Vladimir Pozner, formerly a New York-accented Soviet apologist, is now a quasi-Jew living in Moscow while making big bucks on American TV Vladimir Pozner, it might be said, has the best of two worlds. The former Soviet television commentator has entered into a profitable partnership with American TV talk-show host Phil Donahue. And he spends most of his time in Moscow, where his American TV earnings go a long way.
"Pozner & Donahue," the pair's once-a-week primetime syndicated talk show, is aired in 18 U.S. markets mostly on affiliates of NBC, which also airs the afternoon Donahue show and, with Russian subtitles, it's also a big hit on stations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Pozner, 58, says that he can trace his Jewish ancestry back to the Spanish Expulsion, though his surname comes from the Polish city of Poznan.
He first reached the attention of American viewers as a slick spokesman for the rulers of the old Soviet Union. Formally employed by Soviet TV and the English service of Moscow Radio, Pozner speaks a fluent American English that made him a near-fixture on American news and commentary shows.
Even in his made-for-America incarnation, he lets a certain Soviet slant come through in his views. In an interview with The Jerusalem Report, for instance, he said he had no qualms in declaring that both Patrick Buchanan and George Bush are unabashed anti- Semites.
At the same time, he defends Josef Stalin against a similar charge, maintaining that the Soviet dictator's murderous inclinations were too indiscriminate for him to be considered anti-Semitic. "Stalin was absolutely indifferent to the Jews. He certainly killed more Georgians than anyone else. Stalin was concerned solely with preserving his own power, and if that meant concocting a doctors' plot,' so be it."
Los Angeles Times TV critic Rick Du Brow says Pozner has a combination of traits that explain his success he's "enormously sophisticated, brilliant at promoting himself, and understanding TV." He adds: "If someone is attractive and smooth and appears friendly, that can often negate a lot of negatives." And, he says, Pozner "certainly knows the territory."
Vladimir Pozner has certainly been around. He was born in France, one of the first stops on the itinerary of his father, a native of St. Petersburg who emigrated from the Soviet Union at the age of 14. The elder Pozner who despite his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy was never able to escape his Jewish birth stopped off in Berlin first, then France before emigrating to New York in 1939.
Eventually Pozner pre landed a job with MGM. He became a well-paid film executive, responsible for distributing the company's products in Latin America and Europe. In 1953, enamored of Revolutionary Russia, he took his family back to the U.S.S.R. Vladimir was 19.
Vladimir Pozner was working for the for-foreigners-only Soviet Life magazine and for the North American Department of Radio Moscow when he first came to the attention of "Nightline" host Ted Koppel in the 80s. Koppel was intrigued by Pozner's discernible New York accent and facile command of issues relating to Soviet-U.S. relations. Eventually, Pozner became a fixture on American TV.
"Until last year," says Marshall Goldman, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center, "I wanted to take a shower every time I saw him. Whatever the Soviet Union did, to listen to Pozner, the United States always did it worse. He didn't lie outright, but he deliberately misled you. If you were buying a car from him and would ask how the engine was, he'd say it was fine. But he'd never tell you that the brakes were shot."
In today's Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), says Goldman, Pozner is often tagged as a Jew by his critics on the far right.
Pozner, whose mother is French Catholic, says that the Jewish component of his identity has increasingly come to occupy a position of importance. "My father always vehemently denied he was Jewish, but it did him no good because the name Pozner fingers you automatically. Because of my upbringing, I had a problem with my Jewishness. Today, however, if asked if I am Jewish, I would say I certainly feel partly that I am. But I see Jewishness as being much more than religion it had a lot to do with your culture, where you come from."
In the old Soviet Union, says Pozner, anti-Semitism was institutional but not overt. This prejudice made it harder for him to get into university and almost impossible to get onto TV. (He says the difficulties he experienced in earlier years getting permission to travel came from his repeated refusal to join the KGB as an informer.)
In today's CIS, says Pozner, anti-Semitism is no longer institutional, but it is far more overt, which he says is a more frightening prospect for Soviet Jews. It is conceivable, should Yeltsin fall, that an avowed anti-Semite on the far right could sweep into power.
"Pamyat and other overtly and violently anti-Semitic groups say without any qualification that when they win power they will deal with the Jews. This is something that never existed before, and it scares people. But without the guarantee of livelihoods, Russian Jews do not want to emigrate to Israel."
Neither does Pozner, who would probably have little trouble finding a home in America if he decides to leave Russia. Indeed, he says that if Yeltsin falls and fascism takes hold, he will leave Moscow, where he currently resides for two-thirds of the year.
For the moment, though, he enjoys the best of both worlds, earning big American wages and spending them in a country where the dollar is now king. Pozner: Talks English, feels' Jewish