Soviet Reporter Says He Was Attacked on U.S. Picket Line

A Soviet magazine correspondent told police that he was attacked by two well-dressed men as he tried to interview pickets on strike against an eastern Kentucky coal company, authorities said Wednesday.

“They kept screaming something about ‘You bloody Russian!’ ” Iona Andronov said in an interview.

“They were dressed well,” he said, and “just didn’t have working-class faces.”

Andronov, U.S. correspondent for the Literary Gazette, a magazine published in Moscow, said that he was looking for United Mine Workers pickets Tuesday at the A. T. Massey Coal Co. when the two men drove up in a pickup truck.

He said they jumped out and began yelling, hitting him in the face and left arm through his open car window. Andronov, 48, who lives in New York City, suffered minor injuries that did not require medical attention, Trooper Kenneth Frost of the Kentucky state police said.

The Soviet Embassy informed the State Department about the incident, State Department spokeswoman Sondra McCarty said.

The incident occurred in the Blackberry Creek area near the Kentucky-West Virginia border, where the UMW is picketing several coal mines operated by Massey subsidiaries.

Andronov, who is beginning a three- to five-year tour in the United States, held the same post in 1976, when he visited the region to report on John Robinette, a Vulcan, W. Va., resident who made a highly publicized appeal to the Soviets for foreign aid to build a bridge that the state said it could not finance.

On the day Andronov arrived to talk to Robinette, the West Virginia Department of Highways announced that it had found funds for the bridge. The span was opened in 1980.