Reaction of a Russian: America Is Great, Da? : Relations: A history teacher from the Urals stays with an Orange County family and is duly impressed. ‘Where is mud?’ she asks.

When Tamara Alaiba saw the bizarre display in a quiet Santa Ana neighborhood, she was once again reminded that she definitely was not in Russia anymore.

The former Communist Party official, here for five weeks to learn firsthand about U.S. culture and free-market dynamics, had already received an adult dose of American customs, courtesy of her hosts, the Gary Lawrence family of Santa Ana.

She had visited a McDonald’s in Buena Park, where she marveled at the logistics and quizzed the owner about the employee training program. She had witnessed a funeral in Santa Ana, where during a eulogy she was startled to hear laughter--a nonexistent emotion at Russian services. She’d been to Disneyland, first-class hotels and business breakfasts. She’d met politicians and was a guest at a baby shower.

As a history teacher at Urals University and relatively worldly wise, Alaiba had braced herself for the high degree of material abundance and efficiency that decades of economic growth have created in Southern California.

But there, at the house on the corner, was a strange slice of American life that nothing had prepared her for. Yard upon yard of toilet paper--a commodity Russians have been known to wait in long lines to buy--had been flung about the home’s front yard in the best tradition of teen-age mischief.

In a country where toilet paper grows on trees, Alaiba knows, anything is possible.

Her own future, as her homeland deals with its emergence from 70 years of totalitarianism, is a patchwork of possibilities. As one of the rising democrats in Russia, Alaiba, 45 and a mother of two college-age sons, has lived on the cutting edge of Russia’s recent history.

In September, 1990, she followed Boris N. Yeltsin’s lead and quit the Communist Party, which she had belonged to for 20 years, and persuaded half the local party members to quit with her.

Later, to show support for Mikhail S. Gorbachev during the attempted coup by Communist hard-liners against him, she organized a strike in her (and Yeltsin’s) hometown, Sverdlovsk, since renamed Ekaterinburg. After gaining the support of the city council, she managed the strike for 72 hours without sleep as the industrial city of 1.5 million stopped working.

“We were so happy there was no bloodshed, but it was a very frightening three days,” she said.

She then worked as Yeltsin’s regional campaign manager in his successful bid to become Russia’s first popularly elected president.

Now, she is adamant that the United States not lose sight of its commitment to aid Russia’s transition to a decentralized, multiparty, free-market system. The U.S. government was generous with aid last year, she acknowledged, but after the presidential election drew Americans’ attention to domestic problems, Russia was neglected.

“America needs stability (in Russia), but your aid might be too late,” she said. If the U.S. government doesn’t act now to support Yeltsin against the coalitions that are opposing his reforms, she warned, the United States will end up paying “the same amount of money, but to support a military government.”

It was a message she repeated throughout a jam-packed schedule of meetings, speeches, tours and social events in Orange County, which she is leaving today to return to her homeland.

In one typical day in late November, she addressed high school history students, had breakfast with the management team of a resort hotel, met with a U.S. congressman, toured a food-processing plant in Santa Ana and finally had dinner as the guest of a Superior Court judge.

During her visit, she stayed at the home of Gary Lawrence, a political pollster whose trip to the Soviet Union in 1990 convinced him of the need to bring “well-wired” Russian reformists to the United States for crash courses in free-market principles.

“You can go to Russia and dump words on them, but once they get filtered through translation you haven’t given them a good-enough idea” about participatory democracy, said Lawrence, a prominent Republican who worked for in the Reagan Administration. “So we thought, let’s bring them over here.”

To this end, Lawrence, with partner Bruce Hughes, formed Freedom Development Services, an enterprise that he says is currently at the stage of “an expensive hobby.” They have also brought the Moscow chief of police, Arkady Murashev, and his wife, Olga, to Orange County.

As Alaiba was led from one meeting to another, she was never without her video camera. She was taping for a prime-time TV program, called “Hello America,” that she began in September to teach Russians about American customs, family life and language.

Alaiba’s husband directs the foreign-language department at Urals University, and she speaks English well. One of her first attempts at American slang, however, backfired to the great amusement of her hosts. After being coached to say, “You’re really a gnarly dude,” she told a bewildered 12-year-old that he was “a gnarly dud.”

Hughes was acting as Alaiba’s cameraman as she toured the Anaheim Hilton. With four hotel executives at her side, she saw both the support facilities and the spacious public areas. The opulent decor and furnishings, however, were so plentiful that she had to tell Hughes to downplay it for her Russian viewers.

“I told him, ‘Don’t show too many beautiful things; it will be too painful for people to watch,’ ” she said.

What stuck most in her mind about the Hilton, she said, was not the enormous laundry facility, the low staff-to-guest ratio or the lobby waterfalls. Rather, it was when general manager Glenn Hale spotted some litter during the tour and inconspicuously picked it up himself rather than calling for a subordinate.

“That said much to me,” Alaiba said, “that he cares truly about his hotel.”

Pride of occupation and ownership is a concept that Alaiba saw repeatedly during her visit. Indeed, one of the first things she noticed about Orange County was its relative cleanliness.

“ ‘Where is mud? Where is dirt?’ I said when I arrived. In Russia, it is custom to remove shoes in a home, but here I see why you don’t need to do that. Yards and streets are so clean.”

She also was struck by Americans’ smiles, which she said Russians consider to be both sincere and bountiful. “Your American smile is quite special. It’s your first reaction always,” she said. “At home, we have a slogan: ‘If you meet American with no smile, he must be a spy.’ ”

The energetic confidence exhibited by children--and the affection and tolerance shown them by adults--amazed Alaiba most of all during her visit, which ended Dec. 1. At a crowded election-night party, she was startled to see young children of all ages mingling with adult guests.

“In Russia, you never have photos of your children at your office, and no children would ever be at a gathering of adults. Never,” she said. “But here, they are all around. What is special in them? I think freedom is in their blood.”