February 16, 1980

Speaking on “Soviet and American Sports and Journalism” in the Davison lounge, Soviet sports writer and defector Aleksey Orlov said, “I don’t understand how anyone could think of holding the Olympics in Moscow.” A former baseball writer for the largest Soviet sports newspaper in Leningrad and speaking through an interpretor, Orlov told The Miscellany News, “Every defector has his own personal reasons for Russia, although there are reasons common to all…. Just like anyone else, I wanted to read what I wanted and see the films I wanted.”

Because of universally known prior restraints, lack of information and layers of censorship, Russian journalist, he said, “could not tell the truth… Before the embargo on U.S. grain, nobody even knew that the Soviet Union bought our grain, and then they only found out by radio.”

Supporting the proposed U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics, Orlov said, “The Olympics is for amateurs to compete, not professionals. In Russia every sportsman is a professional…. Your hair would stand on end if you read what the Soviet newspapers said about the situation in Afghanistan.” When the United Nations General Assembly voted 114-18 that the Soviet’s should withdraw from the country, he said, the Soviet press printed only the 18 speeches in favor of the invasion. “In the light of what happened in Afghanistan, I don’t understand how anyone could think of holding the Olympics in Moscow.”

The Miscellany News