Journey to U.S.S.R. Changes Pair’s Lives

One of the profound bonuses of both teaching and the Christmas season is that ex-students frequently come back to Orange County for the holidays--and frequently give me a call when they do. One who called a few days ago is Esther Bradley, fresh back from the Soviet Union (not Russia, she pointed out)--and scheduled to go back there again in a few months. To stay.

Esther Bradley came to my classroom at UC Irvine a dozen years ago, a single mother trying to put her life back together by completing her education. She was a free spirit who wrote that way, slightly out of control but always interesting. She was a legal secretary who wanted to be something else--and had the tools to do it. She would check in with me periodically after she graduated, and two or three check-ins ago, sounding radiant, she told me that she was getting married to a man who approached even Esther’s Technicolor fantasies.

I had breakfast the other day with Esther and her husband of five years, a sprightly, animated, articulate computer scientist with a gray mustache and cropped wavy hair named Bill DeTally. He and Esther met through their common dedication to the Bahai faith, an independent world religion, founded in what is now Iran 150 years ago and dedicated to the promotion of a world civilization “characterized by the true brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.”

I knew about Bahai because one of its major houses of worship is in suburban Chicago, where I once lived. I didn’t know that its membership now numbers more than 6 million throughout the world and that it has been growing steadily in numbers and influence over the past few decades.

Last year, a friend told the DeTallys that a group of 10 young Bahais were planning a tour of the Soviet Union and wanted an older couple to accompany them. Esther and Bill had just decided that they didn’t want to live in Southern California any longer and had bought a home in Seattle. But they were restless and feeling a need--as Esther put it--”to be part of the global process instead of just going to the gym.” So the idea appealed to them instantly. “We looked at our responsibilities and our money,” Bill recalled, “and we said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

Accompanied by their 10 youthful associates--one of whom spoke fluent Russian--the DeTallys spent nine weeks in the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Soviet-American Cooperative Society, headquartered in Glenwood Springs, Colo. Much of this time was spent in areas seldom before seen by visitors.

One such area was the Siberian city of Ulan Ude, a major missile site where the MIG 23 is manufactured. Until last year, it was closed even to other Soviet citizens, and residents had to get special permission to leave.

“I spent much of my life,” Bill DeTally told me, “working on weapons systems to destroy the Soviets. And then one morning on this trip, I find myself sharing a wash basin in our hostel with a Soviet engineer on his way to work at the MIG factory. And later that day, we were allowed to have lunch in the factory cafeteria and pass out our literature on world peace.”

Although they were accompanied by an Intourist guide and interpreter, there were no restrictions put on the group. In each new town, two of them would visit the local media to explain what they were about. The others would set up in a public park and play music and talk to anyone who stopped to listen. A concert would then be arranged at some local hall that evening.

The concert (the young musicians were all amateurs) would consist of ethnic music--ranging from the Beatles to black African--followed invariably by invitations to members of the group to visit the homes of those in attendance. There, talk would often go far into the night.

The one constant in these conversations was the hunger of Soviet citizens for information about the United States. “Until four or five years ago,” Bill said, “the Soviet people were fed nothing but negative propaganda about the U.S. Then the doors were opened, and they were permitted an honest look. So in that very short span of time, they’ve gone from one extreme to the other in the way they think about us.”

Esther enlarged on this. “Most of the people we talked to think that Americans have all the answers. We thought it would make them feel better to know about the serious domestic problems we have, but they said, ‘No, no. We don’t want to hear that.’ All they wanted to hear was that we could offer them absolute solutions to their problems.”

This hunger was demonstrated over and over, especially in the Ukraine, where, Bill said, “there is lots of despair because the people feel that if they don’t get independence now, they never will.”

Except in Moscow--”which is full of big-city people intent on making a living”--the American visitors found the Soviet people they met “possessing a wonderfully generous spirit.” (The DeTallys insist on the distinction between Soviet and Russian because they were startled and impressed by the diversity and independent nature of the dozens of ethnic groups that make up the Soviet Union.)

Esther recalled a food shop in a Siberian town named Severo Vaikolsk “in the only shopping mall we saw on the whole trip.” The DeTallys tried to buy canned milk and were turned away with a string of nyets by the storekeeper. They were standing there confused when a strange woman approached, handed them a slip of paper and disappeared. It was her ration stamp for milk, sugar and tea--enormously valuable in a nation of severe food shortages. “Yet,” Esther said, “she gave it to us freely. That’s how we were treated all over the Soviet Union.”

When the DeTallys returned to the United States, they spent almost three months traveling about this country, talking about their experiences in the Soviet Union and thinking about what they wanted to do next. They were, Esther said, caught up in a confusing dichotomy of plenty.

“I love the materialism of this country on one level,” she said, “but not when it chokes the human spirit. People here are so involved in creature comforts, and over there they focus on survival.” She struggled for a moment for an apt metaphor, then said simply: “There’s no diet cola in the U.S.S.R.”

The DeTallys were haunted by their goodbys in Kiev, where their new friends--and one, especially, with whom they had become very close--pleaded with them to come back. And so they will.

After the holidays, they will sell their house, board their dog with a friend and take up residence in the Ukranian city of Dnetrotetrosk for at least a year.

“We aren’t missionaries,” Bill said. “The Soviet people aren’t into being told things right now. They’ve been told things too long. But the Bahai faith believes in independence of thought, so we will be there to share whatever we can. We represent people who project hope--and they need that badly right now.”

He paused a moment, then concluded: “We’re only burning physical bridges behind us, not emotional ones. We love this country.”