Diplomats Say TV Show Instigates Hatred : Soviets Blame ‘Amerika’ for Vandalism

As part of a broad attack on the TV miniseries “Amerika,” Soviet diplomats complained Tuesday that tires on about a dozen embassy cars had been punctured overnight, implying that the vandalism was committed by Americans made angry by the program, which depicts the United States under Soviet rule.

Oleg Benykhov and Igor Bulay, Soviet information and press counselors here, charged that the 14-hour TV series was malicious, poisonous and “aimed at instigating hatred” between Soviets and Americans. The program is “one of the most unfortunate products of the Cold War,” they said.

The Soviet officials exhibited a handful of small metal pieces--with flat square bases and nail-like spikes jutting an inch or more out--that were allegedly used to flatten the tires outside the Soviet Embassy in downtown Washington. The shiny devices all seemed identical, indicating that they were mass-produced, rather than homemade.

A spokesman for the Secret Service’s Executive Protection Agency, which guards all embassies here, confirmed that Soviet officials reported that the tires were punctured Monday night on 10 cars but had no further comment.

Cite American Occupation

As opposed to the hypothetical Soviet occupation of the United States, “the reality” was that American troops occupied the Russian ports of Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok in 1918-19, Benykhov and Bulay said.

There, they said, the Americans used chemical weapons, “bayonetted people in the streets,” killed prisoners, plundered and committed other atrocities. The diplomats cited as their sources a New York Times dispatch of the time and the memoirs of the American commander of one expedition.

In addition, Benykhov showed a picture of a wooden guard tower at a barbed-wire enclosure that he said was on Mudyug Island in the Arctic. The watchtower was “erected by Anglo-American invaders,” according to captions on copies of the picture that were distributed later.

Although the world believes that Adolf Hitler invented concentration camps, Benykhov said, this was “the first concentration camp ever” and was built by American troops. However, the world’s first concentration camps are generally acknowledged to have been built by British troops in South Africa during the Boer War more than a decade before World War I.

Opposed to Revolution

U.S. and other allied forces did occupy the Russian cities after the Bolsheviks, successful in their revolution, sued for a separate peace with Germany. The ostensible aim was to prevent a Russian pullout from the war, but historical accounts also indicate that some Western political leaders briefly hoped to “strangle the revolution in its crib,” as Soviet propagandists later charged.

In responding to questions at Tuesday’s news conference, the two Soviet diplomats refused to accuse the U.S. government of instigating or otherwise supporting the series. They said ABC, the network airing the series, was primarily interested in “money.”

Bulay sought to portray the series as irresponsibility on the part of the American press, though he acknowledged that ABC broadcasts entertainment, as well as news programs. When asked about the responsibility of Soviet press reports that the Central Intelligence Agency created and spread the AIDS virus and supported the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, he said such accounts were “reprinted from the foreign press.”

“You have no monopoly at producing wrong things,” Bulay added later. “We do it too. But you object to a short film clip. We’re watching 14 hours of extremely offensive” television reaching 70 million Americans.

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