An American Meets Muscovites, Looking for the Limits of Glasnost

Gorbachev-chic arrived on the American mainland at the December Summit. Glasnost and perestroika are rapidly becoming words in the American dialect. Even hammer-and-sickle T-shirts are selling here. Now, as the Moscow summit approaches, the question lingers--how much is substance, how much fashion?

For two months this spring I worked in Moscow as the first American to write a weekly opinion column for a Soviet newspaper. It was not my first visit; as a 13-year-old I had lived there six months while my father wrote a book. Since 1984 I have been to Russia seven or eight times to produce a wildlife documentary film and for journalistic work; I speak Russian with moderate fluency.

This last visit was unlike previous trips; I lived in an apartment, bought and cooked my own food, commuted to work. I ate lunch in the newspaper cafeteria, talking with Soviet colleagues. I interviewed a wide range of people, from cabdrivers to high officials, and dined in the homes of friends and acquaintances.

Much has changed in three Gorbachev years and much has not. To understand that contradictory reality, Americans must first face an unpleasant truth. For a long, long time we have not been really looking at the Soviet Union, but at our own false stereotype of it: a gray, monolithic state, good at making tanks and missiles, but nothing else. Its people, we were told and believed, were depressed and depressing. Repeated polls show we think Soviets are less patriotic, less caring about their families, less happy with their lives and work, less humorous. Less human.

In war, the opposition is inevitably dehumanized. And the Cold War has been no different. For four decades the Soviets have been our international adversaries and we have been treated to countless variations of the stereotype, from Boris Badenov to Ivan Drago: brutal, conniving, heartless, dishonest.

The more distorted the stereotype, the greater the reaction when truth emerges. And in that dynamic lies part of, but not all of, the answer about what has “changed” in the Soviet Union. Americans are now seeing a more dimensional picture; we see everyday Russians interviewed on Moscow streets by American newsmen; we listen to normal-looking Soviets sit on American talk shows, discussing human realities in human terms; we see a Soviet leader with an open, honest manner and a charming, intelligent wife.

A few years ago, Americans were not exposed to any of these things. Had there not been significant changes within the Soviet Union, we still would not be. My guest column for the Moscow News illustrates the point.

Two years ago I had dinner with a Soviet friend, a prominent zoologist. Sitting in his home, I asked if he thought Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms--decentralizing the economy, opening the media, the arts and the political process--could succeed. No, he said. “Many people around him nod in agreement. But they have their cars, their dachas , their privileges. In their hearts they do not change.”

This March I asked him the same question. “It is very difficult,” he said. “There is much opposition.” Then I asked if, two years ago, he would have predicted what had already happened. He did not hesitate: “I would have said it was impossible.”

The Soviet press is full of highly controversial material. In a society that loudly and long proclaimed the absence of serious crime, prostitution and drugs, articles and television programs about these realities are now everyday occurrences. A stunning about-face. What was for decades a press dedicated to official cheerleading has become, in terms of social exposes and criticism, more active than its U.S. counterpart. Typical American reports about corruption in government, for example, focus on the individual--who did what for how much money. The Soviet approach includes the culprit but then digs deeper to explore the economic or political organization that produced the scandal. Again and again, the refrain is that lack of democracy and public participation, control over the flow of information and of the press, breed dictatorial attitudes and moral decay. In a country long run by a privileged economic and political elite, that message could hardly be more dramatic.

The press is in some ways a microcosm of the whole country. Everyone knows that the limits of free speech have changed drastically. But where are the new limits? Even at the Moscow News, considered the “flagship of glasnost ,” the question surfaces.

One of my first columns compared the times and tasks faced by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gorbachev. I wrote that each was faced with saving his respective system from the excesses of its privileged class. Roosevelt saved capitalism, I said, by adopting overtly socialist concepts, including governmental intervention in the economy and programs such as social security and unemployment insurance. Gorbachev, I argued, was taking “large leaves from the book of market capitalism, and injecting pluralism into the political process.”

I wrote the piece in English. But when I saw the Russian version, the text had been changed. The point about capitalist market forces was not touched but the reference to political pluralism had been deleted. The change, it turned out, had been made by a veteran translator who knew such views to be unacceptable. I took the issue to Editor Yegor Yakovlev, and from then on my pieces ran as written.

The perceived limits of public discourse change virtually every week. Within a few days of the Roosevelt article, Gorbachev said that, for the first time in many decades, the Soviet Union was experiencing “socialist pluralism.” His use of that phrase not only legitimized the concept, it set off a media debate, still under way, about the limits of free thought, speech and organization in a modern socialist society.

The U.S. Supreme Court long ago concluded that a person does not have the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Similarly, Americans cannot advocate violent overthrow of the government if that advocacy constitutes a “clear and present danger.” We have other less formal but equally effective bounds for acceptable speech and affiliation. Our limits have ebbed and flowed over two centuries and continue to do so. For the Soviets, the situation is different. For the first time since Josef Stalin purged dissenting opinions more than 50 years ago, the Soviets are wrestling with the questions of limits.

The long absence of such discussion, coupled with the absence of meaningful political participation, has created a strikingly apolitical society. Until very recently, I had difficulty finding people interested in discussing political issues; they felt such talk was simply a waste of time.

What we are seeing now is the activation of such a dialogue. I saw it in widely divergent places: the district-level Communist Party official in charge of ideology who understood he had more questions about the new party line than answers; a smoke-filled room of reporters, including Communist Party members, disagreeing with their editor’s view that their professional role was to “implement party policy”; lunch with an eminent member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who outlined the critical need for bringing the scientific community into national policy decisions.

At many levels, a society which had allowed itself to be isolated from much of the world is opening up, seeking information and ideas. Seeing the process, one cannot help but be struck--on most issues--by the lack of defensiveness, the openness of the questioners.

U.S. reaction to these open, questioning, relaxed “new Soviets” runs the gamut from “they’ve all changed” to the old, “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” I saw the “wolf” suspicion when I sent a column by a Soviet journalist to an American editor friend. He liked the piece--well-written, critical of aspects of perestroika-- and sent it to his boss. “Who is the author?” the boss wanted to know. “Is he KGB?”

We and the Soviets are major players; what happens in our two countries and between our nations affects many, many lives. We should watch them soberly and honestly, blinded by neither euphoria nor Cold War paranoia. And as we see new realities emerge, we should ask: What does this mean for our view of ourselves as a people and a nation? What does it mean for our role in the world?