When a Skeptical American Discovers the Certain Soviets

President Reagan is indeed a quick study. He said last week that General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev told him what really worries the Soviet Union about Star Wars research: that the United States will learn how to launch nuclear missiles from space. The farthest thing from the President’s mind, he said, and yet, “I’m convinced that (Gorbachev) really believes this.”

Reagan figured out in two days what it took this writer two weeks to grasp during a recent tour of the Soviet Union with California journalists. Looking back, it’s clear that the Soviet writers and broadcasters we met along the way, in formal sessions and in more relaxed late-night discussions, really believe the things they say, too.

The Californians went to explore how a workaday reporter or television producer or columnist can affect relations between the superpowers. Many of Soviets we met had spent two weeks in California last year addressing the same question in sessions as stilted as such first meetings can be.

The return visit was different. We were sparring partners--but partners--and we dove not only into the vast differences in the way writers and broadcasters approach their jobs in the two countries but also war and peace, Afghanistan, nuclear winter, ideology and motivations, territory far outside the usual charter of American journalists--but not outside theirs.

It took me so long to realize that they believe what they were saying, I suppose, because it took time to shake the caricature of the Soviets as people too smart to believe in Marxism and too smart to say so.

What the journalists we met believe is that their system will inevitability take over the world, one exhausted country at a time. There is no hurry. The phrase “biding time” recurs in the writings of V. I. Lenin. They believe that war on a grand scale would only slow down a process they see as inexorable. They believe that the United States would start any such war. They are indignant that Americans believe the same about them.

They believe that their dissidents disrupt their revolution and that the way they treat dissidents is their own business. They are in Afghanistan to prevent sinister forces from returning the country to feudalism. What they believe leads to such questions as, “Why do Americans hate us?”

Against that cascade, the Californians pressed their concepts of freedom and challenged the way that Soviet journalism ignored Afghanistan for so long. We raised the possibility that Americans were wary of Soviets because Nikita Krushchev’s line, “We will bury you,” still rings in American ears (they said that was a faulty translation). We tried, without apparent success, to persuade them that they were wrong when they said press and television in this country did not cover a joint discussion by American and Soviet scientists on nuclear winter.

What makes what they believe special is the role of Soviet journalists in their society. American journalists are schooled in skepticism, especially in matters outrageously self-serving and political.

Soviet journalists are part of government--the part with the talent to write persuasively about the dangers of imperialism and the obligations of Soviet citizens, a role about which they are candid and, in most cases, proud. “We serve the party line, that is true,” said a Pravda correspondent. “And the slogan of the party is that the interest of the people is above all. You may wonder why talented people are so willing to be an arm of the party. It is because we are pioneering a new society.”

Nor is everything they write grim. After Gorbachev’s crackdown on alcohol, one writer suggested that if Vodka was to be discouraged, then perhaps the manufacture of glasses should be stopped since glasses simply invite people to pour vodka into them.

The discussions were not all divisive give and take. There were stories that writers and broadcasters could share without regard to border or ideology. For example, we were told that in the early days of the Soviet manned space program, the space bureaucrats considered television crews near the launch pads a nuisance. They stiff-armed coverage. So Soviet television ignored the cosmonauts for a while, and pretty soon the space bureaucrats dropped by to ask how they could be of assistance. It could have happened here.

Agreeing that journalism is a job to keep you on the run, we picked up an old Russian saying, of which there are at least five for every situation: “The wolf eats by its legs.”

One of their group helped us find the Voice of America on our shortwave band every time we lost it. They pampered us and put us up at the best hotels. They were quite candid about the need for dramatic change in their economy and the need to move quickly to meet expectations that began rising when Gorbachev took office.

They told mischievous and sardonic and very Russian jokes about the system.

“How tall is the Soviet Union?”

“It is 1 meter, 82 centimeters.”

“How do you know?”

“I am 1 meter, 57 centimeters, and I am up to here with it.”

At the last meeting, in a plush conference room atop a hotel in the moist warm air of the Black Sea coast, the Californians got back to their more familiar and narrow journalistic charter--are there ways that Soviet writers distort life in the United States, that American writers distort life in the Soviet Union?

In the abstract, those questions can be argued endlessly, so we agreed to pin them down to particulars. The Californians will spend the next year marking up articles from Pravda and other publications and writing comments on Soviet television shows that we think bend over backward to make Americans look bad; they will do the same with clippings and videotapes from America. Next year, when the Soviet writers and broadcasters come back to California we will devote the working sessions to going over the results in detail, looking for lessons to add to one important lesson from the September trip.

The lesson is that, boiled down, the formal conferences and late-night meetings leave two great crystals of conflicting beliefs and values, neither of them likely to shatter or be altered, even under the pressure of the most eloquent words or persuasive pictures. I think the Soviet journalists would agree with the Californians that we can both live--and let live--with that.

Over time, the world will choose between the two crystals of philosophy--one that arranges people’s lives, the other that leaves them free to arrange their own lives. There is a gloomy side to the discovery that the Soviets mean what they say. But it is also possible to think that because the Soviets we talked with are true believers, they are likely to work harder to keep the ideological competition peaceful than they would if they didn’t believe any of it.