Describes ‘Orgy of Buildings’ and ‘Those Girls’ : Pravda Writer a Low Roller in Las Vegas

Glasnost , the official Soviet policy of openness, tolerates a lot these days, but could it tolerate Las Vegas?

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda on Monday published a lengthy profile of Las Vegas, portraying the city as civilization in its most unflattering form and describing in detail the gambling, prostitution and other “entertainment” found there.

“Where are human emotions rather than electronic ones?” the article asks. “One recalls that one is surrounded by a vast desert--highly symbolic to be encircled by a cordon sanitaire. “

The article was written by Pravda reporter Vitaly Gan, the newspaper’s former Washington correspondent. He noted that for 16 years, the State Department had denied him permission to visit Las Vegas because of nearby military installations and nuclear testing grounds.

“Las Vegas exercises its attraction over almost every American, even those who reject its tinsel philosophy,” Gan writes. “Take my word for it, practically every American I’ve talked to said that he would like to go to Las Vegas.”

Gambling is proscribed in the Soviet Union, and prostitution is such a taboo that the word itself is almost never used in the press, although the practice does exist on a limited scale. For many Russians, the Pravda article would appear to be their first exposure to gambling argot that Gan encountered in the casinos, including what the report called “one-legged bandits.”

He describes the Las Vegas Strip as “an orgy of buildings, arches, fountains, statues and ads, striking the eye with the abandon and wanton nature of the merrymaking going on there. All this rolls before your eyes in a searing ball of fire, 24 hours a day.”

The lights on the strip are so bright, Gan says, that “you can read a newspaper at 3 a.m.--that is, provided you don’t care if people take you for an idiot.”

Referring obliquely to prostitution, he says that “those girls who work alone can be called right to your room. Samples and telephone numbers are on display at every street corner.”

However, Soviet readers were likely to be faintly jealous of what Gan says about the city’s “marriage-and-divorce industry,” after he called it an instant, 24-hour-a-day service. In the Soviet Union, divorces are frequent but are enormously time-consuming.

The article’s introductory paragraphs are fairly straightforward reportage, but then it quickly makes Las Vegas a metaphor for life in the West. It notes the biblical injunction that money is the root of all evil and adds that this warning “became obsolete here a long time ago.”

It also says that Las Vegas is “the brainchild of the greatest criminal minds in America” and that it was designed to efficiently separate visitors from their money. In a fairly un-socialist swipe at the customers, Gan says they are “mostly the rank-and-file type.”

He quotes a croupier at one of the casinos as saying that gambling is an addictive habit and that gamblers “always stick to the same pattern, losing their senses and pouring in their money. All of them end up with a big hole in their pockets and a big profit for my employer.”

Gan says that Las Vegas “has put itself entirely in the service of money” and adds that “people know that gambling is one of the silliest inventions of mankind.”

In the article, he quotes an American newspaper as describing Las Vegas as possibly the worst example of Western civilization, but then goes on to say: “Western civilization appears in its most concentrated form in Las Vegas. Maybe it’s just a little too frank for the tastes of some American researchers.”