Hands Off the Sacred Untouchables : Soviet Media: Since Stalin’s time, American presidents have been off-limits for criticism. Not that much has changed.

Once upon a time, a Russian and his American friend were crossing Red Square in Moscow, discussing freedom of speech in their countries. “I can go to Lafayette Square and shout ‘Down with President Nixon!’ and nobody will arrest me,” the American said. “Big deal! I can go to Red Square and shout, ‘Down with President Nixon!’ and nobody will arrest me,” said the Russian.

This anecdote is not only old, it is misleading. In fact, it is becoming easier for us Soviet journalists to criticize our own leaders than it has ever been to criticize yours.

I remember my frustration, and the frustration of all my colleagues who were stationed in Washington and New York and back in Moscow during the Watergate years. The whole world followed the developments that culminated in President Nixon’s resignation, but we Soviet journalists couldn’t write even one word about this event. It would be more accurate to say that we could have written about it, but nobody would have published it in the Soviet newspapers.

Why? Because those years were a time of detente and summit meetings between Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev, so we were prohibited from writing any negative stories about the American President.

It was nothing unusual for the members of the Soviet media. We were used to this kind of censorship. Before the beginning of World War II, when the Soviet Union was holding talks simultaneously with the Western countries and Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin himself gave a strict order to publish the speeches of Neville Chamberlain in the British House of Commons and of Adolf Hitler in the Reichstag in such a way that they would occupy a similar amount of space in the newspapers. After he chose to sign an agreement with Hitler, the Fuhrer’s speeches got more space in the newspapers than those of Chamberlain. Frankly, the Western Kremlinologists had no trouble reading the Kremlin’s intentions between the lines. They only had to count them.

After World War II, we were able to criticize only two political leaders--the fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain, and Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia after he broke with Moscow. Other heads of state and government were sacrosanct, not because we had good relations with them, but because any kind of supreme power had to be cherished.

The official explanation of this censorship was that criticism would poison relations between nations. But the real root of it was Stalin’s fear that by criticizing kings, presidents and prime ministers of foreign countries, we would develop a taste for criticism inside our country and we would question the politics of our own leaders.

The situation didn’t change very much under Brezhnev. It was taboo to criticize Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter. They were shielded by the summits with Brezhnev and SALT agreements.

President Reagan’s arrival did bring a slight change in these rules. I must confess that I wrote three critical columns about Reagan: when he declared that the Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” when he suggested throwing communism into the wastebasket of history, and when he made the off-the-record joke about pushing the button and destroying the Soviet Union in 5 minutes.

But after the Reykjavik summit in October, 1986, Reagan also became sacrosanct, even in the new atmosphere of glasnost. And after the change of guard in the White House, you could read negative comments about President Bush only in American papers. Our criticism was muted at best.

One doesn’t have to be a prophet to guess that after the Malta meetings, and especially after the first full official summit next year, President Bush will become virtually untouchable. It will become much easier for our media to be critical of Chairman Gorbachev than the American President.

Having a man in the White House whom the Soviet media--in the memorable words of Richard Nixon--”won’t be able to kick around any more,” our last hope might be Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who is still quite kickable. I can almost see the pilgrimage of my colleagues to the Pentagon, begging Cheney not to start believing in perestroika . Because if he changes his stance, we will have lost the last Washington punching bag on which we can flex our critical muscles.