People Power Fuels Peace Initiatives

People want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Last summer, Ron Kaufman took 25 Americans to Peking, Canton and Shanghai where they threw Frisbees. They did it, Kaufman said, to “pave the way for world peace and understanding through lighthearted and non-competitive play.” They threw Frisbees on river banks, in parks and town squares. They threw Frisbees on the Great Wall.

This summer, Kaufman, 29, of Encinitas, is planning to throw Frisbees for peace in the Kremlin.

He is among the thousands of Americans from housewives and real estate agents to television producers and children who in recent years have become “citizen diplomats”--otherwise average Americans who, unhappy with the peacemaking progress of world leaders, have decided to take their own brands of diplomacy to America’s ideological adversaries, particularly the Soviet Union.

Boost for Exchange Programs

That grass-roots movement got a boost, observers say, from last year’s Geneva summit during which President Reagan and Soviet Prime Minister Gorbachev agreed to what Reagan called the broadest set of exchange programs in the history of Soviet-American relations.

People-to-people exchanges, Reagan told Congress after the summit, “help break down stereotypes, build friendships, and, frankly, provide an alternative to propaganda. . . . There’s always room for movement, action, and progress when people are talking to each other instead of about each other.”

Whatever the effect of citizen diplomacy, the numbers are up: This year about 120,000 Americans will travel to the Soviet Union, compared to about 50,000 two years ago.

Further boosting the trend, direct flights between the United States and the Soviet Union resumed in April for the first time in seven years. And U.S. officials say fear of terrorism in European and Mediterranean countries has heightened interest in the Soviet Union as a travel destination.

Although some U.S. groups have canceled tours as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, travel agents specializing in arranging tours for citizen diplomats said other groups--perhaps motivated by the disaster to even greater efforts for peace--have scheduled visits for later in the summer.

Soviets Are Reciprocating

And more Soviet citizens are reciprocating. In July, a group of 50 Soviets will join 130 Americans for a “Mississippi Peace Cruise,” a project of Promoting Enduring Peace--a group that for the past four years has organized Volga Peace Cruises in the Soviet Union for American tourists.

There are now 205 American organizations involved in exchange or educational programs with the Soviet Union. They range from the 130,000-member, Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to Grandmothers for Peace, Ranchers for Peace, Bike for Peace, and Salmon for Peace--a project of Soviet and American scientists to help sockeye salmon find their way back to former spawning sites in northern China and Russia.

Among those hoping to “make a difference” with their particular mission are media entrepreneur Ted Turner, who will host his Goodwill Games in Moscow this summer, and psychiatrist Jerry Jampolsky, who recently led 40 children on a two-week visit to the Soviet capital. They include church officials, members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and producers of the interactive television programs known as “spacebridges.” In addition, hundreds of students, teachers, artists, attorneys and even clowns have submitted exchange proposals to U.S./U.S.S.R. Exchange Initiatives, a program begun in January by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) to coordinate exchanges.

Some travel agencies such as the nonprofit Citizens Exchange Council in New York, and Soviet-American Travel in Bellingham, Wash., specialize in sending Americans to the Soviet Union to “explore common interests as well as differences” and arrange home visits with the Soviets.

Though Reagan has publicly endorsed the efforts of citizen diplomats, most State Department officials and foreign policy experts say the good-will trips have little effect on diplomatic relations. At the same time, however, they say citizen diplomacy is harmless, and may even do some good.

“One of our goals is to break down the secrecy and closed nature of Soviet society,” said one official on the Soviet desk of the State Department. “Having Americans in large numbers go there and interact and convey, firsthand, American values is a healthy thing to do.”

Americans traveling to the Soviet Union now are challenging officially arranged and monitored tours, said Michael Shuman, president of the Palo Alto-based Center for Innovative Diplomacy, a nonprofit research organization, and co-author of “The New Diplomats” to be published by Crossroads/Unger/Continuum in January. In contrast to travelers in earlier decades, “people are essentially arranging their own agendas,” he said. Americans who arrive with phone numbers can easily make their own appointments with Soviet officials or professional counterparts, he added.

The U.S. State Department, however, warns travelers to the Soviet Union that their private conversations may be tapped, that 20% of the country is closed to foreign visitors, and that Soviet law prohibits its citizens from taking foreigners into their homes overnight without permission.

The exchange programs of the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur-based retreat usually known for gestalt therapy, sulfur baths and “getting in touch with yourself,” are considered the epicenter of the U.S. citizen diplomacy movement.

Starting seven years ago when there were no official U.S./Soviet exchange programs, former anti-war organizer Jim Hickman, an Esalen co-founder, went to the Soviet Union to check out Soviet progress in parapsychology. There he “discovered” a network of philosophically aligned “new age” Soviets. After lengthy negotiations, the Esalen Institute set up its Soviet/American Exchange Program, which has brought together Soviet and American doctors, researchers, musicians and astronauts for private/public meetings.

While Esalen continues its human potential workshops in Big Sur, the San Francisco-based Soviet/American Exchange Program works on communications, human development and political psychology projects.

Each year, an interdisciplinary group of American psychoanalysts, political scientists, Sovietologists, and social anthropologists meets through the program to discuss the U.S.-Soviet relationship and promote citizen diplomacy.

Last year, for example, after four years of negotiations, the program helped create the Assn. of Space Explorers, an independent international organization of 25 astronauts and cosmonauts.

‘Planetary Consciousness’

In July, the program will host a delegation of Soviet writers who will meet with American editors, publishers and writers in New York and San Francisco.

Whatever their route to citizen diplomacy, the majority are mainstream Americans, motivated by a fear of nuclear war, “new age planetary consciousness” or a need to “make a difference in the world,” said “New Diplomats” author Shuman.

Mainstream diplomats are seeking “common ground,” particularly with the Soviets, Shuman said. Some, like himself, find their dreary expectations of that country--based on Cold War impressions--shattered by bustling streets, newspapers filled with personal ads, break dancing, back-slapping, joke-telling Soviet citizens and trim, shapely women in leotards leading morning aerobics on Soviet television.

In March, Allen Rosenthal, a Los Angeles real estate attorney, went to the Soviet Union with the Center for Soviet American Dialogue, a 2-year-old Bellevue, Wash.-based organization that specializes in arranging visits in Soviet homes . He said he had expected Soviets to “have three heads and a gun on each hip. . . . It was a shock to find they were just human beings like you and me, sincere in their belief that what they are doing is the right thing--but still admitting they had things to learn and that they wanted to talk to us.”

Rosenthal took his banjo. “We went to a private home for a party. There were three musicians, a banjo player and two jazz violinists. We had a jam session with these guys playing American Dixieland. It was fabulous.

“It gave us the feeling that if we did enough of that the whole business of nuclear war would be a forgotten issue.”

Similarly, Danaan Parry, 46, a clinical psychologist and former physicist with the Atomic Energy Commission, leads unstructured tours to the Soviet Union through the Holyearth Foundation, a Seattle-based nonprofit education organization. On one trip, he said, his daughter, 16, went to a park and met a group of people. She and a friend were invited to someone’s home. “I didn’t see them all day long. When she got back to the hotel, she had this incredible necklace the wife had given her. My daughter is still talking about that day. It has affected her life.”

Joseph Montville, research director at the State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs in Arlington, Va., said open-minded, altruistic citizen diplomacy, which he calls “track two” diplomacy, can never replace official or “track one” diplomacy, with its protocol, posturing and underlying threat of force. But both “track one” and “track two” diplomacy are necessary for psychological reasons, he said.

Government leaders and their diplomats must play forceful, even warrior-like roles to win the confidence of their citizens, he said. But some citizen diplomats, particularly in volatile situations, can present fears and anxieties and explore various ideas for resolving conflicts in a low-risk, non-threatening atmosphere, he said.

Most citizen diplomats scoff at the idea that their work has no long-range effect. “I don’t believe it for a minute. I think it’s a matter of numbers,” said Joel Schatz, 48, director of the San Francisco Teleport, a hi-tech Soviet/American communications project of the Washington Research Institute.

‘A Different Perception’

“No one event will have an effect, but more and more you have an atmosphere in which people are less afraid to meet each other and work things out. As that becomes sensed by policy makers who pay attention to the mass media, a different perception begins to take hold (with them).”

Last year, Schatz, the former director of the Oregon Energy Office, created the first civilian computer channel to link American home computers to personal computers in Moscow through satellite. Initially, the channel will link San Francisco and Moscow, said Schatz, who is now finalizing plans to operate “teleport” communication stations in both cities.

“People are getting really scared by the state of relations. They really want to do something,” said Steven Kalishman, 32, an attorney and director of Citizen Diplomacy Inc., a nonprofit corporation that administers a sister-city program between Gainesville, Fla., and Novorossiisk, and publishes a semi-monthly magazine, The Citizen Diplomat, to promote other official or unofficial community ties between Soviet and American cities.

“Really, the human contact is what has the greatest impact,” said Kalishman, who with his wife, Natasha, a Novorossiisk native, persuaded their respective towns to form the first sister-city organization without the involvement of national governments.

So far, four delegations from Gainesville have traveled to Novorossiisk, where they delivered children’s art works, adults’ photographs and entertainment by the Gainesville Cross Creek Cloggers and the Bucksnort Barndance Band. The visits have not yet been reciprocated but “We’ve invited them,” Kalishman said.

Despite surface congeniality, however, Sergei Batrovrin, 29, a Moscow artist now living in New York, says that the Soviet authorities have never encouraged citizen diplomacy among their own citizens and in fact “are doing everything they can to stop this sort of activity.”

In 1982, then-Muscovite Batrovrin formed a private group to encourage increased formal and informal contact with the United States. He called it, “The Group to Establish Trust Between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.” That same year, he was warned his activities were “provocative, anti-social and illegal”; then he was arrested and placed in a Moscow psychiatric hospital, according to a spokesman for Amnesty International, which adopted Batrovrin as a “prisoner of conscience.”

Others Forcibly Committed

Batrovrin was eventually allowed to emigrate. But since January of this year, four more members of his group have been arrested and forcibly committed to psychiatric hospitals in the Moscow area, according to Amnesty International.

Batrovrin said one reason he formed his group was that it is difficult for Americans to make contact with ordinary Soviets. He said thousands of Americans who contact the official Soviet Peace Committee mistakenly assume they are dealing with ordinary citizens. “They simply don’t understand they are actually in contact with Soviet employees of the Soviet government trying to pass themselves off as a public organization.”

While Soviets generally insist on complete control of joint media projects, they show surprising restraint about using propaganda on television, said Kim Spencer, a producer with Internews, a New York-based television production company that worked with other American “peace entrepreneurs” to produce eight “spacebridges.”

Spencer, a former anti-war activist, believes the programs--allowing live, face-to-face communication--help break down the “process of creating an enemy.” But significantly, he says, they also are “good TV.”

Many citizen diplomats see the increase in youth exchanges as the most significant aspect of the movement.

“Children are open. . . . They are going to be leaders of our countries. Now is the time to start breaking down the walls of mistrust and misunderstanding,” said Holyearth Foundation director Danaan Parry. Last year, the organization took a group of 20 American children, ages 10 to 17, to the Soviet Union and planted “peace gardens” with birch trees, the symbol of peace in the Soviet Union, Parry said.

Another nonprofit organization, the U.S./U.S.S.R. Youth Exchange Program of San Francisco, will sponsor its second annual wilderness trek this summer for Soviet and American young people, ages 17 to 21. Last summer, 20 young people spent nearly four weeks together climbing the highest peak in the Soviet Union’s Caucasus Mountains, Mt. Elbrus.

According to Cynthia Lazaroff, 29, co-founder and executive director of the Youth Exchange, the Soviets were impressed with how different the Americans were from one another.

Forced by circumstances to cooperate as they trudged through the snow, rivers and mountains carrying heavy packs, the Americans also became aware of the Soviet attitude that any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, she said. Soviet climbers would repeatedly ask to help carry portions of the Americans’ packs. But it was hard for the Americans to let go, she said.

One peak was 9 meters higher than the other at the top. “A number of the American boys were really anxious to try to make it to the higher peak,” even though a climber (with a previous group) had died trying, she said. The Soviets argued for the smaller peak so that everybody in the group would have a better chance. Lazaroff recalled that one young man, Chito Porath, a 21-year-old Latino from Sacramento, said he had had many tough breaks in his life and wanted to go for the higher peak since he might not ever have this opportunity again.

After a long group discussion, he not only changed his mind but ended up helping Soviets make it to the top of the lesser peak, Lazaroff said. Afterward, she recalled, a Soviet climber, Marina Yegorova, 19, from Moscow said, “Without his smile and encouragement, I would never make it as fast as I did.”

For Lazaroff, the mountain is a symbol. “The two countries have to climb together. It’s not an easy thing to do. You fall down, you stumble, you catch cold. You have to deal with altitude, changes, ideological differences, backgrounds and philosophies.

“But ultimately you have to climb that mountain together if you’re going to survive.”