A Sportswriter Scores Big With Job in Moscow

For most of the past eight years--first at the New York Daily News, then at the Philadelphia Inquirer--Steve Goldstein has been a sportswriter. At the Inquirer, he divided his time between covering tennis and reporting such stories as officiating in the National Football League and the use of steroids by athletes.

On Aug. 15, Goldstein will become the Moscow bureau chief for the Inquirer.

Many of Goldstein’s friends and colleagues--and reporters and editors elsewhere--have expressed great surprise at the selection of a sportswriter to cover the Soviet Union, one of the most difficult, sensitive and prestigious assignments in journalism.

But Goldstein, 36, spent five years as a general news and investigative reporter before turning to sports in 1978 and he’s traveled widely, and he says he just doesn’t see anything so different about his new assignment.

“I’m still gonna be writing about guys named Ivan and Boris,” Goldstein said, grinning broadly. “I’ll (still) be talking to people who are not familiar with the English language.”

Besides, he said, “It should be no more challenging getting a Soviet diplomat on the phone than it was to get (track star) Carl Lewis.”

Goldstein may be kidding himself. Most experienced foreign correspondents (and their editors) say the secrecy and restrictions imposed on foreign journalists by Soviet officials make the Moscow bureau the single most challenging assignment a reporter can undertake. Western reporters in Moscow assume that their telephones are tapped and that their translators report to the government; reporters aren’t even permitted to travel more than 25 miles outside Moscow without giving authorities two days’ notice.

Moscow is considered a “hardship” post, and some papers give their correspondents based there (and in two or three other places) a free plane ticket to fly somewhere else for a week or 10 days every six months or so just to escape the stultifying pressure.

But the challenge of reporting from Moscow is exactly what attracts Goldstein.

“Anybody who fancies himself or herself a good reporter believes that the ultimate challenge is to throw yourself into a relatively unknown environment, up against tough deadlines, on a big story, and see how you react,” he said.

Moscow, Goldstein is convinced, is “the ultimate challenge in foreign reporting . . . the best story in the world . . . the other super-power . . . the antithesis of American society.”

Unlike many foreign correspondents, Goldstein should be at least moderately well-prepared for his assignment. He’s been studying the Russian language six hours a day, six days a week since mid-February. He’s been studying Soviet history at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s attended seminars on the Soviet Union at Harvard, Columbia and New York universities. He’s read widely on Soviet history, politics and culture.

In May, in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, he spent a week in Moscow. In between all these commitments--permanently detached from his sportswriting duties--he’s been working on the Inquirer foreign desk, trying to learn about foreign coverage from both the reporter’s and the editor’s perspective.