L.A. Life Style Seen Through a Soviet Lens

With Soviets eating American pizza, drinking Pepsi-Cola and generally paying more attention to America, the question arises in the wake of the summit: Are they changing the way they think about Los Angeles?

No one has published a scientific survey gauging awareness or knowledge about Los Angeles, but the careful Soviet reader can discover that, in accord with the warming trend of U.S.-Soviet relations and with favorable publicity surrounding the summit, Los Angeles is beginning--in still-limited ways--to appear a more friendly place.

“Definitely, L.A. is one of the cities that immediately rings a bell,” Soviet commentator Vladimir Posner said in a recent telephone interview from Moscow.

So what do Soviets read about Los Angeles?

In many ways, they see a caricature--with a Soviet twist--of the same portrait of Los Angeles that can be found in newspapers and on television in the United States, according to a survey of reports by Tass, the Soviet news agency, and other Soviet media:

To wit, Los Angeles is at once an alluring and frightening place--the Promised Land and the Devil’s Playground.

Hollywood is a purveyor of art, sex, violence and anti-Soviet Cold War stereotypes. The beach, beautiful weather, the beautiful people, AIDS, gang warfare, racial tensions, greed, wealth, military-industrial capitalists, downtrodden underclasses, the heat, smog, and traffic all co-exist uneasily in the Soviet mind as prominent features of Los Angeles and Southern California.

The Soviets engaged in an orgy of Los Angeles bashing in 1984 that was aimed at drumming up support for the Soviet decision to boycott the Olympics.

Posner said the tarnish to Los Angeles from the Olympics campaign has largely faded today, although a leading U.S. expert on Soviet popular culture disagrees. Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of Columbia University’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, said, “The stuff that sticks in people’s mind is the reportage from the Olympics. L.A. is the dangerous city of pollution, drugs and people lurking in the streets to murder you.”

The Olympics campaign was not subtle.

Flowing Blood

Articles published in Izvestia and released by Tass depicted a Los Angeles where “plenty of blood (was) flowing,” and pollution was so bad that horse trainers should put gas masks on their steeds and that athletes were suffering from respiratory ailments. “The local organs of power” were riddled with “shameless anti-Soviets” bent on inflaming residents against Soviet participation, one article warned darkly.

The worst, perhaps, was a one-hour “documentary” on Soviet network television shown to as many as 100 million viewers that argued Olympic fans would risk their lives by attending. It cited the slaughter of 21 people in San Ysidro--more than 100 miles away--as “nightmarish testimony” to the dangers that awaited spectators in Los Angeles.

Superimposed on these images since then, according to Posner, “in a Soviet person’s mind . . . is Hollywood and the whole idea of California, the beaches, the beautiful weather.

“People who know a little more tend to think of a city where there is no public transportation and where everyone has at least one car, if not two or three or four. For a great many people here, there are two all-American cities, New York and Los Angeles. New York being the financial and cultural capital and Los Angeles being the movie capital.”

The Soviets display great ambivalence about Hollywood.

Sounding like a Soviet version of the Moral Majority, ideologists frequently depict foreign films, including American movies, as corrupting and dangerous.

‘They Shoot, Steal, Kill’

Film critic Lyudmila Kasyanova wrote in Sovetskaya Rossia on Oct. 25, 1985, that the foreign films, which frequently outdraw Soviet-produced movies, “show off clothes, villas and yachts with the stylish flair of advertisements. How sporty and elegant the men are! How sweet and seductive the women! What feelings, what passions! The heroes give chase in cars, planes (often private ones) and boats. They fight, shoot, steal and kill--but how effortlessly and cleverly they do it! One can only envy them. And some people . . . imitate them.

“This seemingly inoffensive, entertaining form of contemporary cinema--by virtue of its mass appeal and accessibility--is most certainly used as a powerful means of propagandizing and promoting the bourgeois way of life. . . . What price do we pay in moral losses?”

Soviets also blame Hollywood for glorifying war.

In a May 7, 1987, piece about the Soviet peace movement, Tass took a slap at Hollywood: “Generations that never experienced a war realize that it is not a series of exciting adventures by supermen, heroes of Hollywood thrillers.”

Another Tass piece criticized several American movies, including Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo” series, as “depicting particularly refined scenes of violence.” Soviets say the ABC miniseries “Amerika” and “Red Dawn,” which depicted the United States under Soviet domination, and “Rocky IV” keep alive the worst anti-Soviet stereotypes.

Yet positive aspects--to Soviets--are beginning to appear. Soviet critics liked “The Day After” as “evidence of the American’s concern over the real threat of nuclear war,” as a May 29, 1987, Tass report put it, and showed the ABC film on Soviet television. They recently noted with pleasure film plans for a Soviet-American co-production on the Chernobyl disaster, an award received by the Los Angeles director of the Soviet Chernobyl play “Sarcophagus” and a proposal to make a movie about the late Samantha Smith, the American schoolgirl who made a well-publicized trip to the Soviet Union. More recently, “Platoon” received favorable Soviet reviews as an anti-war film.

In addition, the Soviets have written warmly about increased contacts between U.S. film makers and the Soviet film industry, which moved to the forefront of the glasnost movement after years of enforced, stultifying conformity under Leonid Brezhnev.

Los Angeles gangs, which have received worldwide coverage, have not been ignored in the Soviet Union.

The Tass bureau in San Francisco recently sent in a series about Los Angeles gangs and in April, Soviet television ran film of Los Angeles gangs. But instead of focusing on the shortcomings of U.S. society in the television report, the Soviets used American gangs as an introduction to a look at Soviet motorcycle gangs, according to Sanders.

“They showed L.A. gangs before, but never would have shown the stuff about Soviet gangs before glasnost ,” Sanders said.

Spotty Coverage

Gangs aside, since the Olympics, Soviet coverage of Los Angeles has been spotty.

Tass did not report the Whittier Narrows earthquake. No Tass report since Jan. 1, 1987, has dealt with Los Angeles’ booming international trade or with the rapid ethnic changes in the area.

Posner and Tass reporter Andrew Sidorin, who is based in San Francisco--the nearest Tass bureau to Los Angeles--acknowledge the lack of thorough Soviet coverage of Southern California. There are no Soviet television crews based on the West Coast.

“Unfortunately, there are not large articles because Soviets have rare opportunities to go there,” said Sidorin, who arrived in San Francisco in early April. “No Soviet journalist has visited L.A. recently. I am looking forward to the trip, to judge by what I see. Then I can compare with the background information.” Posner, who visited Los Angeles last March as part of the so-called “Entertainment Summit” between Soviet and American film makers, said Gostelradio, the Soviet television and radio agency, plans to station a television crew on the West Coast soon.

The View From Tass

In the meantime, here is Los Angeles and Southern California according to Tass:

--Last summer’s Soviet-American peace march between Leningrad and Moscow was covered extensively and there was a Los Angeles connection. “I believe in the peace-making mission of art, in its ability to unite people,” peace marcher Carole Shakly, a music teacher from Los Angeles, was quoted by Tass.

--Last August, Tass ran an anniversary piece on the 1965 Watts riots: “Several dozens of people killed and thousands more wounded and arrested were a result of an uprising by Los Angeles have-nots in Watts, the city’s black ghetto, 12 years ago (sic), which was mercilessly suppressed by police and National Guardsmen.”

--Also in August, the Soviet news agency carried an excerpt from a piece by Pravda’s New York correspondent, who had just taken a trip to California: “It is not only peaches and grapes or Hollywood that California lives upon at present. The ‘Golden State’ has become a huge workshop and a vast proving ground for arms manufacturers.” In the full article, the reporter described an interview in Los Angeles with a disaffected defense plant employee who lamented the increasing influence of the Pentagon in space research. “If this continues, I will leave,” Pravda’s unnamed source declared.

--In a similar vein several months later, Tass, quoting the Associated Press, reported that “the United States has conducted test firing of a Tomahawk missile with a MIRVed warhead. After flying over a 500-mile distance, it reached a test range located 125 miles north of Los Angeles. The missile hit three targets by three dummy warheads and itself struck the fourth target. . . . This weapons system will be ready for deployment aboard U.S. Navy ships as early as in the autumn of this year.”

--A December Pravda article, elaborating on a remark by Gorbachev in his NBC TV interview before the INF summit that he had received 80,000 letters from Americans, devoted an entire page to the letters. Los Angeles resident David Yochelson was quoted as writing: “As I see it, today’s world lacks far-sighted leaders and the fact that such a leader as you has appeared, who can rise above day-to-day concerns for the good of succeeding generations, holds out hope. It would be an honor for me if the program of the stay in the United States allowed you and your wife to have dinner . . . in my home in Los Angeles.”

--On the same day, this positive presentation of Los Angeles contrasted with a Tass report headlined: “U.S. intends to continue sheltering terrorists.” The 438-word story dealt with the first known successful hijackers of a Soviet airplane--Pranas and Algirdas Brazinskas--who are reportedly living in the Los Angeles area. In a struggle on board the plane in 1970, they killed a 20-year-old stewardess and injured three crew members. The story reported that the U.S. State Department once again rejected Soviet requests to extradite the two to the Soviet Union.

--In March, Tass had three stories about Bradley Correa, an El Segundo nine-year-old who was feted on an all-expenses-paid tour of the Soviet Union as a second “Samantha Smith.” Bradley “broke into singing the song ‘This Land is Yours and Mine’ out of joy when received at the Executive Committee of the Leningrad Soviet today,” Tass reported.

--In April, Tass reported that Los Angeles industrialist Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum would be a partner with the Soviets in the construction and operation of two plastic plants in the Ukraine.

--In May, Tass reported on a California Court of Appeal decision in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against Los Angeles police that said the department did not abide by guidelines on holding suspects: “American policemen violate human rights. The police office of Los Angeles is guilty of violation of human rights. This verdict has been brought by the California Court of Appeal on the suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Following a years-long investigation, systematic deviations from the existing legislation on the detention of persons by the police of the U.S.’s second-largest city were revealed.”

Pre-Summit Trend

A warming trend in Tass coverage first turned up May 21 in pre-summit interviews with Robert Sturdivant, president of the Centre for American-Soviet Initiatives, and San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

“If one is to judge by the state of California, one everywhere feels that people have become more open-hearted and well-wishing and are ready to receive guests from the Soviet Union and themselves show profound interest in meetings with Soviet people, in establishing friendly relations based on mutual respect and mutual understanding,” according to the Tass report of the Sturdivant interview.

In the O’Connor interview, Tass said the San Diego mayor said that “the Moscow summit meeting will undoubtedly promote further development of Soviet-American relations in all areas of mutually beneficial cooperation.”

Warming trends aside, two other items show some things transcend politics--namely, large, noisy airplanes and tiny, baby animals.

Tass reported approvingly May 23 about the reaction to the Soviet AN-124 transport, the world’s largest airplane, at San Diego’s air show: “The Soviet giant aircraft surged aloft and flew at a low altitude always to the rapturous shouts and hand-waving of spectators.”

And apparently unable to resist a universal fascination with young animals, Tass also reported on the emergence of the California condor chick in the San Diego zoo.