Frienship Flight : Tony Circles the Globe : Journalists’ Impressions : Soviets With Tony Take In the Sights

The snapshots of America are as simple as they are familiar: a mirrored skyscraper standing tall over a sleepy city, a shoe store on a busy street, a swimming pool and hot tub nestled behind a tract house.

Each is but a snippet of a vast and complex nation, but taken together a picture begins to emerge of a people and a country, one seemingly so rich in many ways yet so needy in others.

It was the America as seen through the eyes of Maxim V. Chikin and Aleksie Grinevich, two Soviet journalists who gained firsthand impressions of life in the United States while accompanying 11-year-old Tony Aliengena of San Juan Capistrano on his historic flight around the world.

Officially, Chikin and Grinevich are following Tony as an expression of the Soviet Union’s interest and good-will in the youngster’s “Friendship Flight” that will reach its emotional peak with a stop in Moscow and a possible meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But for the 27-year-old Soviet journalists, the trip also has been a rare opportunity to take a close look at a country that has been both feared and admired in their homeland.

Since Tony’s seven-week odyssey in a private plane began June 5, the correspondents--both from Moscow--have been reporting back to their readers on everything from the presence of swimming pools and tennis courts atop high-rise buildings in Denver to $750-a-night hotel rooms at ski resorts above Salt Lake City.

“You will understand when we are in the Soviet Union why I am so excited about this,” Chikin, a correspondent for the Soviet youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda (circulation 18 million), said as he eagerly snapped photographs in downtown Denver. “At home, there are no goods.”

The fact that Tony is being allowed to fly across the Soviet Union later in his trip is due in large measure to the Soviets’ desire to try to better understand what Chikin describes as “the middle American.”

They see as one such average American Tony’s father, Gary Aliengena, a former truck driver who now invests in real estate and owns a plane, three cars, and large house with swimming pool and hot tub. Chikin said that his first dispatch from America was about the rags-to-riches story of Aliengena, 39.

“That is the American dream,” Chikin said of Aliengena’s successes in both the real estate market and a truck-transportation company.

The Soviet journalists were so taken with observing the lives of “average” Americans during the week that they ignored practically everything else. On tours of Salt Lake City and Denver, for example, they asked their guides to show them where middle Americans lived and worked.

When Denver tour guide B.J. Eckardt, a local magazine publisher, asked if they wanted to see the poorer side of town to counter-balance the opulence they had seen earlier, both replied “nyet. “ And when they passed a beggar on the street, Chikin dismissed the sight.

“Oh, we’ve seen one of those already,” he said.

Neither Chikin nor Grinevich, a correspondent for the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura (circulation 3 million), had been to the United States before.

In their travels through Orange County, Salt Lake City, Denver and Boston, both expressed unabashed admiration of America’s wealth and technology and added they hoped that their government would emulate its system of free enterprise.

“Under socialism, we have no (successful economic) models to follow,” Chikin said. “So we have to look outside for models to the United States.”

In the Soviet Union, by contrast, Chikin said, goods are so scarce that even he, a success by Moscow standards by virtue of a prestigious job and an apartment in Moscow, cannot obtain some essential goods.

“My poor wife tells me when I get home (from work) that she had gone to the shops (for food) and found nothing,” said Chikin, who cannot afford a car but is saving frugally to buy one.

This unabashed praise of the United States stands in contrast to the America-bashing that was so common in the Soviet press only five years ago. Under Gorbachev’s new policy of glasnost, or openness, Chikin and Grinevich said they are encouraged to report the truth about the United States. And during this trip with Tony, they are trying to do just that.

“For years, the Soviet press reported that America was poor and that the majority of people were homeless and with nothing to eat,” Chikin said. “But it is not true. America is a rich and wealthy country and now it’s time to say the truth.”

On their tour last week of Salt Lake City and vicinity, the Soviets’ eyes bulged as tour guide Deanna Winn pointed out such attractions as a ski resort condominium which recently sold for $1 million and a three-story hilltop mansion.

“Is it for one family?” Chikin asked in disbelief about the mansion, which housed one not-so-average American family.

Yet life in the United States has not all been vodka and caviar for the Muscovites. Arriving in Orange County from Moscow 10 days ago, they have had to overcome severe jet lag.

They also have had to adjust to the somewhat unsettling experience of flying in a private plane. The two Soviets, along with this reporter, are riding in a twin-engine chase plane that is accompanying Tony’s single-engine Cessna. The plane, delayed in Washington with mechanical problems, picked them up in Boston Wednesday and caught up with the entourage in Iqaluit in the Northwest Territories.

The food here is, likewise, less than thrilling for the Soviets. At a Mexican restaurant near Salt Lake City, the two grimaced and shook their heads when asked if they wanted to sample guacamole and salsa. Chikin explained that they are accustomed to a bland diet and could not stomach the hot spices of Mexican food.

The Soviets wound up munching on some cheese quesadillas, the only non-spicy item on the menu.

Chikin also found disturbing the Americans’ preoccupation against cigarette smoking. An avid smoker like many of his countrymen, Chikin said he feels like an outcast lighting up in a country where smoking is banned in many public places.

“Everybody watches me like I am an Eskimo when I smoke,” Chikin said.

Overall, though, the Soviets say they have been impressed by the friendliness of most Americans.

“I was in England last year and I thought the United States would be like there, where the people are not friendly,” Chikin said. “But here, the people laugh a lot and are very friendly.”

Unlike their American counterpart, the Soviet journalists took no notes to record their observations, whether good and bad. Instead, they spend a few moments before turning in at night to jot down their thoughts in a journal.

“We don’t take notes every day because we don’t need all the small facts that you are taking down,” Chikin explained. “We need only our impressions.”

Grinevich said that his most important story would come at the conclusion of Tony’s flight, scheduled for July 20 in Orange County.

What the Soviets did have in common with American reporters, however, was a tendency to work erratic hours and a dread of what an editor might do to a story. Chikin, for instance, had worried that his Tuesday dispatch might have been bumped from his newspaper altogether because of the international news this week.

Both Chikin and Grinevich have been professional journalists for about five years, having completed training in Moscow universities and served the requisite two years in the Soviet army.

After covering local stories around Moscow, the two journalists began going out on foreign assignments, a coveted job both in American and Soviet newsrooms.

Chikin has been dispatched to France, Czechoslovakia and India, while Grinevich has been to Europe and Southeast Asia. Chikin is multilingual, fluent in English, French and Czech, besides his native Russian. Grinevich speaks much less English, and in America has relied upon Chikin to interpret.

In their travels, they bring with them only a small bag of clothing and essentials and a log book to record impressions and write stories. Then they dictate their stories to editors back in Moscow.

Although they were favorably impressed with the United States and rail incessantly about the economic troubles back home, neither said he would ever want to move.

“It is the motherland,” Chikin said with a shrug.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t want to come back for a visit. Last week, as Grinevich drank in the pure mountain air of a Utah ski resort, he suddenly pulled a coin from his pocket and sent it sailing into the air.

“It is a Soviet custom,” he explained. “If we threw the coin, it means we must return to this place.”

Times staff writer Richard Beene contributed to this story from Orange County.

FLIGHT LOG: Page 2.