Moscow on the Pacific Views Gorbachev With Skepticism : Soviet Emigres Are Suspicious of Summitry

As Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan huddle in Washington this week, the vigorous Soviet emigre community of Los Angeles will be watching with skepticism, suspicion--and fascination.

The first visit by a Soviet leader to this country since Leonid Brezhnev came for eight days in 1973 has Gorbachev’s former countrymen talking about the doings in the Soviet Union with the intensity of kibitzers watching a Grand Master chess match.

For many, Gorbachev is just a better salesman for a system they rejected.

Still the Same System

Editor and publisher Alexander Polovets expresses the opinion of many emigres when he says of Gorbachev’s program: “You can call it whatever you want, but a dictatorship is still a dictatorship and a one-party system is still a one-party system.

“Today, we have Mr. Gorbachev. Tomorrow, we could have another Stalin.”

Yet almost despite themselves and the deep-rooted anti-Soviet feelings many brought with them, the 60,000 emigres living in Los Angeles devour every scrap of news from the old country, and the summit has only whetted their appetites for more.

“I follow it very closely. I am fascinated,” said Beverly Hills lawyer Boris Gorbis, a former Odessa resident who came to the United States in 1975.

For months, Polovets has been running stories about the summit in the pages of his Russian-language weekly Panorama. On Saturday, Channel 18’s weekly hour-long American Russian television program will interrupt entertainment for a special segment on the summit.

On Sunset Boulevard, the topic came up Friday at the opening of the emigre-owned 350-seat Ataman nightclub. The summit was an undercurrent Saturday at an elaborate emigre bar mitzvah just off Mulholland Drive and also at a more modest welcoming party in the Fairfax area for a family just in from Berehovo, a town of 40,000 in the Carpathian Ukraine.

In widely varying accents and grammar, singer Mischa Shufutinsky; nightclub announcer Albert Pisarenkov; actor Elya Baskin; TV producer Serge Levin; dentist Leonard Glosman; deli owner Inna Katsnelson; computer expert Eugene Volokh; temple director William Weiss, Gorbis, the lawyer; Polovets, the editor--offer their perceptions with a didacticism that can seem jarring.

“This is Soviet habit, unfortunately,” said Levin, director of the American Russian television program. “Everybody who used to live in Russia teaches everybody. Russians are a very strange people sometimes. Impatient people sometimes, in my opinion.

“I agree that it is not finished,” he said of Gorbachev’s attempt to rejuvenate the Soviet system. “They change many, many things. We have to wait. We cannot tell today it is not good, it is not working.”

Shufutinsky, the bear-like baritone who is part-owner of the Ataman and its lead attraction, takes a more skeptical view:

“This guy, Gorbachev, he has to prove to us he is like he seems. He seems like a good guy. We want to trust him. We want to believe the Russian people are going to live a good life.”

Ataman announcer Pisarenkov, a well-known Moscow comedian who arrived here two months ago after an eight-year wait for a exit visa, is more succinct.

“I hope,” he said, “but I don’t believe.”

Southland Cluster

About 30,000 of the Soviet Jews who emigrated to the United States since the late 1960s settled in Los Angeles, says the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. Polovets said that an equal number of non-Jewish Russian speakers, including Armenians, Ukrainians and East Europeans, have settled in Los Angeles. The addresses of Panorama subscribers are mainly in West Hollywood and the Fairfax neighborhood but also in the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Long Beach.

Gorbis, a psychology professor when he arrived here in 1975, got a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, and passed the Bar on his first attempt. Now he lives in Benedict Canyon and drives a BMW. “You have your perfect Communist yuppy they would wish,” he said with a laugh.

He is moving his law offices from Hollywood to the Great Western Bank building on Wilshire Boulevard. “Beverly Hills! Hooray!” he exulted. “It was time to move on to something better.”

About the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting, he said: “The trouble with the summit is that it is loaded beyond its capacity. We have a lame duck president coming into a major negotiating session essentially with an arch rival burdened with such political liabilities that I find it very difficult to see how it can yield any results.”

It is a point picked up by Sergei Zamascikov, a RAND Corp. consultant, who arrived in the United Sates in 1979.

“The summit has been blown up out of proportion. We already had two summits. There will be a fourth one next year. . . . It is not big news anymore. I don’t think it should be. . . . The hoopla that surrounds it doesn’t help the foreign policy of this country. . . . Expectations are too high,” he said.

More important than the summit, says Zamascikov, whose job is analyzing Kremlin politics, is the possibility that Gorbachev may already be on the way out.

“The story making the rounds since last night,” he said Friday, “is the apparent recent rift between Gorbachev and (Politburo member Yegor) Ligachev. . . . Ligachev has given an interview to (the French newspaper) Le Monde saying he has been given authority by the Politburo over the (party) Secretariat. This is unprecedented. Either he had authority to say that, which means he became more powerful, or it means that Ligachev has to be fired.

“It is possible that Gorbachev is moving into the position of (Andrei) Gromyko, the position of nominal president. Maybe, the President will not talk with the most powerful man in the Soviet Union.”

Partying U.S. Style

Dentist Leonard Glosman invited several hundred emigres to a black-tie party Saturday at Le Bel Age hotel honoring the bar mitzvah of his son Arthur. Guests at the reception were offered three types of caviar, smoked swordfish, wine, vodka, ice sculptures, a court jester, a magician, a glass blower and an artist, who painted caricatures of Arthur’s friends on T-shirt mementos.

The celebrating emigres offered a wry commentary on Gorbachev’s refusal to don a tuxedo, the caricatured uniform of monopoly capital in Soviet cartoons. Gorbachev, the leader of the world’s largest communist country in terms of land mass, apparently is concerned about the image he will project when he attends a black-tie dinner at the White House Tuesday.

If the secretary general is so worried about appearances, said Glosman, “he should stay there (in the Soviet Union) and we should stay here.”

One emigre who has joined the film industry here, Elya Baskin, an actor who played the best friend of Robin Williams’ Anatoli in “Moscow on the Hudson,” and had parts in “2010,” drives a Mercedes, lives in Santa Monica and is starring in “Likewise,” a spy comedy scheduled for release in March.

As for the summit and Gorbachev, he says: “If I would say we are one step closer to a better world, it would sound too naive. But I like the intentions of this guy and I think they are sincere and I just hope that he has enough strength in him to overpower the reactionary machinery that he has to fight. To be honest with you, I am a little pessimistic about that.”

Most politically active emigres in the United States wind up Republicans, Polovets said.

“You know why? Because they had a tough experience living in the Soviet Union,” he said.

“They know what it is like to live in socialism. Simplifying though it is, they believe the Republicans are for capitalism . . . strong military power, so-called Star Wars. About Democrats, they feel they are close to socialism. Socialism has very good slogans but the fulfillment of the slogans is the Soviet Union.”

Some, however, take a less conservative position on domestic policy.

Volokh, vice president for research and development of the VE-SOFT computer software firm, is a case in point. He said he considers his own politics “somewhere to the right of Cro-Magnon Man,” but then added: “Right wing foreign policy and liberal socially.”

If anything unites the emigre community, it is emigration itself. For many, it is the most important issue.

“One thing that bugs me,” said Volokh, “is that every time I hear that they are relaxing and releasing dissidents (from prison), why doesn’t anyone scream about how nobody can get out of Russia? Forget the Jews, besides Russia and the East Bloc, what other country forbids people to leave? What more basic human right can there be than that?”

Indeed, Katsnelson, proprietor of the Gastronom deli on Fairfax Avenue, cares nothing about Gorbachev and his ambitious program to revitalize the stagnant Soviet system. For her, “the most important thing is that he lets people out and he lets people visit their relatives.”

William Weiss, 41, formerly of Berehovo, now lives in Canoga Park in a four-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot house with a swimming pool.

The superintendent of the Stephen S. Wise Temple has something he wants to say to Gorbachev.

“I would invite him to my house to see how I live, to what I reached with my own two hands in a free society,” said Weiss.

“Let him see himself.”