Glasnost’s Captivating Pitchman Makes a Sale

How can you dislike Sergey Plekhanov?

He knows the lyrics of Phil Ochs’ “Talking Birmingham Jam” by heart and brought his guitar all the way from Moscow. He tells funny jokes. He never says Vietnam when he means Afghanistan.

Communist, atheist Plekhanov, deputy director of the Soviet Union’s major think tank on the United States, charmed most of the ordinary citizens he met--even some hard-shell anti-Communists--during a Soviet delegation’s four-day visit here last week.

People said: “He’s great.” “He is fascinating.” “He is different.”

He was also sick. His eyes, small buttonholes behind thick glasses, looked tired. This made people he’d just met--some who only a day earlier had thought Soviet leaders wanted to bury them--scurry to find him aspirin and vitamin C.

Tall, lanky and well-dressed, Plekhanov speaks American English so well that his boss, Georgy Arbatov, joked that his comrades suspect that Plekhanov might be a plant from the CIA. A regular guy, yet brilliant and vulnerable, Plekhanov couldn’t have been a better pitchman for glasnost if he had been computer-programmed.

Plekhanov, the son of a pacifist soldier, was 10 when the 20th Party Congress announced de-Stalinization. He said he had felt perestroika --the Soviet Union’s plan for economic and social restructuring--coming on since 1968. He personally gave up the Cold War after spending 1969 in New York City as an exchange scholar, he said.

Plekhanov, looking exhausted, opened with a couple Soviet jokes last week when he spoke to about 100 UC Irvine students in Prof. John Whiteley’s class, “The Social Ecology of Peace.” (They say Gorbachev has no support. No support? No, he can walk by himself.) Friendly. Not threatening. Smooth, but not slick. They laughed.

Then he launched into his message:

The Soviet Union is a child growing out of its new clothes. If perestroika fails, it will be a disaster. Change is visible already in new human rights groups and religious freedom laws. Total nuclear disarmament is possible by the year 2000.

The old thinking, he said, is like the cartoon of a government leader who, in a room full of nuclear warheads, says: “We can annihilate them 20 times. But if they can annihilate us 25 times, we’re goners.”

In the new thinking, Soviets and Americans cooperate to fill human needs, such as when Soviet trucks carried American grain to starving Ethiopians. “It’s a vision we can only develop with you,” he said.

Only foreign-born students from the Soviet Union or the Eastern bloc countries challenged him. “In Russia, I’d be sent off to some mental institution for not liking the system,” said Alexander Ignatovsky, 19, a Russian immigrant who chairs the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom on campus.

“It’s very, very difficult to put a person in a mental institution now,” Plekhanov responded, looking distressed. “Abuse of psychiatric care has been dealt with, so please don’t talk about that.”

On corruption: “Look, we’re throwing the rascals out. It’s a difficult business. There are a lot of rascals.” On invasions: “Czechoslovakia 1968 will not be repeated.” On the charge that glasnost is propaganda: “It’s ridiculous to think we’re doing this to impress people. We’re doing this because we need it.”

Plekhanov’s voice was failing. He wiped his brow.

“Oh, he looks so pale,” whispered an expert in computer security.

An older woman in sneakers raised her hand: “Thank you for being here. Some of us Americans appreciate what you’re trying to do.”

Plekhanov concluded: “The potential of socialism is not exhausted. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Sustained applause.

As he left, students followed. Even Ignatovsky called out a friendly farewell in Russian.

Twenty minutes later, we were back at The Newporter Resort. Plekhanov bent over a form, resembling a tax form. It was one of three Whiteley needed him to sign so that the university would pay him $200 for his speech. He read it up and down. He said he had a problem with the complexity.

Despite Whiteley’s reassurances, he concluded: “In a bureaucracy, when you make a mistake, you can get in a lot of trouble.” Trying to merge the new and the old can be “mind-boggling,” he said. Sometimes he feels the weight of the old inhibitions as a physical force, he had told the students.

I gave him my business card. I liked the idea that my name might travel on a plane to Moscow, maybe sit in a desk at the think tank. It seemed harmless enough.