A Joint Venture Into Perestroika

As I stood by the recently vacated Soviet army barracks, there flashed through my mind a felicitous phrase encountered somewhere in the dim past: Life is what actually happens to you while you are making all kinds of other plans.

Certainly none of my “other plans” had ever included my being in this township of 50,000 about 100 miles from Leningrad.

Yet here I was, participating with a small group of Americans and a large group of Soviets in a ceremony celebrating the conversion of a military facility into a factory for the manufacture of children’s clothing (a consumer product so short in supply as to be desperately desired throughout the Soviet Union).

The official act of conversion we were there to witness had the legal effect of “transferring the land and buildings from a military unit to the Garant Cooperative for the production of children’s clothing with the assistance of American businessmen Mr. H. Willens and Mr. W. Bilson, they being present at the procedure of signing this act.” And directly above the signature of Urij Menshikov, the authorized official of Kingisepp, appeared these words: “I do stress as well that the transformation of a military unit into a civil one is real evidence of perestroika policy having the aim to improve the life of the Soviet people.”

My own words, expressed on behalf of my partner, Los Angeles business executive Wesley Bilson, plus apparel manufacturer Bernard Grenell, project coordinator and translator Sophia Lansky and corporate planner Gail Woodward (a “team” uniquely qualified to share entrepreneurial skills and experience with our new Soviet friends) stressed the symbolic significance of the Kingisepp conversion as described by Menshikov: “To transform a military facility into a children’s apparel factory captures the very essence of a universal priority shift from which all the people of the world would benefit at this moment in human history. We Americans here today actively support your perestroika because it seeks to redirect from military priorities to civilian needs the human skills, the technology and the financial resources required to deal with potentially terminal global problems. Let us hope that the small but significant step we witness here today becomes an example that inspires many more such steps toward the safer, better world we want for our children.”

Dressed in full uniform, Col. Victor Makarov, the former commander of Kingisepp Army Base, stated that “only a short while ago I could not ever imagine that I would witness what is taking place here today . . . and yet I consider this act as a measure that is humanistic, just--and justified.”

Although the audience reaction seemed warm and favorable to each speaker in turn, it struck me as being especially responsive to the words of Raisa Gorbachev when they were read for her by Vladislav A. Starkov, editor-in-chief of the popular Soviet journal Arguments and Facts. In her message, the first lady “conveyed her warmest wishes to the organizers of the children’s-clothing venture being set up with the assistance of American businessmen,” and expressed her hope “that Soviet people will welcome this as still more evidence of the new friendship which has been emerging in Soviet-American relations.”

Probably because of the message from Mrs. Gorbachev, the event received nationwide television, radio and print-media coverage, thus communicating to most of the Soviet Union the fact that seasoned American business executives were--as an act of enlightened self-interest--gladly sharing, at their own expense and with no profit potential in mind, their skills and experience, gained over many years.

I thought about enlightened self-interest as some of us were being given a tour of the buildings already being remodeled at the base, and at the banquet afterward I proposed a toast to a dramatic example of enlightened self-interest: the Soviet-American partnership that destroyed a would-be world-destroyer by the name of Adolf Hilter.

And I ended the toast with these words: “Let us drink to the reestablishment of that de facto partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union for in it lies the best hope not only for preventing catastrophic war, but also for solving, one step at a time, global ecological threats for which the only cure is prevention.”