Starting with work at the Press Agency in 1961, going through the school of the USSR State Television and Radio, collaborating with Phil Donahue's show, explaining in the best possible way the most unexpected statements of the USSR leadership on domestic and international affairs, receiving not only TEFI but also orders (For Services to the Fatherland IV degree, Friendship of Peoples, etc.), he became the most iconic figure in Soviet and later Russian journalism.
However, when it comes to migration, the international journalist, organizer of well-known telebridges, is familiar firsthand with the problems of migrants from the former USSR – from different historical periods and generations. Vladimir Pozner is unwavering: emigrants have very little chance of preserving the culture they 'take with them' when leaving their homeland.
Pozner says that he has seen emigrants of the first wave, the second wave, and Jewish emigration. At the same time, culture is preserved with difficulty, despite the fact that earlier emigration was mostly that of the intelligentsia. But in the new emigration, as Pozner noted, completely unprecedented things often happen – after just 3-4 years, compatriots abroad acquire an accent.
The journalist understands where the disgusting snobbery comes from – when those who have gone abroad say 'how do you say this in Russian.' In his opinion, it is ordinary human stupidity and 'psychological problems.'
About the 'last' wave of emigrants, Pozner speaks with sadness – 'they have nothing to preserve.' Indeed, people who have read little, rarely attended concerts, remain in a kind of 'vacuum.' Having left Russian culture 'overboard,' they never become 100% Americans, Israelis, or anyone else.
However, Pozner grew up in Brooklyn, lived for long periods in the USA, and he himself, despite his highest level of education, knowledge, and professionalism amazing for our time (one is tempted to call his professionalism 'old school'), in essence remained a curiosity. In domestic journalism, he is a conscience looking at 'unwashed Russia' from 'over there,' and in foreign journalism, he is a representative of Russian reality.
It seems that the fate of a person abroad, and in essence – the main problem of any migration – is that the one who has entered or 'left beyond the borders' remains in a kind of 'zero' space, in a sort of No Man's Land. Even in Warsaw, relatively close to us, speak Russian on a tram and you will notice contemptuous glances. And in the former USSR, it is as if one is supposed to fidget nervously before foreign speech – so as not to disgrace oneself before a foreigner.
It seems that this is precisely the loneliness that befell one journalist, who, though incredibly intelligent and charmingly attentive, will never become 'one of us' either here or, of course, 'there.'
_