A Small Step To a World of Reason

An American astronaut, walking for the first time on the moon’s mysterious surface, said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

That could also describe President Ronald Reagan’s first step inside the Kremlin to meet Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as he walked on the red carpet of the historic stairway, over which hovered the shadows of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.

This was the man who, not so long ago, called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Why did he meet with Gorbachev?

Not because he changed his views and shifted “to the left.” The horror of total holocaust compels all sane people, even those on the right, to take a step to the left to save humanity--it’s a step in the direction of their own heart. The same horror forces sane people on the left not to turn away from their hearts. With all the differences between Soviet and U.S. political systems, the only constant is the system of the hearts of mothers who lose children in war--be it Vietnam or Afghanistan. The zinc coffins that hold the corpses of their children do not turn into silver or gold. They remain zinc. A U.S. Republican and a Russian Communist can in fact belong to the same party--the party of common sense.

Now it’s time to understand a new nuclear truth: The best policy is above politics. The first agreement signed by the two biggest nuclear powers to reduce nuclear weapons rises above mere ideology. This agreement is only a small step, but it was a beginning.

A doorbell for another people’s doorway is better than the nuclear button. And it turned out that when the door opened, the people living behind it were not as horrible as supposed. The hospitality that the American people showed Gorbachev and Soviets extended to Reagan shows that the instinct of friendliness is stronger than that of mistrust.

Russians, generally speaking, have positive attitudes towards Americans. Not only have we never fought each other, we were allies during our common war against fascism. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are the most popular books of our children--everyone feels nostalgic for something he had in childhood but cannot find again as an adult.

Even now my taste buds can recall the flavor of the American bacon I ate in the hungry days of 1941 in Siberia. We opened the cans with a key magically soldered to the bottom, and the pink slices of bacon beckoned from their wrapping of transparent paper. I proudly wore yellow American boots, which squeaked with a decidedly foreign accent.

At our movie theater deep in Siberia, we wildly applauded the American jazz from “Sun Valley Serenade.” Soviet soldiers were in love with American movie star Deanna Durbin. My personal hero was James Cagney from the “Roaring Twenties”--shown in this country under the idiotic propaganda title of “The Fate of a Soldier in America.”

May, 1945, when Soviet and U.S. soldiers swam with their weapons--as well as bottles of vodka and whiskey--raised over the Elbe waters, was truly the honeymoon of our peoples.

By that time, I was back in Moscow and, like so many schoolboys, bought cigarettes by the caseload and sold them one by one to pay for movies and soccer games. But on Victory Day all the Moscow urchins rushed to Red Square and handed out cigarettes for free--just as ice cream vendors did with their wares. Red Square was inundated by celebrants, and filled with the sounds of tangos and fox trots from hundreds of record players the people had brought. Women, their hands coarse from hauling shell casings at the factories, were dancing with the soldiers. Not a single one wore shoes; all were in army boots. And yet that day all the women looked particularly beautiful.

People were kissing beneath the blue firs of the Kremlin. Drunken generals had to be carried from the Spassky Gates, their medals dangling from their tunics.

Allies--Americans, French, British--were thrown into the air in jubilation, while we kids frantically picked up the foreign change that came pouring out of their pockets. On a wing of Lenin’s Mausoleum, an invalid without legs and a U.S. officer sat together, drinking a vodka toast to the common victory.

But our honeymoon was all too brief. War united us. Victory divided us.

Mikhail Kalatozov, the film producer who wrote the screenplay for “The Cranes Are Flying,” once told me a sad story. Right after the war, while working as a Soviet representative in Hollywood, he decided to organize a joint Soviet-U.S. radio concert. The best American and Soviet musicians and actors were to perform in a live broadcast from the United States to the Soviet Union and from the Soviet Union to the United States. It took Kalatozov a great deal of work to assemble the American stars. But all were enthusiastic, brimming with joy over the war victory. Just before the concert began, a white-faced official from the Soviet Embassy came in and, with shaking hands, gave Kalatozov a cable, freshly decoded. It said: “Moscow won’t receive on Stalin’s order.”

The Cold War had started. Confused and despondent, Kalatozov did not have the heart to tell the American stars about the cable. The broadcast went on as planned. Kalatozov told me afterwards that it was a great concert. But it went out into empty air.

Later, all the participants had lunch. Finally, with tears in his eyes, Kalatozov told them about the cable. All of them cried together.

A new era had set in--the era of mutual mistrust. In the United States, the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee had started. The roots of the “Evil Empire” no doubt lie in that time of Reagan’s life. Here in the Soviet Union, we started our own witch hunt. Composers like Dmitri Shostakovich, writers like Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoschenko were insulted and attacked. The “campaign against cosmopolitanism”--an ideological, anti-Semitic drive--started. The great Jewish actor Mikhoels was murdered by a speeding truck. The agony of Stalin and Stalinism was slow and horrible. The shadows of Stalin and Lavrenti P. Beria also hovered over that red-carpeted stairway as Reagan met Gorbachev.

Another paradox of the meeting is that Reagan, as politician, was born during the peak of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, while Gorbachev’s rise to political power led to a sharp and, I hope, irreversible fall of Stalinism.

Therefore, it’s only natural that many of Reagan’s political statements reflect old attitudes about the Soviet Union. But at the same time, one must give Reagan his due. The very man for whom it was particularly difficult to adapt to the new image of the Soviet Union, to such suspicious words as perestroika and glasnost, raised his foot and placed it on the first step of the Kremlin stairway.

The credit due the President is even greater because his entire political experience, all his social instinct, had to be against such a step, and still he made it--thus ennobling the closing days of his political career. Reagan made that step because his social instinct was overcome by the supreme instinct of mankind’s self-preservation.

This desire for self-preservation brings the superpower leaders to the realization that mankind’s salvation is achieved not through one state’s mission, but rather through the collective action of all states.

It would be good if the U.S. and Soviet Union would assume a joint responsibility for mankind’s security. But it would be bad if they monopolize this responsibility, excluding other countries or, not completely excluding them, supervised their diminished roles. The slogan of unification that can be offered to all of mankind should be: “Each person is a superpower.”

No single country should cockily assume the mantle of leader of all progressive forces, just as no single country should be seen as the focus of the world’s evil. The proponents of progress are distributed across many countries just as reactionary forces are.

The U.S. right-wingers and our Stalinists, the enemies of democracy and glasnost, need each other to sustain their theory of looming threat. For only through frightening people with “the ugly face of the enemy” can they hold on to their positions. A great friend of mine, John Steinbeck, once told me, “During my travels with Charley around America, I met a farmer who even blamed a drought on the Russians. I think that when you Russians have droughts, then you, too, blame the same Russians, only you call them Americans.”

Reagan, with a good deal of common sense, observed once that we must intensify human exchanges, especially among young people. If just a dozen Soviet children would study in the United States and the same number of U.S. students come to the Soviet Union, then both U.S. and Soviet adults would be more careful with their buttons. Students might become our voluntary hostages of peace.

We must organize a joint international Peace Corps of young people to help developing countries. Nothing unites people better than a struggle against a common enemy. But we needn’t resurrect Hitler to fight against him again. Americans and Soviets have many common enemies now--diseases, regional conflicts, hunger, environmental pollution.

What if one of the desperate, small nations possesses nuclear weapons or something even more horrible and brings mankind to the brink of destruction? Wouldn’t it be better to join now against hunger and poverty to preempt aggression born of despair? Only one road leads to salvation: the road from mutual accusations to mutual understanding. This road does not preclude mutual criticism, as long as it’s based on good intentions rather than malice.

To keep the hot line between Washington and Moscow in working order, they test it by reading Chekhov’s novels. This single fact could symbolize the vital role of world culture in the salvation of mankind.

In 1960, when I came to the United States for the first time--with $33 for three weeks and three English words, “Where is striptease?”--a funny thing happened. The leader of our group--a writer whose work was favored by Stalin--ushered us into his room in a New York hotel and showed us some wires beneath the carpet. He said they were for eavesdropping.

Whipping out his pocket knife, our courageous leader cut the wires, and instantly the light went out in his table lamp. Moral: You can’t cut innocent wires of culture that connect our peoples, or the light goes out.