Idaho and Soviet Moscows Trade Journalists : 100th Birthday Brings Gift of Glasnost

The big 100th anniversary party for the world’s pea and lentil capital was threatening to fizzle. The Folklore Society was hard-pressed to find people to square-dance on Main Street, and the Liar’s Contest had been scrapped because no one had entered.

Just when it looked like the centennial highlight would be a helicopter dropping 5,000 Ping-Pong balls over the shopping mall, glasnost came to the Moscow, Ida., centennial.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Soviet-style openness arrived in Idaho in the grandfatherly form of Yegor Yakovlev, an influential Soviet journalist who agreed to trade Moscows for a week with a reporter for the daily Idahonian.

If the exchange of journalists and views didn’t stir passions among the populace, it at least provoked thought. “Hell, yes, a place like this can play a role in international politics,” local real estate agent Linda Hartford said.

What Yakovlev came to call “a small, first experiment” in this quirky university town of 18,000 in fact reflects a blossoming grass-roots diplomacy; scores of Soviet citizens are paying official but privately funded visits to America’s smaller cities and towns this summer.

They range from teen-agers camping in Colorado to Kirov ballerinas dancing in New Jersey, and from the Latvian choir singing in Missoula, Mont., to the Leningrad Dixieland Jazz Band playing Sacramento, La Crosse, Wis., and Grand Rapids, Mich.

One advantage was immediately clear to Yakovlev. “I knew much about America before,” he said. “I saw a lot of films and read a lot of books. But probably before I saw black-and-white pictures--now it’s in color.”

Wrote Daily Column

Yakovlev spent his week gathering material for his own paper, writing a daily column for the Idahonian’s front page and sampling a style of American glasnost that left him at times resentful, grateful, bemused, enlightened, touched and--if you count the boat crash--downright worried.

He left for home over the weekend to resume editing the weekly Moscow News, a tabloid publication that some observers call the Soviet Union’s liveliest, with a circulation of 1 million in five languages.

It has published articles suggesting a clampdown on information about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and it often reports on other controversial subjects, putting it on the cutting edge of the new Soviet openness.

How glasnost came to Idaho is another story. Jay Shelledy, editor and publisher of Moscow’s 10,000-circulation, seven-reporter Idahonian, had yearned to do “something different” for the town’s centennial.

After countless phone calls and three trips to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Shelledy had a successful plan.

Cub Reporter

Vera White, a 52-year-old cub reporter, went to Soviet Moscow to chat with journalists there, meet with officials and write cultural pieces for the Idahonian.

With her went a mayoral proclamation, centennial T-shirts, pictures of the seasons in her hometown and two dozen packets of lentil chili. (At the last minute, a sack of Idaho potatoes was deemed too heavy to carry.)

In return came Yakovlev, toting bottles of vodka, jars of caviar and a somewhat reticent interpreter supplied by his embassy.

“The Russian has landed,” the next day’s Idahonian proclaimed.

Next to the headline ran Yakovlev’s first Idahonian column, which set out to chip away at American stereotypes of the Soviet system. “I’m only one of many Soviet journalists who see as a main idea in their work strengthening of ‘glasnost,’ widening of democracy and the victory of the principles of social justice,” he wrote. “Today, when in my country these ideals are developing quickly and irreversibly, I, and, I believe, many other Soviet journalists want to say our lives had sense.”

Editor Shelledy, writing later, questioned whether the Soviets might use exchanges such as this one as forums for propaganda.

‘So Do We’

“Yes, in some ways they do. And so do we,” Shelledy wrote.

When he wasn’t at his Cyrillic typewriter, borrowed from the local university, Yakovlev ate pizza, drank Scotch, shot the rapids of the Snake River and tried to chat with Moscowans through his young interpreter, who excused the rough spots in the translation by saying that this was not part of his usual job at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. The pizza lunch--at the Karl Marks pizzeria--had a hint of propaganda gone awry. Yakovlev ordered a pepperoni and pineapple pizza and learned that the restaurant was named not for the philosopher but for the three founders--one named Karl and two named Mark.

“Marxism is very tasteful,” Yakovlev concluded tactfully.

If he was mistaken to assume that a pizzeria’s name expressed philosophy, he also overestimated American familiarity with the term glasnost, which he said was as universally understood as Sputnik.

‘Yakosomething’

“Glasnost? Was that his name? No, I think it was Yakosomething,” said Mark Guilbeau, the 28-year-old pizzeria manager.

Just how Moscow, Ida., got its own name is uncertain. The first settlers, whose pigs thrived on the local roots, called it Hog Heaven, but christened the town’s first post office Paradise. But Idaho already had a Paradise and the mail got mixed up, so, according to at least one version of the story, it was renamed after someone’s hometown, Moscow, Pa., which had been named by Russian immigrants.

People who don’t like that story claim that a resident named it for his ma’s cow, though townspeople now pronounce the name to rhyme with snow .

Boris Malakhov, press officer at the Soviet Embassy, said the Russians can’t agree on how their Moscow was named, either.

Modern-day Moscow, Ida., in the northwest corner of the Idaho panhandle, is a curious mix of quaint and cosmopolitan. A mainly white community with no slums, it is home to the University of Idaho and several thousand foreign students. It combines a colorful cultural palette and keen interest in world affairs with down-on-the-farm friendliness.

The streets are clean enough to keep the mayor’s white shoes spotless, and the most serious crime this summer was the bungled vending machine burglary at the Bowlerama--2,000 quarters tend to weigh a thief down.

In this conservative state, the town is sometimes viewed as a sort of hotbed of liberalism; the latest example is its new sister-city relationship with a Nicaraguan town.

Maybe that is why Moscowans--whom Yakovlev insisted on calling Muscovites--seemed blase about his columns, translated into slightly broken English by the embassy information officer accompanying him.

Shelledy braced himself for irate letters calling the Idahonian a commie rag. They never came. He warned Yakovlev to be prepared for public criticism, but there was none.

“Everybody was great,” Yakovlev wrote in his farewell column.

However, not everyone was enthusiastic about glasnost.

‘Nothing to Talk About’

Jim Johnson, 27, was wary. “I see a general attitude that, if we just bring a few of their guys over here and throw a few of ours over there, we’ll have something wonderful someday,” Johnson said. “But our moral concepts are completely different and we have absolutely nothing to talk about. Liking the people subverts the issues. I don’t care how many you send over here.”

Eric Sodorff, a 17-year-old farm boy, disagrees. “The feelings we have about other countries have to begin at this level,” he said.

Sodorff became the first local subscriber to Yakovlev’s Moscow News, so delighting the editor that he waived the $19 fee.

He gave the teen-ager a wooden doll that opens to reveal increasingly smaller dolls inside.

“He told me that truth is like this doll, that you have to uncover layers to get to the truth,” Sodorff said.

Privately, Yakovlev complained that Shelledy was making him spend too much time on the other side of the notebook.

He spent hours debating college classes, shaking politicians’ hands and meeting the American press.

Better Understanding

“One curious thing,” Yakovlev said through his interpreter. “Many of my ideas of the U.S. were on the thought that Soviet propaganda was wrong about things like homeless people and the unemployed. I met a family whose son was unemployed in Boise. Now I understand Americans better than before.”

Realtor Hartford was among a dozen friends of Shelledy’s who spent an entire day with Yakovlev aboard a fishing boat called the Happy Hooker.

Hartford was too daunted by the translator to strike up a conversation but made Yakovlev pose for a snapshot and sign an autograph.

She spent the day watching him play with the skipper’s rambunctious 3-year-old son, try to teach the sleepy dog how to shake and toast his hosts over plastic cups of Scotch.

“This is really real,” Hartford said. “On this river, we’re just people thrown together. It breaks down the defenses and there’s interaction even without words.”

Unswayed by the Americans’ claims that monster sturgeon lurk in the depths of the Snake River, Yakovlev didn’t go near a fishing pole on the 10-hour trip through the deepest gorge in North America.

Riding Rapids

Instead, he rode the rapids of Hell’s Canyon illegally perched on top of the jet boat, grinning as the icy spray hit his bare belly. He waved at passing rafters and tipped his Idahonian baseball cap at some campers.

After the boat’s engine died suddenly in mid-rapid and hurled itself against a particularly jagged edge of Oregon, Yakovlev smiled wanly while repairs were made.

“Every trip needs a little excitement,” he said.

Shelledy said he plans to accept Yakovlev’s invitation to visit the Soviet Union next year and continue the exchange. “I think he really enjoyed it, Shelledy said, “and I think it’s good to rub elbows with people who run their shop differently.”

In an eloquent column bidding Yakovlev farewell, Shelledy wrote that his most enduring memory of the visit would be that of Yakovlev sitting on his front porch, cradling Shelledy’s 7-month-old son, Ian, and cooing to the baby in Russian. Shelledy said that it was then that he realized that to an infant at least language, ideology and politics made no difference.

“I want Ian and Yegor, Yakovlev’s grandchild, when they meet as adults, to feel the same way,” Shelledy concluded.

‘Lovely Cowboy Hat’

Yakovlev left for home bearing postcards of Idaho in its early days and “a lovely cowboy hat that I can’t wear in Moscow because everyone would point a finger at me and say: ‘What an old fool.’ ”

Although his initial Idahonian column had lectured Americans, in his own farewell column, Yakovlev had visibly softened.

“Back home, I’ll write about great things that can be achieved by people who really want to cooperate and not blame each other for everything, by people who want to know each other and not to teach each other,” he said.

Staff writer William J. Eaton in Moscow and researcher Dallas Jamison in Denver also contributed to this story.