Students Get a Lesson in How Cold War Can Heat Up

It was billed as a speech on perestroika. Instead, it became an illuminating lesson on the legacy of the Cold War.

Eager to give their students a global perspective, administrators at Sierra Nevada College on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe invited a Soviet diplomat to the campus to discuss the political and economic changes convulsing the Soviet Union. Gennady Zolotov, the deputy consul general in San Francisco, graciously agreed, and a date for the lakeside mini-summit was set.

Then politics got in the way.

On the other side of the globe, an American diplomat in Leningrad was denied permission to travel into Lithuania the day before last Friday’s scheduled speech at the tiny college. So the State Department, in a tit-for-tat policy dating to the 1950s, promptly called Zolotov in San Francisco and told him to unpack. He was informed that the special permission he needs to journey more than 25 miles beyond the consulate had been revoked. His trip to the mountains was off.

“It wasn’t retaliation,” State Department public affairs representative Chuck Steiner said. “It was just an in-kind response. They denied our request, so we denied theirs. It’s been a long-held rule between the two countries.”

Foreign affairs officer Kim Lamberty added, “We didn’t zap this guy on purpose. . . . It just so happened (Zolotov) was the next (Soviet diplomat) scheduled to travel” in the United States.

College officials, expecting a crowd of several hundred students and community leaders at their event, protested heartily. But it was no use.

“It seems pretty petty and immature to me,” college dean Mark Hurtubise said, recalling his fruitless pleadings with Washington. “Why couldn’t we have been a role model rather than resorting to the same type of activity we criticize in other countries?”

The episode has become something of a cause celebre in Incline Village, the small, woodsy town two miles from the California state line where Sierra Nevada College is located. Last year, the 500-student liberal arts school hosted the consul general from San Francisco, Sergei Aivazian, and his appearance was a smash hit.

Referring to the turmoil in the Soviet Union sparked by Lithuania’s declaration of independence from Moscow on March 11, Hurtubise said: “We figured it was a great time to bring another Soviet official to our campus.”

In addition to Zolotov’s speech, a weekend of events--including tete-a-tetes with local politicians and hiking in the surrounding mountains--were planned for the diplomat.

“Gennady was going to bring his wife, Valentina, and they were going to stay at our house,” Hurtubise said. “Everyone was looking forward to it.”

Zolotov did not return telephone calls from The Times. But reaction to the news in Incline Village has been “disappointment and disbelief,” college spokeswoman Roz Parry said. Callers from the community “basically agreed the whole thing was childish,” while students were puzzled by what looked to them like State Department paranoia over an innocent social visit, she said.

“The students thought it was quite ironic, since the topic of the speech was perestroika and glasnost, that their own government would deny them the opportunity to hear new ideas,” Parry said. “We had hoped they would reconsider, as a gesture of openness, but they said a policy is a policy.”

Hurtubise is an optimist, however, and is hopeful the speech can be rescheduled. Perhaps by next semester, he reasons, chilly international relations--like the frosting of snow on the peaks surrounding Lake Tahoe’s sparkling waters--will have thawed.