Kremlin Spin Doctor Pozner Confesses He Was Often Throwing Curves : Soviet: The U.S.-reared journalist’s confession of past dishonesty invites skepticism. Resentment of orthodox communists runs high in the East Bloc.

Vladimir Pozner, the Soviet journalist who for years was an apologist for the Kremlin on American television, is making an apology of his own.

With his perfect English and knowledge of all things American, from Joe DiMaggio’s batting average to brands of breakfast cereal, Pozner was the first Soviet commentator able to put the Kremlin’s spin on events without turning Americans off.

He is proud of his efforts during the 1980s to counter what he calls “enemy images” of angry, boorish, downtrodden and dangerous Russians--of Nikita S. Khrushchev banging his shoe and Leonid I. Brezhnev slurring his speech, crowds queuing for food and tanks crossing Red Square.

Although he insists he should not be considered an “official” Soviet spokesman, he is pleased to be known throughout America as an embodiment of the Soviet Union.

In short, he believes he’s done a lot of good.

So why should he feel bad?

Because, he admits in his new autobiography, “Parting With Illusions,” he said many things he didn’t believe--and didn’t have the courage to say some things he believed strongly.

In commentaries broadcast around the world by Moscow radio and appearances on such American television shows as ABC’s “Nightline,” he excused the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, endorsed the internal exile of Andrei Sakharov in 1980, idealized the accomplishments of the Soviet economy and sang phony paeans to justice in a communist society.

“Why did I do this? Some things I did not see, and others I did not want to see,” he said in an interview in New York. “ . . . It was very painful to come to the realization that I was trying to defend things that really weren’t defendable.”

To many Americans, Pozner’s confession that he was not completely honest with his listeners, or with himself, will come as little surprise. He never has lacked critics or doubters here.

The timing of his admission--in a period when the Kremlin is encouraging self-criticism and historical revision--also invites skepticism.

A decade ago, such a confession could have landed him in jail and would have been courageous. But now that resentment against orthodox communists is running high in the East Bloc, his admission of past ideological impurity appears useful, even necessary, to his career.

Pozner, confident and sharp-witted at age 56, knows that for these reasons, his apology might not meet rapid acceptance in either the Soviet Union or the United States. But he is undaunted.

He has trumpeted the confession in his autobiography, published this spring by the Atlantic Monthly Press.

The book recounts Pozner’s childhood in New York City, where he learned to love the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pete Seeger and Mark Twain. His mother was French, his father a Russian emigre who earned a handsome salary in the American film industry but remained a devoted communist and never gave up his Soviet citizenship.

Despite a classic American boyhood--paper route, baseball games, summer camp--Pozner says he never felt fully American. Other kids at Stuyvesant High School thought of him as Russian. For a while, he thought of himself as French.

When his father lost his job because of his communist sympathies in the late 1940s, the teen-age Pozner stayed with his family as it headed for the Soviet Union.

They went first to war-ravaged Berlin, where his father grew impatient with a Soviet diplomat who found one excuse after another to delay the family’s permission to go to Moscow.

Only much later, Pozner says, did he and his family realize that the diplomat had been trying to protect them from Josef Stalin, who feared the influence of Russians with experience in the West.

“Had we arrived in the Soviet Union any earlier than we did, there is little doubt that we would all have ended up in one of the Gulag camps,” he wrote.

As it happened, Stalin died not long after the family members arrived in Moscow in 1952, and they were spared. Vladimir studied at Moscow University and managed to apprentice himself to Samuel Marshak, perhaps Russia’s greatest translator of English literature. Later, he broke into journalism and became a commentator for Moscow radio.

Today, he works for the state television network, hosting two talk shows. At the very start of his career, Pozner says, he made a promise to himself that he would not lie.

“I made that promise in all honesty, but I cannot honestly say I kept it,” he says in the book. “It was not that I deliberately misinformed my audience. Rather, I censored my statements, I deleted passages that could be threatening to me, I rarely spoke my mind fully.

“More than once I questioned what was really influencing my decisions--fear for myself and my family’s well-being, the desire not to furnish the ‘enemy’ with ammunition, a false sense of patriotism, or a real lack of courage? Probably, a bit of each.”

The book, written in a conversational tone, mixes political arguments with personal recollections, sometimes switching abruptly from one to the other as it charts Pozner’s two marriages, his rise through the ranks of Soviet journalists, a bout of depression and heavy drinking in 1977, and his success in the Western media.

The final chapter is about his recent shedding of communist ideology, the “parting with illusions” to which the title refers. A skeptical reader might view this as a politically expedient conversion to Gorbachevism.

Pozner, however, makes no mention of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in his concluding pages. He pays tribute instead to Sakharov--the man he once publicly reviled--as an inspiration to courage.

One of the great ironies of Pozner’s life is that because he was Russian, he never felt fully at home in America, but because of his American upbringing, he has not felt completely comfortable in Russia.

“That I wanted to be involved in bringing these two countries together as much as possible should not be surprising,” he said, “because although I don’t feel totally comfortable in either of them, I am part of each.”