Events in the Soviet Union

Mr. Smith is a former Moscow and Eastern European correspondent for The New York Times, and is now a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He authored two books on the Soviet Union: in 1983 he published The Russians, and in 1990 he published The New Russians. In a speech two weeks after the coup, he examined trends in the Soviet Union and the recent coup, and he discussed the how the Soviet press has thrived despite existing under government controls. He gave emotional descriptions of Soviet journalists he knew who were censored or killed by their government.