Wanted: A cool million dollars for one contrarian Soviet emigre

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See the Lev Navrozov Archive By Lev Navrozov SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian. .

I arrived with my family in New York in 1972 with a book for Harper & Row and with an article for “Commentary” magazine. Since then I have been writing daily, weekends and holydays included, and publishing everything I wrote. Yet our financial circumstances are just as they were on the first day of our arrival in New York in 1972. That is, my wife and I live quite comfortably, but millions of dollars in my bank account? No!

Let me give you one example to explain why not, and how the situation can be remedied.

When we arrived in New York in 1972, Ray Anderson, the “New York Times” Moscow correspondent, had called the editor of the “New York Times Magazine” and advised him to receive me. I had brought him the sensation of the third quarter of the 20th century — the Soviet rulers were developing post-nuclear superweapons!

But the “New York Times” never printed a word about it until 1992, when the newly elected President Yeltsin of Russia opened the former Soviet giant bioweapons part of the project to international inspection and thus forced the Western media to report it.

Let me explain why the “New York Times” had been silent on the subject until 1992. The subject was unpopular, unpleasant, unfashionable, and frightening to most Americans. When the U.S. mainstream media described in 1947 how aggressive Stalin was, this was popular, safe, and pleasant, because Stalin had no nuclear weapons, to say nothing of means of their transatlantic delivery, while the United States could reduce Stalin's Russia to radioactive dust in no time.

But in the 1970s and 1980s it was different. After one of my lectures, a sedate lady from the audience approached me and asked almost in a whisper whether she could ask me a very personal question. I said, “Of course!” She glanced around and asked: “How can you say what you're saying if THEY are SO powerful?”

Yet in New York, there appeared in the early 1980s one daily, “New York City Tribune,” which printed what was unpopular, unpleasant, unfashionable, and frightening for most Americans — my column about the Soviet development of post-nuclear weapons. Predictably, the “New York City Tribune” had fewer readers than the “New York Times” and could pay me less than the “New York Times” paid its columnists.

Before I became a regular columnist for the “New York City Tribune,” I had been publishing in “Commentary” and other such periodicals, which were called “conservative” and had too few readers to make their authors millionaires.

Once Tom Bolan, President of the East Side Conservative Club called me and asked for my consent to become a member of the Advisory Board. “Tom, but I am not a conservative, nor am I a Republican, nor am I a Conservative Republican.” “It does not matter,” Tom said graciously.

In a while, William Safire, an honest-to-goodness Republican (in the “New York Times”) gave a lecture at the East Side Conservative Club, and Tom Bolan introduced me to William Safire you can imagine how.

And here I proved to be by no means an impractical bookworm — I saw my chance. “Mr. Safire,” I said, “Here is a copy of my “Commentary” article that has been reprinted and outlined by 500 periodicals in the West, and the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan has read it — in the proofs! — and wants to meet me. The article contends that the CIA does not exist as an INTELLIGENCE agency. And Reagan wants to create a REAL CIA. Look, the most important geostrategic information today is the Soviet development of post-nuclear weapons. But when I said this to the CIA, they took me for a madman. Now, as a columnist for the 'New York Times,' you can help Reagan and the United States.”

When Safire sat at a dinner table before his lecture, the copy of my article lay next to him on the table, and when he spoke it was on the lectern. I thought: “Tom and I did it — in a couple of days Safire's column would be on the subject “What Does the CIA Know about Russia and China? Nothing!”

He has never mentioned in the “New York Times” what my “Commentary” article said or what I told him, though the fact of the Soviet development of post-nuclear weapons and the fact that the CIA does not exist as such were more important than all that the “New York Times” printed.

In the 1990s, China replaced Russia as the key developer of post-nuclear superweapons. But to say that China is developing post-nuclear weapons is far more unpopular, unpleasant, unfashionable, and frightening than it was to say this about Russia. The “foreign-policy conservatives,” from Senator Helms to “Young Socialists, USA,” supported me, and I lectured all over the world — in Canada, South America, Europe, and Japan. I became an Albert Einstein Prize winner. The reviewers of my Harper & Row book compared me to Mark Twain, Proust, Orwell, and Dostoyevsky. True, Harper & Row would not sell my book, since Golda Meir threatened to sue them because I described her admiration for Stalin as one of the many examples of Western “innocence.” Still, over 100 reviewers met my book with rave reviews.

And now? The mainstream media have been successfully pretending that China does not exist except as a remote benign area for trade, cheap labor, and vacations complete with Beijing duck.

The “New York City Tribune” folded way back in the 1990s. Ironically, the founder and head of WorldTribune.com is Robert Morton, the editor-in-chief of the “New York City Tribune,” and the founder and head of NewsMax.com is Christopher Ruddy, its editor.

Millions of dollars be damned! I am so grateful that the “New York City Tribune” has miraculously survived like a plant like a plant in its new sprouts.

As a result, I have had a chance to publish in 2002 and 2003 several articles according to which China is, geostrategically, a tiger preparing for a global leap, while Iraq, a small and technologically backward country, is a gnat that will bite (guerilla war) only if preemptively attacked.

Of course, my articles could ruin the pleasure of so many Americans who watched the Anglo-American war on the geostrategic gnat. It was as grandiose as a Third World War except that it was safe for those watching it, fashionable and upbeat. To ruin the pleasure of 79 percent of Americans? No, this is not the way of becoming a millionaire.

So I propose something else. Let us establish a department for retroactive evaluation redistribution. Thus it would have found in 1992 (when the newly elected President Yeltsin of Russia opened the former Soviet bioweapons archipelago to international inspection) that the “New York Times” had never printed a word before 1992 about the Soviet development of post-nuclear weapons, that is, misled its readers for about twenty years. On the other hand, Yeltsin's exposure demonstrated that what I had been saying in the “New York City Tribune” had been true. Well, is this not a chance to redistribute the fees and salaries retroactively? In this way I would be a millionaire, and the “New York Times” columnists would come down to my financial level.

But perhaps this redistribution is unnecessary in the light of one case I have just recalled. When the “New York City Tribune” was about to fold in the early 1990s, I appealed to its readers to donate for the publication of my column as a separate edition, and one contribution was $600. I called the contributor to thank him, and he told me that he was a wallpaper hanger, and the $600 was his only savings.

Imagine that someone who has $100 million would pay me for my column or donate to me $99 million. Still, he would have had $1 million left for himself. Now, that reader of mine gave me his all. Surely, his $600 is morally worth more than $99 million, with $1 million retained by the donor for himself. So please consider me a multi-millionaire.