The trip ‘put a face on the Soviet Union. . . . They feel like we feel, maybe more passionately.’

Katie Moore, 15, had long held a drab image of the people of the Soviet Union.

“I thought they’d be tired, gloomy, sad, and all want to come to America,” said the junior at Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena.

But after a 10-day visit last month to that country, she decided that although they were a decade behind in fashion, they seemed happy enough.

Moore was one of 12 youths who took the trip organized by Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church as part of the church’s dedication to promoting world peace. The congregation declared itself a peace church a year ago.

The youths recently shared their impressions of the Soviets with a brunch crowd at the church.

Casey Carlburg, 14, admired the Soviets’ relative lack of vanity. “They don’t worry about how they look, what they wear. You see fat girls wear bikinis and nobody cares. . . . That’s (radical) because they don’t care what their body looks like, they care more about the inside.”

Still, several Soviet youths tried to trade an antique chest for a pair of jeans, said Moore, whose black pair of jeans mysteriously disappeared from her hotel room.

“They’re not expressive like we are,” noted Katie Collins, 16. She wondered why so many Soviets spoke English while “very few people in our country make the effort to learn their language.”

“They think Americans are foolish to smile at everyone,” Moore said, adding that “we are relatively loud,” and were told to tone down when riding the subway.

Myths were cleared for the adults, too.

The trip “put a face on the Soviet Union,” said group leader Carrie Patterson, 27, of Eagle Rock. “I’ve always heard how colorless it is and how severe the people are. . . . They feel like we feel, maybe more passionately.

“The people seemed to be more openly affectionate. Mothers and daughters were walking arm in arm in the streets.”

Chaperone Jamie Thomason, 25, of Huntington Beach was surprised when he entered a Moscow poster shop and discovered mostly peace signs for sale. Other posters glorified workers.

The group agreed they felt safe and free to move around, even late at night. “Soldiers walk all around the streets, but they were not menacing,” said Brandi Bakewell, 14, adding that many soldiers seemed not much older than her.

Although the group followed an itinerary organized by the Soviet Union’s tour agency Intourist, a highlight of their trip was an unscheduled visit to the home of a refusenik family. The family has been denied exit visas four times since 1978.

Judy Felton, another of the adults accompanying the youths, said she was amazed that the family felt comfortable entertaining the entire group at its Leningrad apartment. Felton learned about the family from its friends who were allowed to emigrate to this country. She called the family from a pay phone during an earlier trip to arrange a rendezvous in a park. A visit to the family’s home would have been impossible then, she said.

“After just 20 minutes it felt like we’d known them all our lives,” 16-year-old Jared Hughes said of the family. Their hosts played Jewish folk songs on a guitar and piano, he said, and the group danced until midnight.

The group seemed most deeply touched by a visit to the Khatyn Memorial, a park near Minsk, the capital of the republic of Byelorussia. . The park is located where the hamlet of Khatyn once stood and commemorates the 186 hamlets around Minsk obliterated by the Germans in World War II. The war is referred to in the Soviet Union as the “Great Patriotic War.”

The youths placed a basket of roses before a statue of an emaciated man holding a dying child in his arms. The statue commemorates the nearly 150 villagers who were marched into a barn and burned. Automated bells in chimneys representing each household regularly chime at half-minute intervals, and soil from each of the razed villages is buried nearby. Several in the group said they were moved to tears.

“There was almost a guilt about it,” Hughes said. “We’ve never known war, we just don’t know that kind of tragedy. We can’t relate to the pain, the sorrow.

“It’s much easier for (Americans) to say ‘Push the button and nuke them,’ ” he said, adding that it made him furious that the United States is pouring billions of dollars into defense while such reminders of war atrocities exist.

“Peace is always on (the Soviets’) lips. They don’t want anybody to go through that same pain,” Hughes said, remarking on the numerous memorials of World War II, which claimed the lives of 20 million Soviets.

Peace banners hang from government buildings, and graffiti scrawled on walls call for peace for the children, for the world, the youths said.

Visiting the memorial “was absolutely one of the most moving things we ever could have done,” said 15-year-old Kristy Wheeler. “(War) is something we have to stop from happening again, and I think that was what our trip was really all about.”