Suddenly -- you could see it in his face -- inspiration struck. He dashed out a story on a typewriter, slipped it through the censor in a minute and then yelled for a telephone. "Get me London!" and got London in a minute.

Luckily the connection was so bad he had to yell the story into the phone. I remember the lead: "I just drank champagne with six Soviet Cosmonauts preparing to go into outer space."

Pure fiction.

Well, the Daily Mail reporter didn't know what to do, and he paced frantically.

Suddenly, inspiration struck him. He whipped his story past the censor and called London: "Plans to Send Six Soviet Cosmonauts into Outer Space Mysteriously Scrubbed."

Of course the next day our London reporter read the stories and wondered why I didn't have them, so I got a phone call from the home office.

Why would the Russians allow this idiocy to go through Because they had no problem with speculation that they were close to putting men into space, even if it weren't true, if it furthered their aims.

Russia is a behemoth lumbering towards disaster under the weight of a backwards peasantry, with an economy that produces a dearth of goods consumers despise and can't use anyway, and an antiquated government crying for reform but held hostage by a generation of octogenarians. Alcoholism, declining life expectancy: this is a society in crisis.

Or: Russia is a modern state which has struggled out of the grip of medievalist in scarcely a century, has promised its cautious and hardy citizens national security, law and order, cradle to grave welfarism, and has delivered on those promises. This is a society notable for stability amidst hardship.

Those are the terms of the debate in Soviet studies today. Stephen Cohen, a professor of Soviet studies today. Stephen Cohen, a professor of Soviet politics and history at Princeton University and a columnist for The Nation, leans toward the latter view. But he claims that news coverage of the Soviet Union favors the former.

"[New York Times columnist] Flora Lewis may write that the Soviet Union has broken its promises to its people," he said, "but she doesn't realize that the promises that government makes are not the same ones this government makes.

"The coverage is distorted because we emphasize the bad things, because there is no pro-Soviet lobby in this country to clamor about the coverage the way there is for the Chinese, and because the American Journalists are undertrained. Soviet journalists are professional Americanists. They study the country and they cover it for life."

But Cohen was in the minority this week. The Soviets constantly harass the 30-odd American correspondents in Russia, bugging their guarded compounds and occasionally trying to set them up in compromising circumstances with a photographer nearby. The Soviets limit the number of correspondents who speak Russian, and they enforce quirky rules (no photos of bridges, ports, railway junctions, men in uniform, police stations or military installations are allowed).

Still, most commentators praised the coverage, with reservations, said Misha Tsypkin, a Ph.D candidate in the Government Department who emigrated from Russia in 1977, "The coverage is good, considering that the journalists have to deal with a very organized point of view coming from the government. There are no friendly and reliable leakers in the Soviet Union." Times correspondent Shipler quipped. "If a dissident says his apartment was trashed you can't call the KGB to get comment. I had to relearn things when I moved on to Israel, which is obviously a different situation. People say it's hard to work in the Soviet Union but there are certain things which are easier!"

But Tsypkin denounced stereotypes portrayed by the American media. "That cliche about the Russians always being invaded is silly. The invasions brought Russia the greatest land empire in the world! And all the talk about the 20 million dead in World War II, how that affected the people. Stalin killed about 30 million and you don't hear much talk about that."