Modern ‘Rip van Winkle’ : Finding a New World in Old Homeland

Margaret Wettlin thinks of herself as Rip van Winkle.

In 1932, Wettlin was a 25-year-old schoolteacher from suburban Philadelphia who, like many of her generation, looked wistfully to the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution, still young, seemed to offer the hope that American democracy did not in the worst year of the Great Depression.

So Peg Wettlin decided to take a leave of absence from her job and travel to Russia for a year to see.

She stayed for 48 years. She fell in love with and married a Russian, raised a family in Moscow and became absorbed into the Soviet intelligentsia.

And when she finally returned to America after her husband’s death, she “awakened” to discover, much like the mythical Van Winkle, that her home had changed.

‘Couldn’t Go On’

“I was shocked to see the high standard of living that was almost common,” she said in an interview. “I couldn’t help feeling that, seeing the rest of the world, it just couldn’t go on.”

Wettlin’s new America had been largely censored by the Soviet media, she said. Suddenly, she was thrust into a world of electronic cash machines and overflowing supermarket shelves.

The daily routine in the Soviet Union, she said, “is a brutal struggle for survival . . . a battle for food and clothes,” giving queued-up citizens little time for anything else.

By the time Wettlin came home in 1979, the Soviet regime she once admired had suffered the gradual disintegration of its revolutionary ideals through Stalinist purges, World War II and the entrenchment of a totalitarian tyranny, she said.

Compassion for Russians

“My greatest feeling today for Russia is compassion for the Russians,” said Wettlin, who at age 79 is sturdy and tall, with wide blue eyes and thick white hair.

“The average Russian has been through so much it’s beyond the comprehension of Americans,” she said. “Certain Americans see Russians as aggressive, crude, elementary individuals who want to conquer the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . the Russian people have been put through the wringer since 1914, and they are simply wrung dry.”

But Wettlin sees the beginnings of hope for change after returning to the Soviet Union for two months last fall to visit her son and three grandchildren.

Just recently, she said, after several years of stonewalling by Soviet authorities, she received word that her family, including her son’s Russian-born wife, would be allowed to leave the country to join her in the United States. She believes it is the result of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s liberalized policies. “Gorbachev has promise,” she said. “My hope is that he is really the enlightened leader he seems to be.”

Enormous Gulf

Still, there is much to be changed, she added. In bitter contrast with the regime’s professed egalitarian ideals, the ruling Politburo created an enormous gulf between the rich--the leaders themselves--and the poor--most of the rest of the country, she said.

“If there is a big gap between the corporation chiefs in America and the working class, that is nothing compared with the difference between those in higher echelons in Russia and the average working man,” she said.