Sergei Lapin; Soviet Journalist Wouldn’t Air Watergate News

Sergei G. Lapin, a former diplomat and journalist who told U.S. correspondents during the Watergate scandal that the story was not worth reporting in the Soviet Union, died Thursday, according to state television. He was 78.

In a career that spanned six decades, Lapin served as head of two of the most powerful Soviet media organizations--the Gostelradio television and radio agency and the official Soviet news agency Tass.

“Sergei Georgiyevich Lapin put all his strength and heart into all this. And today his heart stopped,” said an anchorwoman on Soviet television’s nightly newscast “Vremya.”

The obituary did not give a cause of death, mention survivors or say when memorial services are planned. Tass, where Lapin once worked, did not immediately carry a report of his death.

In a 1974 interview with U.S. reporters in Moscow, Lapin was repeatedly asked why Soviet TV viewers had been kept in the dark about then-President Nixon’s Watergate troubles. He said the story was an “internal problem” of the United States and that Soviet media did not report “rumors.”

“Only facts, without forecasting, without rumors. We never analyze rumors,” he said when asked why Soviet media did not report the possibility that Nixon might be impeached.

Lapin headed Gostelradio from 1970 to 1985 and before that was general director of Tass for three years. He was ambassador to Austria from 1956 to 1960 and to China from 1965 to 1967. He began his journalism career in 1932, working for Leningrad newspapers.