fervor in
1917," Mr. Posner said, "and always
had great memories of those times."
The family, however, moved to
Berlin and Paris in the 1920's. In 1929
his father, by then a young man,
started work at M-G-M and married a
French woman. Mr. Posner, whose
full name is Vladimir Vladimirovich,
was born in Paris on April 1, 1934.
'Practically All-American' at 15
In 1940, considered more Jewish
than Russian, the family slipped out
of Nazi-occupied Paris with false
passports and sailed for New York
via Marseilles and Lisbon, Mr. Poo
ner said.
By the time the family left the
United States nine years later, he
said, "I was 15 and practically an all-
American boy."
During the years in New York, Mr.
Posner learned English, picked up his
Brooklyn accent - "I don't know
how" he said - and attended the City
and Country School and Peter Stuyve-
sant High School.
"I was a rich kid from New York
with my own bedroom, a playroom,
and my family had a cook, two maids
and a summer house on Long Is-
land," he said.
But influenced by his father, who
dreamed of returning to Russia to
join in the development of Commu-
nism despite his sizable income from
M-G-M, Mr. Posner said he admired
the Soviet Union and never felt com-
pletely at home in New York. .
"Dad had a big map of the Soviet
Union on the wall," Mr. Posner said,
and during the war he outlined Ger-
man advances in black and the Soviet
counterstrikes in red, "predicting
from the start that the Nazis would
never conquer Moscow or Lenin-
grad."
Settled in Moscow In '52
In 1949, after Mr. Posner's father
was fired by M-G-M and blacklisted
because of his pro-Soviet views, ac-
cording to Mr. Posner, the family
moved to the Soviet-occupied zone in
Berlin and in 1962 settled in Moscow.
He became a Soviet citizen that year. .
After studying biology at Moscow
State University, improving his Rus-
sian, his third language after French
and English, and working as a trans-
lator, Mr. Posner became an editor
and writer in 1961. His broadcasting
career began in 1970 as a commenta-
tor for the North American service of
Radio Moscow, a job he still holds.
"Vladimir Posner's Daily Talk," a
five-minute radio commentary in
English, is beamed daily by short
wave to North America.
Although Mr. Posner described
himself as "a product of two cul-
tures" and said "I miss the New York
Yankees, franks, ice cream sundaes
and American folk music," he is not a
man of divided political loyalties.
In an interview published on Dec.
15 in Komsomolskaya Pravda. he
said, "I do care about America and
there are things about her that are
dear to me, a talented literature and
music, a remarkable people."
But, he went on in the newspaper,
"she also has an amazing ability not
to notice suffering."
"A society should be judged not by
how it treats its most p
members but by how it cares for the
weakest and most defenseless," he
said, "and in this respect the United
States cannot stand up to criticism."
Sitting in his study last week. Mr.
Posner, who has a Russian wife and
two grown children, said he tries to.
"act as a bridge" between the United
States and Soviet Union.
"To me the tense relationship be-
tween the two countries is painful,"
he said.
Mr. Posner added, "I have never
been asked to say something I didn't
believe, but I don't expect viewers in
the United States to accept the Soviet
position."
He said, "I just want them to under-
stand there is a rationale for the
views of this Government."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/07: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706630013-9