Russians Lead Talks on Moscow Politics at Reagan Library

From a sun-streaked hilltop in Simi Valley, over an elegant dessert of blackberries and cream, a dozen American academics and Russian politicians plotted Monday to rescue a bedraggled ex-superpower.

Still jet-lagged after a stop in Washington, four Russian lawmakers tried to convey the gritty rough-and-tumble realities of Moscow politics to the American economists and professors gathered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Monday.

The gloomy talk--of hyper-inflation and falling production, of the price of cheese and presidential rule--clashed with the idyllic setting.

“It’s very interesting for us to see how Russia looks from here,” said Sergei Sirotkin, a progressive member of the Russian parliament, gazing off into the blue sky. “It’s very difficult, it seems, for people here to understand Russia.”

But on Monday, people were certainly trying.

In a think tank dedicated to a Cold Warrior President, the Russians and Americans brainstormed together on how to save the remnants of the Soviet Union from conservative, backward-looking communists. The Russian delegates, who represent four reform-minded parties, will meet with Reagan in his Century City office today.

“These are four of the field generals in the Russian march toward democracy,” John Midgley, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Center for Public Affairs, said in opening the round-table discussion.

“We’re here to hear their needs, strategies and tactics,” Midgley added. “We’re here to learn how the West can help them push and pull Russia.”

As they tried to hash out a plan, though, participants in the conference soon discovered a fundamental problem: a glut of experts. Self-confident all, the experts--both Russian and American--could not seem to get their philosophies to jibe.

So the workshop soon degenerated into a theoretical debate, as each expert pontificated--without a translator to mediate.

Has corruption crammed every nook and cranny of Russia’s economy? Russian lawmaker Peter Filippov said yes. His colleague, Sergei Krasavchenko, said no. Is inflation more dangerous than unemployment? Congressional deputy Sergei Sirotkin said yes. Hoover Institute Sovietologist Annelise Anderson said no.

And on and on it went.

Starkly, the Russians warned their hosts that forces against Boris Yeltsin might try to rend the country by provoking inter-ethnic strife or by wrecking the already moribund economy in an effort to turn the people against their elected president. The power struggle, they predicted, could easily turn bloody.

Given those realities, the Russians shrugged off most of the American advice as useless. Suggestions that Yeltsin dissolve the communist-dominated parliament or invoke a state of emergency could spark an all-out civil war, they said.

Although they could not come up with a blueprint for carrying their struggle forward, the Russians said they were satisfied simply to get their message to the American people.

“It’s important that a wider circle of Americans understand us and know what Russia is like from the inside,” lawmaker Aleksei Surkov said. “What knowledge we leave behind, they will use in their fight to help the Russian people.”