Going With Glasnost: A Testimony by Train

On my last reporting trip before being expelled as Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief in 1982, I was accused by authorities in the Central Asian city of Dushanbe of telling young men that the Soviet Union should abolish the draft. The basis for the charge: During discussions with young Muslims about the Afghanistan War, I had mentioned the United States having an all-volunteer Army. To the KGB, that was tantamount to advocating draft resistance.

I recently returned to the Soviet Union and found that, like so much else, attitudes towards the West and Westerners are changing, although often unevenly. Conversations that once would have been branded “provocative” are now commonplace, and the authorities have largely given up trying to insulate society from the outside world. Like their American counterparts, Soviet citizens exhibit uninhibited curiousity about the other superpower. And, as in the United States, there is a lively debate about possible interaction between Western policy and Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika .

The most dramatic change is government willingness to tolerate, even encourage, the opening of communications channels that present a picture of the West wholly at odds with the old imagery. Taking full advantage of his fluent Russian, U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. regularly delivers speeches to Soviet audiences, including military academies. Soviet publications have run lengthy interviews with him which he characterizes as “absolutely fair.” Western radio broadcasts are no longer jammed and Soviet emigres are allowed to return home for visits, spreading word about their lives in the West. A small but growing number of Soviet citizens are traveling to the West on private visits, not as members of official delegations.

Traveling by train, I found people more interested than ever in details of Western life--prices, wages, ethnic relations--and comparing them to their own situation. As a Western reporter, I encountered less fear and harassment than before, particularly in the Baltic republics. But in provincial Russia, old instincts die harder. In the northern city of Vologda, a young man contacted me and made a classic KGB entrapment pitch: Would I help relay information about “police and troop deployments in the region” to American correspondents in Moscow?

Some once-standard questions were significantly absent this time: Who lives better, the West or us? Why does America want war? They were never asked by the people with me in the “hard” or second- class cabins of trains, since the answer to the first question was now obvious and the second deemed laughable. A young engineer recalled the old propaganda line that the United States was to blame for Soviet food shortages, since the “American threat” necessitated heavy defense spending. “Now that we have good relations, who will we blame?” Then he grinned.

The only time I heard the old line was in a first-class compartment through the Ukraine. Two middle-aged Communist Party officials claimed they knew for a fact that “some Americans, not ordinary people, but the neo-fascists,” want war. But as we were pulling into the station, a young man who had stayed out of the discussion attacked the two officials for representing “the era of stagnation,” the current term for the Leonid I. Brezhnev era. Something like that would not have happened before.

Deeper divisions exist on the more fundamental question of whether the West should serve as a model for the Soviet Union. Activists in the Baltic republics openly push for Western-style democracy and capitalism. Some Russians are similarly inclined--but others fear unleashing “anarchic” forces. Writer Vasily Belov asked if I believed it was a good thing that glasnost has already opened the doors to “narcotics, eroticism and pornography,” which he clearly identified as products of Western-style liberalism. Dmitri Vasilyev, leader of the Russian ultranationalist group Pamyat and an avowed monarchist, argued that “the West is not an ideal and may be even worse than what we have here.”

But as recent elections demonstrated, many citizens, Russians included, are eager to open their system further, emulating Western ways. Among official propagandists for perestroika and among dissidents pushing for still broader changes, debate focuses on a familiar question: How can the West help Soviet reform?

Veteran Izvestia correspondent Melor Sturua hailed my return as a sign of the improved U.S.-Soviet climate. He had reason to be pleased: in tit-for-tat for my expulsion in 1982, he had been expelled from Washington. Now the slate was wiped clean and we both were allowed to return to old stomping grounds. As a faithful proponent of every policy twist since Stalin’s day, Sturua is currently a fervent advocate of perestroika --and eager to discuss the West’s “moral obligation” to help the Soviet Union.

“The experience of history shows that if you are economically strong, you are less aggressive and more predictable,” he said. The implicit warning: Without Western aid, perestroika may fail and the Soviet Union will again threaten the world. Somehow the blackmail element never disappears, even in better times.

The real veterans of battles to open up the Soviet system--and of the prisons and labor camps--take a radically different view of the Western role. “The support Gorbachev gets in the West gives him the feeling that he can delay changes in this country,” argued Sergei Grigoryants, the editor of the samizdat journal Glasnost.

I heard the same argument at a meeting of Ukrainian nationalists in Lvov, but with a more embittered edge. “In times of crisis, the West has saved the Soviet Union and it is doing so again,” Sergei Noboka declared. “The West does not want destabilization of the Soviet Union and it will do everything to allow us to be put away for another 15 years.” Baltic nationalists expressed similar worries, that the West would sacrifice the republics’ interests on the altar of a new detente. Most people I met had little confidence in the ability of Westerners to understand the current situation.

Westerners traveling to the Soviet Union are not helped in that task by a duplicity that still exists. In Moscow, I met an old friend who occupies a senior academic position. He exuded utter pessimism about the durability of glasnost and the chances of perestroika arresting the deterioration of the Soviet economy--but only to people he knows well. My friend described a recent meeting with a group of visiting American Sovietologists, whom he described as euphoric: “They said everything was wonderful.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “So who was I to say anything different? I said it was wonderful, too.”