…and the cloud cuckoo land of legal nit-picking, by Geoffrey Bindman
An unusual libel case came my way in the late 1980s. Vladimir Matusevitch had been sued and the trial had taken place in his absence. He was facing a demand for damages of £65,000, plus costs. He became aware of this only when a bailiff called to seize his possessions. I was able to get a stay of execution. Matusevitch was a journalist employed by Radio Free Europe to broadcast to the Soviet Union, where strict control of local media denied the population accurate information about what was going on in the world.
RECRUITMENT POLICY
His opponent, Vladimir Telnikoff, had been employed at one time by the BBC Russian Service to do much the same thing. The Daily Telegraph on 18 February 1984 published an article by Telnikoff, “Selecting the Right Wavelength to Tune into Russia”, in which he complained that these Western efforts were ineffective in turning the Russian people against their rulers.
Telnikoff argued that the policy of the BBC and other Western broadcasters was confused:
