Home
Away
Far Away

 

Vladimir Pozner in Moscow (1982-87)

On network news and feature programs ranging from Nightline to Phil Donahue's "A Citizens' Summit" to a response to a President Reagan address, American television has from time to time presented Vladimir Pozner, "a Soviet journalist" who appears from Moscow live via satellite, looks straight into the camera and then answers all questions from America without pause. He speaks absolutely flawless American English in complicated sentences. He uses such Americanisms as "the military brass," "a kind of political football," "on the sidelines," "jumping the gun," or "I hope to God war doesn't happen," and he says "yeah" and "yep" among other sounds characteristic of American mediamen.

Since American intermediaries customarily provide no biographical information other than Pozner's recent position as "Deputy Director of the State Committee for Radio and Television," viewers naturally wonder who he is, and how he learned to speak English--no, American--so well? Indeed, he talks like a New Yorker, not in the sound of his voice, but in his penchant for running his sentences together with "and" or "but" with scarcely a pause between them; so initially I imagined him either a child of a former Soviet diplomat here or, perhaps, a defector--a Lee Harvey Oswald, who never returned.

However, friends recently emigrated from Russia assured me that no defector would be allowed to talk live to America; he might say something that would embarrass the Soviet government. Pozner was, they suggested, a native Russian who had been thoroughly trained by the KGB to pass as an American, much as super-spies are trained. Another friend speculated that Pozner is a superior Soviet actor who has labored to appear like a U.S. newscaster largely by imitating videotapes gathered for him in New York City. Whenever Pozner appears, everyone stops to listen and look in awe, in part wondering where this guy came from?

With all these images in mind, I got an American magazine, for which I had written in the past, to commission me to profile Pozner several years ago, as I planned to be in Moscow for something else. When I got there, I telephoned him. A voice first said "Dah," but as I spoke his name with an American accent, he replied, "Hello." Once I asked to interview him, he promised to pick me up in front of my hotel and, when he arrived, greeted me, American-style, by my first name. Out stepped a man 5'11" tall, slender, with thinning hair, broad nostrils, graying sideburns and a face that resembles Richard Burton's. He wore an open-necked sports shirt revealing a golden horseshoe on a thin golden chain; and of course, he spoke familiar, pure American. Affixed to the dashboard of his four-door Lada, a Soviet car, was a metal U.S. flag. I asked directly, "Who are you?"

He told me that he was born in Paris, April 1, 1934, the son of a stateless Russian-Jewish father and a French mother who were then unmarried. Pozner's grandfather was an engineer who left Russia soon after the 1917 Revolution, settling first in the refugee colony in Berlin. In tow was his son, Pozner's father, also named Vladimir Pozner, who had been born in St. Petersburg in 1908. When the grandparents separated, the Pozner grandmother took her children to Paris, where young Vladimir worked in the film industry, initially as a sound engineer. He met a young Frenchwomen, Geraldine Lutton, also working in the film industry, and fathered her son whom they called Vladimir Gerald after themselves. Later that year, in 1934, the mother took the boy to New York, where she worked in the film industry. In 1939, the senior Vladimir Pozner, deciding he wanted to marry the mother of his child, came to New York City to fetch them both.

"I first met my father when I was five," Pozner told me, as we were driving to his house, "and I remember him distinctly. It was the summer of 1939. I was living with friends in the country. My mother used to come on Saturday and Sunday. One Saturday I was upstairs in a vile temper because I had a little boat with a string on it, and I could not get it untied, and so I was mad at the boat and mad at the string and mad at the world. My mother said there was a man downstairs who was very good at untying knots. And so I traipsed downstairs and there was this man. And I kind of said, you know, what about this knot? And he said, yes, I think I can do it. And you know, it's strange; I remember his hands. I remember that he had a kind of wart on his fourth right-hand finger. And he untied the knot, and I was very glad about that. And my mother said, 'That's your father,' and I can recall looking at him, appraising him, sizing him up and saying, 'Oh, I see.'"

By now we have arrived in Pozner's six-room apartment in a renovated building off the street, behind a courtyard, in an old part of Moscow. As a party of friends was winding down in the kitchen, we went into Pozner's study, perhaps eight feet by sixteen, with its library of current American literature (securely locked in a glass case) and a desk graced with fresh flowers and a Smith-Carona portable typewriter with an American keyboard. As we settled into chairs before a window open to the noise of the summer courtyard, Pozner told me that his father took his wife and son back to France. When World War II began, he enlisted in the French airforce; but once France capitulated, his family went first to Marseilles in Vichy France. "They decided to leave France via Spain and Portugal for the United States. His elder sister married an American around 1926 and went to live in New York. Again it was difficult for my father, because he had no passport that was really valid. We had to find a way of buying a passport--the Gestapo was corruptible--but we didn't have the money. These were things I learned later, of course.

"But there was a brave rich woman of Jewish origins who did have the money, but didn't have the contacts. And she was agreeable to giving us the money if we would take her out as my nanny. And I very clearly remember that my mother told me that we are leaving tomorrow with your nurse. At that time I was six, but the war makes you somehow older than you really are. And I somehow understood that this was to be my nurse, if I were ever asked. And so we boarded the train and crossed the border into Spain with my nurse, who incidentally had diamonds on her fingers larger than my mother ever saw, let alone owned. We sailed from Lisbon to the United States, arriving early in 1941. That's where I grew up, really."

The senior Pozner went to work for Loews International, a division of MGM, in a unit dubbing films into Spanish for Latin America. As the son tells it, his father was earning "$25,000 a year handling distribution of films to Latin America and Europe for Loews International, a division of MGM." They lived in a nine-room duplex at 24 East 10th Street, just off University Place. "I had my own bedroom, my own bathroom and my own playroom. I know what wealth can bring. It is not something I've heard about; I've experienced it." Young Vladimir went to City and Country, a Greenwich Village progressive school that still exists. A second son, Paul, was born in 1945 in New York City. (He also lives in Moscow and has been working as a research associate in Vietnamese medieval history.)

In his Moscow studio, speaking into his own tape recorder, Pozner told me that in 1947 he entered Stuyvesant High School, that special Manhattan public school for bright boys interested in science. He said he played basketball and track, even citing his best time (49.2 for the 440), and in 1950 entered Columbia College, where he majored in American literature. By then, however, the Pozner family had split up. As the son tells it, the senior Pozner had always planned to return to Russia and so obtained Soviet citizenship soon after his return to America in 1941. This he was granted on the grounds that his own father, grandfather Pozner, had become a Lithuanian citizen after leaving Berlin and that, once the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania, all Lithuanians and their children were automatically entitled to Soviet citizenship. This grandfather was shot by the Nazis in 1941.

"By 1947," the son continued, speaking into his own tape machine, "the Cold War began, and we were being harassed by the FBI. Our phones were tapped. Our old friends were scared to call us; it was becoming really scary. The man who ran Loews International, Major Arthur Loew, called up my father and said, 'Now, look, you have to realize that I cannot keep you in this capacity as a Soviet citizen. Things have changed. Either you will become an American citizen--and that I can do for you in three days--and I will double your salary, or I'm going to have to fire you.' My father said that he realized the predicament. 'Go ahead and fire me.'

"And he was fired. Well, we had to move out of the duplex pretty fast, because we didn't have the money to pay for it anymore. My parents and baby brother moved into a very small apartment, a ground floor job on West Eleventh Street." In 1948, his father went with his wife and younger son to East Berlin, where he worked for the Soviet film organization. As Pozner now tells it, already politically hypersensitive, he decided that he did not want to live in post-Nazi Germany and so remained in the United States, boarding with a family named "Perez" on Park Avenue.

"I had problems in Stuyvesant. My father had educated me in a pro-Soviet way, which was fine throughout the War. By 1946, I began to run into animosity and emotional problems. There were monumental fights. Kids ganged up on me at school. It was almost like being a black in the south. I was pretty much of a loner. I was kind of cut off. As soon as people heard about me, they didn't frequent me. I wasn't close to anyone at all. Most of my old friends had completely stopped seeing me. They were afraid; they said so.

"It was a feeling of apprehension, of being surveyed, of having your mail opened. You realized that there were nice people, good people whom you would like to frequent, who would like to be with you, but who simply were afraid. At that time there was a real fear of having anything to do with anyone like myself. Most of all I liked to sit in on jam sessions and play and sing. They weren't hootenannies, because they were just in people's apartments or in lofts. That's where I first met Woody Guthrie." This love of vernacular American music persists in Pozner's collection of jazz and folk records--the best collection in Moscow, he claims--as well as his translation of Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory, into Russian.

The four Pozners moved from East Berlin to Moscow in December, 1952, a few months before Stalin died. "They came back at a good time, relatively speaking," the son judged between puffs on his Camel. "If Stalin had died later, or they had come earlier, I have reason to believe that my father would have been sent to Siberia, like so many others before him. But, thankfully, things worked out differently. I joined them at the end of 1953, having dropped out of Columbia and obtained my own Soviet passport. I was going on twenty. That was my first time in the Soviet Union, and I did not speak a word of Russian, because I had never spoken it at home. There was no need to."

He had to learn to be a Moscovite from scratch. "When I first came here, it was to me a totally alien country. All I knew were the ideas and the ideals of which my father had spoken a lot. But I really didn't know anything. I didn't know the language, little things: People walk differently. It's a different culture, and that is very hard to take when you are twenty. It took me some time; it took me some time. I went to learn about this country in a conscientious way, as I learned about the United States. I began to travel. I went all over. I went by foot from Irkust near Lake Bakal--that's in Western Siberia--to Bratsk. That's about 400 miles through the forest. It took me three months in the summer. I saw the lumber camps and the lumberjacks. I had tried to meet the people that I had learned about in America, and I found that there were many similarities--in the songs, in the way of acting, in the openness. Gradually, I came to have a feeling for this country. I think today I can say that it is as much a part of me as my American background is. And that has determined by role here, as I understand it."

In 1954, he took a competitive examination that enabled him to study biology at Moscow University and graduated in 1958 as a physiologist. Instead of pursuing graduate work, he became the secretary to Samuel Marshak, a Soviet translator of English literature. In 1958, he also married his first wife Valentina Chemberdzy, the daughter of the well-known Soviet composer Zara Levina and now a professor of Latin and Greek; and in 1961, they had a daughter Katya, who has since studied music. By the time of his first marriage, as he tells it, he had decided to remain in Moscow; there would be no return to America or France. That same year he was offered a job at Novisti, a new press agency that was then organized by the writers union, and there he worked, entirely in Russian, until 1970. He joined the Communist Party in 1967 and has since contributed 3% of his income to its coffers. In 1969 he married Yekatarina Orlova, a large handsome redhead who has been an economics correspondent for the magazine Soviet Union; she speaks little English.

Pozner started freelance broadcasting, mostly in English, in 1966 and in 1970 was invited to work fulltime as a commentator for Gosteleradio, which is the nickname for the State Committee for Television and Radio. "I took it because being a commentator means just writing your own stuff and reading it and being totally independent in the sense of not responsible to or for anyone else and just doing your own work. And that is what I thought I really wanted to do. I was hoping to address a larger audience and always thought that radio and television gave you that opportunity." His principal job this past decade has been writing and speaking a five-minute English-language program, "Vladimir Pozner Talks," that has been broadcast daily over Radio Moscow's North American Service. In the U.S. this can be heard only on short-wave sets, except in Florida where it is received as an AM signal from Cuba. For this work he told me he earned 370 rubles a month, plus a percentage for his knowledge of a foreign language that raised his base salary to 420 per month.

Since his bosses have instituted an incentive scheme (a device more familiar to capitalism), Pozner has been paid "extra for everything I write," including his appearances on American television. (American television pays Gosteleradio for the studio, the technicians and the satellite. Gosteleradio gives Pozner between 30 and a hundred rubles per appearance, depending upon how much time he spends on the air.) All these extras bring his average monthly income to a thousand rubles (or $1,300 by the official rate of exchange). "In this country, this is a lot of money," he boasted--roughly the wage, I later discovered, of a high government bureaucrat or a Siberian oil worker. What do you do with it, I asked? "Spend it. Last year my wife and I spent a month in Paris. We both like antique furniture. Books."

On many American programs, Pozner has frequently engaged in spontaneous debates with American spokesmen, and these are always disconcerting, because he looks and sounds as American as the Americans. Therefore, either the producers or the American opponents customarily insist that Pozner be given some visual sign of his allegiances. For BBC television, he had a Soviet flag behind him; for the Canadian-produced pilot for PBS, he had a small Soviet flag on a stand in front of him. Reviewing Pozner's BBC debate with Robert Kaiser, a Washington Post correspondent, London's Sunday Telegraph commented, "The problem was that Mr. Pozner was at least as nice and clear as Mr. Kaiser and, forgive me, but I think he actually spoke English better. Or rather American. Because if it wasn't for the hammer and sickle draped above his head, Vladimir Pozner could easily have been mistaken for one of Mr. Reagan's bright young men."

One reason why Pozner has been such an effective broadcaster and also such an effective spokesman for Moscow is, of course, that he speaks to us as one American might to another, without the hostile posture or Soviet lingo or the lugubrious accent that all sound so suspect and sinister to American ears. As Ted Koppel told me, "Instead of speaking in bureaucratese, or even worse in Marxist bureaucratese, that we find so stilted and thus automatically reject, he speaks in language we are accustomed to hearing." (Another ABC staffer told me, "Putting him on is like having Brezhnev speak American.") A second reason is that his performance is not slick, as he stumbles through "ums" and "uhs" and frequently smacks his lips, as well as betraying a slight lisp that has plagued him since childhood. Because he answers nearly all questions immediately, rarely refusing or misunderstanding or fumbling for the most acceptable phrasing, his responses appear more spontaneous than calculated. A third, more subtle reason is his eyes, which engage the camera (and sparkle) in ways unknown to other Soviets appearing here. By contrast, other Russians on American television fail to look into the camera, have shifty eyes, stumble through English, pause suspiciously, seem secretive and insincere, fall into incoherence and, in general, have far less credibility. He is not just Radio Moscow's best "American"; he may well be its only sympathetic voice. In truth, the Soviets could not have invented a better publicist if they tried. Why his bosses took so long to "discover" him is an interesting question.

The Pozner I met in Moscow looked and talked and felt like an American--better yet, like a New Yorker; he made me feel at home. He had his favorite folk singers--Judy Collins, Bob Dylan and, especially, Dave Van Ronk; his favorite jazzmen--Ellington, Parker and Armstrong; his favorite American movies--One Flew over the Cookoo's Nest ("not the novel"); his favorite contemporary novelists--Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow, "if you still regard Bellow as contemporary." Why Vonnegut? "Much of what Vonnegut says is simply what I think and what I feel. Generally speaking, in my literary tastes I'm inclined to like people who have something to say. I don't want to sound corny about this, but to me the man is vomiting blood when he speaks. He's in pain about the human condition. His books are so popular here they are snapped up the minute they appear. They are brought out and, wham, they're gone." There was even a book of mine on his locked shelves; and from one colleague to another, I happily inscribed it.

At times he could make you forget that he has been out of town for over thirty years. "My favorite ball team is the New York Yankees. I used to know Joe DiMaggio, because my mother did a documentary for Paramount on the All-Star Games; and that made all the difference. I still think that he was one of the greatest players who ever played the game. I have two baseballs signed by all members of the 1936 All-Star team; that was the first All-Star game in which DiMaggio played. I have several of his pictures and autographs and everything. I liked him a lot. As a matter of fact, I have a lot of respect for him as a human being. But now the Yankees aren't what they used to be, for me at least. In fact, baseball has become too much of a business."

The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that Pozner keeps abreast of a culture and, especially, a language so far away. He told me that he reads the newspapers and magazines received at the Gosteleradio office--the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News, etc., in addition to the wire services of the U.P., the A.P. and, of course, Tass. "I keep up pretty well with what's happening; I have to." Former colleagues of his, now immigrants in America, testify that even in the office his linguistic competence distinguished him from everyone else. Most of them attributed it not just to his youth here but to his love of new American literature--he knows how we speak today from reading our latest books.

Nonetheless, once talk turns to politics, no one can mistake Pozner for an American. His positions are clearly and profoundly Soviet. As the folks at ABC told me, "None of us have any illusions that Pozner will give us anything other than official reaction." On national television, the night John Lennon died, he defended in advance the possible invasion of Poland: "As a matter of fact the Soviet Union has made it quite clear that it has no intention whatsoever of intervening, but...that should Poland need the help of the Socialist community and should it ask for that help, that aid would be coming."

Even though Ted Koppel once introduced Pozner as "always a competent spokesman for the Soviet Union," Pozner insists that he is an independent journalist who works for government-owned media. One night he told Koppel, "You called me an official of the Soviet government, and of course that's very honorable to me. But I'm not that. And I mean my words should not be taken as any kind of statement from the Kremlin." Another time he insisted, "Don't confuse myself with the Soviet officials you're speaking of. I'm a journalist working for the State Committee on Radio and Television. But that doesn't make me an official. I'm hired by that organization."

"I speak my mind of whatever subject," he told me over tea. "It may coincide or not coincide with official policy. Take capital punishment: I'm against it; I don't think it serves any purpose, even though it exists in this country as a law. In domestic policy, we tend to subsidize too much. Meat is subsidized. It costs about three rubles to produce a kilogram of meat; it is sold for two-sixty. It is ridiculous that I should pay 16 kopecks for gas in my house, no matter how much I earn. I think rents should be higher than they are today. When I pay fifteen rubles per month for this apartment, that's stealing. I'm stealing from everybody.

"Take drinking the way Russians do it. It's a serious problem; it really is. It's an economic problem, because it affects people's work; it's a demographic problem, because it affects children who are born abnormal because of that. The difference between the way we drink and the way you do is that here people are more prone to drink to get drunk; it's harder drinking. Here it is a national style that crosses all social strata, that affects all people. When you ask people why they drink like that, the response is that we Russians have always liked a good drink. That is true, but it's also atavistic.

"I'm totally independent. I write my own material; I read my own materials, and there's nobody to control it. But I realize full well that I'm working within a framework, and what I do and say is something that is accepted. There is much more difference of opinion here than Americans tend to believe, and much more freedom of expression. In fact, the limits of freedom of expression are very clear cut. You do not have the possibility in this country of attacking the system per se--attacking socialism of the Soviet Union. That's not the same as saying that something is not working and we should try to improve it, or that so-and-so is not doing a good job. There are laws banning the former; it's called anti-Soviet activity. There are laws against it, whether you like them or dislike them; they have their reasons, which are mainly historical. If you want to do that, go ahead; but you are breaking the law and you can take the consequences, whatever they may be. Aside from that, there is a lot of freedom of expression here."

The disagreements with official policy that Pozner mentioned at that time all concerned domestic matters. In a different context, he mentioned another, more profound deviation: "I think that anybody, no matter were you live, no matter who you are: If you want to leave your country, you can leave it. That's a human right, basic. But I know what it is to emigrate and therefore I always have compassion for émigrés. It's okay for the kids, if they are small; but for adults, it is a very painful procedure. It's tearing up your roots and that, in my experience, is very, very difficult." In a country that few natives ever leave in their entire lives, where exit visas just for travel, even for brief trips to satellite states, are hard to obtain, this is a radical position.

"If I am asked 'Who am I' I wouldn't be able to give a clear-cut answer; but I would definitely say that I am partly an American. I knew that I wasn't an American citizen, for sure. Due to the way I lived in America--my father wanted me to be independent--I bummed around, hitch-hiked; I went to California. I got to know a lot of people most Americans never really meet. I got to have a feeling for the other America that city people really don't know much about. I have had, and still have, a really deep love, an affinity, for my America. (Everybody has his own America.) To me, it's a wonderful people that I can communicate with easily and that I really care for very deeply. America was to me never a 'foreign country.' It is part of my background, part of my psyche. I am a very rare bird, because I manage to adapt quite well to both countries. Whereas I might inside, internally, never completely merge with either, I have been and am part of both, and have been accepted by both as being fully part."

By no accounts is Pozner a typical Soviet; he has possessions and privileges that are not commonly available. Our conversations were recorded on his portable German tape machine worth several hundred dollars. He seems to get all the American books and magazines he wants, even those that Soviet inspectors customarily confiscate as inimical to the Soviet system. He obtains permission to travel abroad, not only for business but for pleasure, even with his wife (which is itself remarkable, as Soviet officials are usually reluctant to let couples out of the country together). The Pozners have telephones in every room. His apartment has a burglar alarm that is wired to the local police station (forcing the Pozners to close all their windows before leaving, and to telephone the police station immediately after coming home). He can freely enter the Intourist Hotels that are closed to non-occupants, meeting foreign journalists, so he told me, without obtaining permission. In a fundamental sense, he functions as though he is a wholly unrestrained "Western" reporter, in a culture that supposedly does not have wholly unrestrained journalists. As he drove me back to my hotel, my thought was that Vladimir Pozner had made himself into a character in a work of fiction.

His taste for fiction came out in other ways. During our conversation he was persistently reluctant to tell me the names of people he knew in New York. His claim was that he was too alienated to have friends in college or high school or that the "family friends" who boarded him on Park Avenue were dead. As we spoke about his possibly returning to America, perhaps for a lecture tour, I asked him what he might like to do in New York City. He spoke of wanting to visit his old house, to walk the streets of downtown Manhattan, to look up elementary school friends such as "Bobby Hollander and the McGhee brothers." I stopped him short. The first name was familiar to me: Robert Hollander, a Princeton professor of comparative literature, born a year before Pozner. Was this he? Pozner could not confirm my hunch (and refrained from mentioning any more names).

Once back in the U.S., I wrote Hollander who acknowledged the childhood friendship and provided this memoir: "What I remember most vividly about Vladimir were his capacities for, one, having extraordinarily attractive fantasies and, two, for getting the rest of us to believe them. For the better part of a year he had me convinced that he had in his basement a trunk full of the most marvelous tin soldiers, tanks, ships, etc. He promised me (we were twelve at the time) that, whenever he could arrange to invite me on a Friday afternoon, he would give me a warship--a cruiser or battleship, I don't remember--with moving turrets.

"The crucial invitation never came, despite my incessant inquiries, until the whole beguiling scheme was allowed to dwindle and disappear into the pile of lost implausible hopes that childhood wisely accommodates. On two or three occasions that same year Vladimir came to school with money, five and ten-dollar bills, which he found, he said, in the gutter. I recall that one afternoon a contingent of other C & C classmates accompanied him to forage for currency in unlikely streets. They found none." No one could be more surprised than Hollander to find his childhood buddy now in Moscow, "talking with Ted Koppel, thirty-three years later--what Herodutus calls a generation."

This image of young Pozner as a story-teller prompted me to check out other details of his autobiography. Once back in New York, I could confirm that he went to City and Country, that he lived at 24 East Tenth Street, that between 1934 and 1939 he attended Dalton Nursery School, Riverside School and a public school on 14th Street near First Avenue. Other elementary-school classmates whom I interviewed likewise remembered that ""he sought escape into fantasy," "he was full of fairy tales," "he could turn the slightest thing into a fantastic story." I also discovered that Columbia College had no record of him, that his transcript at Stuyvesant High School revealed that he dropped out suddenly in November, 1948, and then that this transcript was not forwarded anywhere (which indicates that he did not continue in another American high school). His schoolmates here at the time remember that in 1948 he went with his family to East Berlin.

Pozner told me that in 1960, while working as a secretary to the noted writer Samuel Marshak, he published a book of translations of "John Donne and the poets of that period." The émigré poet, Joseph Brodsky, himself a translator of English literature into Russian, insists that this book does not exist; the first Soviet volume of Donne translations appeared over a dozen years later, translated by someone else. Asked to account for this discrepancy, Pozner told me, "If you asked to see it here, I would have shown it to you." Brodsky: "I'd like to see it." Pozner told me that he got a free subscription to the Book of the Month Club from Arthur Krim, a prominent New York film executive. The latter remembers meeting Pozner's father once in Moscow around 1957, but has no recollection of sending the son any books. The person who introduced Krim to Pozner, senior, was Ilya Lopert, then an American film producer-distributor who had known the senior Pozner since they worked together in 1932 in Paris and had employed him in New York in the 1940s. It was Lopert and his family who gave the Pozners American books and clothes, among other supplies unavailable in Russia.

The more I questioned, the more discrepancies I found. The father was not in charge of MGM distribution to Europe and Latin America; other people were. In the International Motion Picture Almanac for 1947-48, Wladimir A. Pozner lists himself as "General Manager" of Loews International. In fact, he had worked since 1941 as a sound engineer in a dubbing operation that was initially owned by Lopert and later subsumbed into Loews International. The work consisted mostly of dubbing American films into Spanish for Latin American distribution. George Muchnic, then a vice-president of LI, remembers that Pozner, senior, was "well-spoken, wrote good memos, knew his job. I know he got increases in compensation when I was there."

Along with others who worked in that office at that time, Muchnic questioned Pozner's story of his father's dismissal by Arthur M. Loew, long deceased. "I worked with Arthur every day. I wasn't there, but I can't imagine that he would double anyone's salary." Seymour Mayer, then in charge of international sales, told me, "It was not like Arthur Lowe to say that--change your citizenship or I'll double your salary. $50,000--that's ludicrous; no one got that kind of money in that type of job in those days."

What happened in fact was that Pozner, senior, decided on his own to emigrate, only suddenly informing his colleagues and family. "He kept it a dead secret," a close family friend remembers. "I don't think anyone knew about it, not even [his wife] Jerry. We were afraid at the time that Jerry wouldn't leave America. Vovo had dreams of becoming a head of Mosfilm." And then there were circumstantial reasons to doubt the son's story of the elder Pozner obtaining Russian citizenship as early as 1941. Pozner was not a Communist when he came to America. Indeed, back in Paris he had captained a White Russian basketball team. While here, he fell under the influence of his sister who had gone to New York before him and who had cared for his future wife and their son during their first stay in New York. Known as Mrs. Helen Kagan, she had worked as a buyer at Macy's and then at the U.N and lived with a man, a Russian, who was thought to be a Communist. Secondly, there was a delay in the Pozner family's departure--a delay having something to do with receiving appropriate papers, which is to say a new passport and/or a new citizenship.

In my judgment, Pozner is less a liar or an imposter--two possible charges that come to mind--than a fibber, a guy who since childhood has told petty falsehoods because he likes to tell stories, not only because that is his way of charming people but because like all good fictions his stories made his life richer and more literary than it would otherwise be. Notice that he fibs not about others but about himself (and his ancestors). As a good fibber, Pozner can persuade others of the "truth" of his fictions; perhaps after many years, he eventually persuades himself, or even transforms himself into a persuasive example. An émigré here, who remembers Pozner in Moscow as "someone who lied when he did not need to lie," nonetheless believed that Pozner had, in fact, attended college in America, in part because he developed a linguistic competence equal to that of American university graduates. Now that this profile is appearing in print, I wonder how many other "attractive fantasies" are left in this piece. (It is a long way, after all, from Irkust to Bratsk.)

Knowing what I know now about Pozner, my hunch is that, especially when he talks to us, he believes himself to be an American, all truth to the contrary notwithstanding; and his capacity to persuade not just us but himself of this illusion accounts for why he is such a uniquely successful Soviet communicator. Of course, there is also a difference in political meaning between a college student, a could-have-been American, spurning America for Communism and a younger high school student being taken there by his parents; but my own opinion is that such a political nuance is perhaps less necessary than his romantic, essentially literary desire to believe that the crucial decision of his life--that one that determined his future--was made by him, rather than, as it was, by someone else, for him.

When I first wrote this profile several years ago, I thought I had a successful piece, full of explanations of mystery, along with nuance and character and everything else that makes an article interesting. Instead, I discovered some limitations of American print journalism. The folks commissioning this article had never seen Pozner's performance. (It is hard for me now to account for why they commissioned it; I think someone told someone else that Pozner was unusually interesting.) One editor wanted me to challenge him with a questions about the situation of Jews in Russia, without recognizing they were not relevant to my piece, or even realizing in advance, as I did, that he would probably provide an answer so more sympathetic than any other that, once they read it, they would prefer not to print it. Though the article was accepted, and fully paid for, it was eventually returned. Offered to another prominent magazine, it came back, with the editor's testimony that he too had never seen Pozner. (They were yet other examples of what Marshall McLuhan once called a PROB--a print-oriented bastard.)

An editor of a mass weekly insisted that I find out if Pozner "was KGB"? I replied that, if I asked him, of course he'd say no, declaring again his independence of the state machinery, in which case I would either be obliged to call this another fib, even though I had no evidence to the contrary at all, and did not know how to get any. (I remember asking this editor, "Pray tell, where can I find the list of members?") A second editor, of a far more prestigious cultural monthly, made the same glib request about "Pozner's ultimate affiliations," making me wonder whether these two guys went to the same journalism school. A third editor, loyal anti-Communist that he was, had trouble accepting the truth that Pozner had fibbed in America as well as Russia. Another magazine wanted my portrait reduced to "only four double-spaced typed pages," while retaining its complexity, a feat that which would be possible only in an editorial never-never-land. A further truth was that my portrait had eschewed, or transcended, American journalistic clichés for portraying Soviets.

However, in the years since then, Pozner has become yet more visible, appearing not only on Phil Donohue's show many times, but during the pseudo-Olympic Freedom Games and on Public Broadcasting, doing his act as well as only he can do it; and I find myself often asked how his performance can be so singularly successful? This memoir is my answer.