3 Moscow Students Visit Fullerton Campus : From Russia With Wit, a Savvy Debating Team

The heat was on. Yelena Kravchenko and her two Soviet comrades had so far parried and dodged the pointed questions on human rights abuses, political prisoners and press censorship flung at them by this lunchtime crowd of students at Cal State Fullerton.

But now one of the Americans was asking for a blunt comparison of political freedoms.

“I could walk out of here right now and yell to the world that our President, Ronald Reagan, is a fool. Could you do the same in your country?” the student asked.

“Sure,” retorted Kravchenko without missing a beat. “I also have the right to go to Red Square and say that Ronald Reagan is a fool.”

The Moscow State University student’s quick wit broke up the crowd of students and lightened the air at what was an otherwise testy question-and-answer session. That the Soviet students had prepared well for the Americans’ questions was no accident. Kravchenko, Vladimir Mescheryakov, a graduate student at the Institute of International Affairs in Moscow, and Alexey Kruglov, a member of the presidium of the Committee of Youth Organizations of the U.S.S.R., make up a crack debate team currently on a tour of American college campuses, where they will debate U.S. teams on the question, “What is the responsibility of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for the economic and political growth and stability of the developing nations?”

Monday’s visit to the Fullerton campus was the group’s first stop on the two-week, seven-campus tour that will include UCLA later this week. Since the late 1970s, Soviet and U.S. debating teams have toured each others’ countries every two years.

The Soviet team, chosen by the Student Council of the U.S.S.R., which claims to represent 10 million students, was supposed to come here in February but postponed the trip because of the impending death of then party leader Konstantin Chernenko.

Earlier Monday, the trio visited a Russian language class, heard a lecture on Soviet foreign policy and received a guided tour of the Fullerton campus from student association president Tracey Stotz.

At one point on the tour, while passing the well-marked Miles D. McCarthy Hall of Letters and Sciences, Kravchenko stopped and asked nervously, “He wasn’t related to the senator, was he?”

Assured that he was not, Kravchenko and the tour went on, concluding with the question-and-answer session where the Soviets explained the requirements of party membership--”You must be among the most convinced Communists, and I use that word knowing it is a curse here”--and revealed their favorite American authors, “Hemingway, Mark Twain, O. Henry, but not Robert Ludlum.”

Dr. Lucy Keele, professor of speech communication at Fullerton and one of the coordinators of the tour, said that “this is the only program, public or private, that puts American students in front of Soviet audiences, and Soviet students in front of American audiences, and lets them say whatever comes to their minds.

“There is no better way to understand someone’s point of view than to get at their value premises; you have to understand what their values are, where they spring from.”

Monday night, the Soviet students got a chance to explain some aspects of their country’s system to a crowd of about 700 Fullerton students.

For the most part, the Soviets recited a litany of the contributions their country has made to industrial capacity in such Third World countries as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

‘No Political Strings’

“And our country does not attach political strings to the aid it provides,” Mescheryakov said.

American debater Brian Holland, a senior in political science at Cal State Fullerton, responded that there is not a single example of the Soviet Union contributing substantially to any international food assistance program in its history.

“Both of our countries have acted irresponsibly at times,” Holland said. “But one has been more irresponsible than the other.”

But Kravchenko had an answer for that one, too.

“Your country is richer than ours, and it did not suffer during the Second World War as our country did,” she said. “So I think it’s a logical and wise approach that your country give more to the developing countries than we do.”