Russian Lesson : Beverly Hills Students Return From Soviet Tour With New Insights
Riding a train from Leningrad to Moscow, Beverly Hills High School senior David Epton quickly learned that in the citadel of socialism, consumer goods are king.
Epton’s mother, Nanette, rewarded a woman attendant who served tea on the train with a bottle of nail polish. The excited attendant quickly spread the word among other workers who besieged the Americans, hoping to buy anything they had to sell.
Epton, 17, and his mother, a native of Manchuria who speaks fluent Russian, had plenty.
They used a tiny table in a compartment “the size of a sofa” to display their wares--20 T-shirts, cosmetics, cassette tapes, sunglasses, cigarettes, perfume, chewing gum.
“The conductor paid 225 rubles (worth $1.10 each) for all of the T-shirts,” Epton said. “We sold from midnight to 3 a.m. and made 560 rubles.”
His mother’s only regret: “I didn’t take enough.”
Epton and his mother visited Russia earlier this month with a group privately organized by the school’s Russian studies teacher, Henry Dersch, who has taken more than 500 students to the Soviet Union on 23 trips since 1970.
Dersch said his Russian studies course is the only one in Southern California and he developed it to familiarize students “with the very complex subjects of Russia and the Soviet Union. Some ignorance is taken away. They learn Russians are ordinary people who love their kids, want to send them to school and want houses and cars like everyone else.”
He added that since his first trip, he has noticed a general modernization in architecture and clothing. “The current concern for hair styles and makeup was non-existent when I first went,” he said.
The 10 students on the April trip all reported encounters with Russians anxious to buy any scarce goods they possessed. All the goods the students took into Russia were not for sale, though. Two described how they smuggled two suitcases of clothing into the country for Soviet Jews.
At a party in Beverly Hills on Monday, the students swapped photos from the trip and discussed their impressions of Russians they met. The group was given VIP treatment during its 10-day stay, and Dersch said Occidental Petroleum Chairman Armand Hammer arranged a visit to Lenin’s apartment in the Kremlin, usually off limits to tourists.
With help from Hammer, Dersch had first taken a group to Lenin’s apartment and museum last December, and those students wrote the late Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko a letter (later reprinted in Pravda) thanking him for that stop on their tour.
For the return trip, Dersch asked senior Liz Rayner to do a pencil drawing of Lenin to present to the museum’s director. Beneath the drawing, Rayner wrote: “May our futures together bring peace, happiness and understanding.”
“The director was very touched by the drawing,” Dersch said. “He embraced me and placed the drawing in a display case, saying it was the only gift from American students in the museum.”
The students, most of whom are Jewish, were impressed by what they saw as a genuine affection that Russian people had for Americans. Some, however, viewed the Soviet system with a wary eye.
Before leaving, Ronnie Richards, 18, had arranged to deliver suitcases of clothing to Russian Jews. To get that clothing into the country, he said, he loaded his briefcase with American newspapers and magazines that he thought customs agents would not allow in.
Ignored Luggage
They were so busy going through the newspapers, Richards said, that they ignored his suitcases. He and another student later delivered the suitcases to a Jewish couple, he said.
Eddy Machtinger, 17, said his friends in Los Angeles “were shocked that I was going because of Russian anti-Semitism and the fact that Jews can’t get out.” Machtinger met a “refusednik” who had been an engineer but was demoted to a boiler room operator when he applied for a visa 12 years ago.
Laleh Soomekh, also 17, said she met a man on the Moscow subway who went on at length about how much he loved Los Angeles, Hollywood, American films and theater.
“But then he said he didn’t like (playwright) Arthur Miller because he’s Jewish,” she said. “One of the parents with us spoke up and said she was Jewish. The man became so flustered he didn’t know how to react.”
Hungry for News
Some of the students were able to get American publications into the country, and Gil Traub, 17, found Russians very interested in news from the United States.
“Russian people really like Americans,” he said. “I asked them if they liked Reagan, and they all said yes. They were very interested in my American newspapers, but when I showed a soldier a picture of a Russian SS-24 missile (in Newsweek magazine), he laughed. He said the drawing was so far off, not even close to what the missile looked like.”
The students were relatively free to travel about Moscow and Leningrad by bus and subway, they said, and most added that they felt safer there than they do traveling around Los Angeles. Even when Soomekh and some other students encountered a drunk who professed to love American girls, they said the situation was nothing they couldn’t handle.
Americans have the impression that Russians live terrible lives, several students said, but they were impressed by the people’s resourcefulness in getting around prohibitions against contacting Western tourists or buying Western goods.
Although Soomekh enjoyed her trip, she never developed a taste for Russian food and lost seven pounds in a week. “The best meal I had was a cheeseburger at the Americans Embassy,” she said.
Drinks Always Available
They may not have enjoyed the food, several said, but Russian drinks were always available. A young Russian led one group on a labyrinthine route to a wine tasting in the back room at a closed liquor store, where they imbibed freely.
Told that wine tasters normally only swirl the drink in their mouths, Machtinger asked: “You mean, we were supposed to spit it out?”
The students were nearly unanimous in their perception that Russians initially appear to be cold and reserved, but they quickly become “extremely warm once you get to know them.”
Soomekh said the trip and Dersch’s course, which examines 20th-Century Russian history, politics, culture and sociology, gave her an interest in studying international relations in college. ‘This is the only class that ever motivated me academically,” she said.
Added her twin sister, Ladan: “This trip made you feel it’s too bad there’s all this tension.”
