Did The Post Magazine Error In Publishing Photo?

“Leonard isn’t discussing it,” Inside the Beltway was told yesterday by the secretary for Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.

Not that we blame him, given an apparent horrible lapse of judgment on the part of the newspaper that led to a certain full-page photograph being published in the Washington Post Magazine on Feb. 11.

Our story begins with the celebrated life of Alexis N. Obolensky, who up until his death last year at age 86 was well known in both official and social circles that stretched from Washington, where for several decades he was chief of the State Department’s Russian translation section, to his ancestral home in Russia’s Kaluga Province.

Indeed,