A FLOWER CHILD
VISITS THE LAND OF GLASNOST
by Judith Goldsmith
The Blue Moon which overlooked the historic
visit of President Reagan to Moscow had barely lost its perfect
shape when I boarded a plane to Moscow with nineteen other
American gardeners as part of an Earthstewards Network
"Gardeners for Peace" tour of the Soviet Union. The rest of the
tour group was a delightful bunch of earthy gardeners from all
over the U.S., most of whom have been actively working for peace
for some years: several community garden organizers, from
California and Massachusetts and Michigan; two farming couples
and an herbalist from Oregon; a research horticulturist from
Colorado; and several others, including our tour leaders, garden
author Kate Gessert of Oregon and Earthstewards leader Diana
Glasgow of Seattle.
The recent warming of Soviet/U.S. relations
has encouraged American citizens to visit the Soviet Union. What
will they find? Those of us who've been find it a little hard to
talk about, like trying to describe a trip through a time-warp,
but there is definitely one overwhelming consensus: the more
U.S. citizens that visit the U.S.S.R., and the more Soviets that
visit the U.S., the better. We have a great deal to learn about
each other, and the interchange can only help. So strap yourself
in, and I'll try to prepare you for the future.
. . . . . . . .
When the U.S.S.R. fully embraces tourism, the
first place it should start to re-make its image is the Moscow
airport. It's modern enough, but the vast dark ceiling makes it
feel like a gloomy and uninviting cavern. And passing through
passport control could have given me a chill even in the most
cheerful building. U.S.S.R. Passport Control was straight out of
Orwell's 1984; the top of the officer's face was all that was
visible through the window; there was not even a hint of an
expression on it as he took passports, looked at them, looked up
intently and directly at the passport-holder, then looked down
and fiddled with the passport while the holder shifted nervously
from foot to foot. It wasn't until Customs that the human
feeling returned. One member of our tour, Geralyn Brusseau, (who
owns Brusseau's Restaurant in Seattle) is starting a group for
exchanges between cooks and other food-preparers called "Peace
Table". When the Customs officers discovered Geralyn's Russian
flyers describing her organization, along with pages of recipes
to exchange with Soviet cooks, they held up the line until three
other custom officers had been called over to read it. Then I
heard "zamir" [peace] muttered over and over under their breath
as the rest of us with our "I Choose Peace" buttons (in Russian
and English) filed through. Apparently, they couldn't quite
believe the mixture of peace-making with cooking and eating.
Luckily, the quick appearance of our guide
rescued us from our "stranger in a strange land" experiences.
(Most Americans wind up traveling with Intourist, expensive and
fancy, and the only way to travel for individuals; as a group,
we were able to travel with Intourbureau, moderately priced and
less fancy, but reserved for unions and other organizations; it
was more representative of the way Soviet citizens travel.) The
guides are there less to watch over you than to help you have a
good trip. You no longer have to stay with them if you don't
want to. We found the guide and the buses provided for us a
blessing which enabled us to communicate beyond pidgin Russian
and to get to all the places we wanted to go fast and easily.
Moscow lies in a vast forest. The endless
winter finally being over, thousands of people were out swimming
in the lakes, ponds, and swimming holes which are found in the
greenbelt that surrounds the city. The Muscovites are serious
about a greenbelt: one side of the rim road is all trees and
lakes, with the city starting abruptly and pleasantly only on
the other side.
Next morning, we started the (to Soviets)
serious business of touristing. Thousands of meretorious factory
workers and youngsters are shipped to Moscow as a reward for
their good work each summer, and there is a prescribed order to
their tours, to which we were now introduced. First, you must
see Red Square, the heart of the city. Then, there is the
Kremlin tour, and Lenin's tomb. Red Square is the cobbled plaza
between the Kremlin's walls on one side, St. Basil's Cathedral
on the second, and G.U.M. department store and the old part of
the downtown on the third. About the size of a football field or
two, Red Square is certainly not as imposing as I'd thought;
even the dais above Lenin's tomb where government officials are
seated to watch official parades is just right above the square.
G.U.M. reminded me of the central bazaar in Istanbul or the big
city mercados of Central America.
The other standard place to visit, now-a-days,
is Arbat Street. Moscow is trying its first tentative
experiments with the renovation of the older sections of the
city that the rest of the world is, freshening facades, and
putting in planter boxes along pedestrian walks. Arbat Street
was the first experiment, and (as most elsewhere) was such an
enormous hit that two more renovated streets are in the
planning. The Arbat is also the place to experience glasnost
first-hand: for the first time anyone can remember, artists
exhibit their works, people post flyers exclaiming
(controversial?) information, musicians strum guitars, and
stands sell soft-drinks and flowers. Small crowds gather at
each. (Lines seemed to form instantaneously; people rush to get
into anything that looks like a line immediately - after all,
you can always change your mind later, and if you don't want
what's being offered, probably someone you know does.)
After a day of getting oriented, including a
tour of Moscow's metro (easy to use after you master the
cyrillic alphabet), we went on to less standard visits: meeting
with the head researcher on U.S. agriculture at the Institute of
U.S.A. & Canada Relations, himself a citizen diplomat
extraordinaire; a wonderful warm "Russian tea" with homemade
jams and miles of cakes and home-baked goodies with the Moscow
Society for the Preservation of Nature (a combination Sierra
Club, Audubon, SPCA, and garden club); the Moscow Botanical
Garden; the Tretyakov Museum (with an exhibit of previously
"unoffical" Soviet art); the Exhibit of Economic Achievements (a
permanent and interesting "county fair" of animals, plants,
homes, and other trades); bookstores (very poor quality,
although there are many foreign authors available in
translation); the circus (incredible); and the gorgeous historic
buildings of the Novodevic'e Convent, Kolomenskoye, and the
well-preserved and striking Russian Orthodox churches inside the
Kremlin, full of icons and candles.
The U.S.S.R., at least judging from the tour
guide's careful recitation, is generally proud of their
planning. And in some things they have been remarkably
thoughtful. I was especially impressed by the forests which have
been created around the apartment houses. Instead of building
sprawling suburbs, as Americans and Europeans have allowed
themselves to do, the Soviets built up. Dedicated to providing
housing for all its citizens, the Moscovites razed villages on
the outskirts of the city and gradually replaced them with
thirty-story apartment buildings, which the former villagers
were purportedly eager to move into, for the sake of their
plumbing, kitchens, and other modern conveniances. The land
around the residences is public space, worthy of any future
ecological city, which residents use for morning calisthenics
and walks, evening dog strolls, swimming in the lakes and
waterholes, and, under agreements with the local government,
home gardens. (There are few lawns needing high maintenance and
water; green areas between trees consist of freely and lushly
growing wild plants.) Each apartment complex is opened complete
with stores so that residents don't need to travel to another
part of the city for services. And each is at a bus stop. The
bus is practically free (the ticketing runs on the honor system)
and is a quick ride to one of the cheapest (5 kopecks), fastest,
and cleanest metro systems in the world. Pedestrian underpasses
under main streets speed traffic flow. Art is incorporated into
many of the new buildings, especially art reflecting indigenous
traditions.
Despite the highlights, however, my overall
reaction was: If Moscow is the epitome of the Soviet Union, the
result of their most focused efforts, it is a grim country.
Well-planned and carefully thought out, and because of that,
suffering from a numbness in the limbs which are only very
slowly regaining circulation in the last three years since
Glasnost. Life in the cracks is scarce. Everything is big and
concrete, with grout oozing out the seams and corners that don't
quite seem to meet, although they must, and poor maintenance of
buildings once they are built. Centralization and
standardization is pervasive: there are massive universities,
massive sports facilities, massive youth facilities, massive
stores, etc. etc. E. F. Schumacher would not be pleased.
Imagine yourself, your 1988 self, dropped into
the U.S.A. of the early 1950s: post-war block housing going up
everywhere, meatloaf and spaghetti on the average family's
dinner table, factories turning out highly-standardized
refrigerators and t.v.'s and other household goods, family
vacations to resorts, job-oriented education, sports and science
highly valued, families gathering around their tvs morning and
evening, specializations (doctor, lawyer) relied on,
do-it-yourselfing limited to weekend hobbies, magazines and
books with little color printing, jogging unheard of, the
McCarthy hearings going on, a strong political party dominating
all branches of government, conservative standards of dress,
secret alcoholism, big business and Keynesian economic theories,
travel abroad unusual . . . Now you have an idea of what the
U.S.S.R. feels like to a sixties person living in the eighties.
There are some important differences from the
U.S. 1950s: women are not hassled when traveling alone,
bus-drivers sit at the head of the table with officials, babies
in their carriages are left unattended outside stores (and
passer-bys comfort them when they need it), there are next-to no
visible poor, and there is rock and roll. It's quite an
experience to be in a place where there is little nit-picking
over who pays for what, because the state takes care of most
everything. But the U.S.S.R. has not yet had its "1960s", its
period of individualism and creativity. It feels very much like
a middle-class industrializing 1950s U.S. It wasn't until the
final stop-over of our trip in Copenhagen -with its
individualized houses, restored inner city, bright shop windows,
international cuisine, bicyclists carrying bread or flowers -
that the impact of what I had experienced in the U.S.S.R. really
hit home. Yet, not having traveled, or seen much of the west's
media, Soviet citizens have little to compare their lives to.
Soviet citizens are warm and loving, and they are trying their
best, under very adverse circumstances, to figure out what's
going on.
The Soviet people are very eager to have peace
and friendship. Yet the overwhelming feeling I came away with
was that I felt really sorry for them, a feeling I have rarely
experienced in my travels. Travels to Brittany, England,
Holland, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Guatemala, and Mexico all made
me envious, in Europe of being in places where western culture
is really done right, in third world countries of the vitality
of the indigenous cultures. But it was hard to find vitality in
the Soviet Union. Everybody has the basics: food to eat,
shelter, health care, education (the absence of very poor people
was very noticeable; I think I saw two beggars on the whole
trip). On the other hand, few people, at least as far as I could
discover (though I didn't meet any party functionaries or
important people) have much more. Contemporary crafts, colorful
magazines and books, foreign movies, inventive clothing,
interesting recipes, flower gardens, interesting shops, are
almost non-existent. Organization "by interest" is a growing,
but still rare, trend. With the installation of glasnost and
perestroika, street sales are coming into the open: herb- and
knicknack-sellers, street artists, the woman with her scale
charging people to weigh themselves, all draw good-sized crowds.
And we visited several of the "rinoks" (the markets where people
can sell home-grown produce, flowers, meats, and other
commodities), and found all the same eager elbowing and
bargaining that characterizes such markets around the world. The
prices were high though, and even there variety was limited.
It was the same feeling I'd gotten visiting
the Republic of Ireland in 1985. Everybody talks about what's
wrong with the country (except in the U.S.S.R. they mostly think
it instead of saying it), how come we're so stuck, so behind. In
Ireland, people felt guilty about it, as though there must be
something wrong with them, as is understandable after centuries
of colonial domination. In the U.S.S.R., there is more
bewilderment.
What's wrong? The government is making a
valiant effort to house everyone in new, modern apartments by
the year 2000, but construction is proceeding slowly and the
building has been so shoddy that residents of the original
housing built in the 50s and 60s are already asking for new
buildings. Meanwhile, country towns (at least those we visited
at the edge of Moscow) seem to be almost third world, with
outdoor toilets and dirt paths (although of course that can also
be a pleasant respite from city-living). Agriculture is in
crisis, yet the solutions we heard mentioned were dangerously
close to the mistakes the U.S. has already made: breeding
vegetables and fruit for mechanical-picking; more irrigation
(rather than the search for drought-tolerant crops); and
allowing collective farms to contract with individual producers,
which may help, but has the danger of turning them into
share-croppers. Meanwhile, home gardens raise much of the food
(80% of the potatoes, for example), with cheap seeds and
information provided through tv programs; hopefully the
contribution of home farming will continue.
And the food (as American gardeners our big
complaint): Meals in our hotels were almost always the same: a
small plate of cucumbers and tomatoes, sometimes with radishes
or green onions; rather plain bread (though solid, and always in
both white and whole wheat) with sausage and cheese, and
occasionally jam; a soup (usually cabbage); and a main course
with a big piece of meat, barley or rice or potatoes, and
cabbage; a sweet desert, coffee and tea, mineral water, and
sometimes juice or kvass (a nice fermented barley drink, very
thirst-quenching). We all got the same food - although the
service people really went out of their way to find something
for the low cholesterol and vegetarian diets on our tour - and
there is plenty of it, but since we didn't get much choice, lots
of food got wasted. One thing Gorbachev himself recently
pinpointed was the lack of variety and the lack of fresh fruits
and vegetables.
But the worst problem is probably fear - fear
of speaking up, of individual expression, of identifying oneself
as disgruntled, of trying anything new. The Soviet people don't
really believe glasnost yet; they stretch a little and try
something, very tentatively; when that proves ok, they step an
inch further. They don't feel secure that it's really going to
last. Visiting a kolkhoz farm near Tashkent, we wanted to split
into two groups, some to hear more about the orchards, others to
visit the vegetable gardens. Later, our guide told us she'd
overheard the officials saying they guessed it was now all right
for visitors to go off without the guide there; this was unheard
of in the past, when guides made sure visitors only saw the
right things.
Olya was a story herself, one which
illustrates the barriers through which the Soviet people must
pass. She was a little slip of a woman for her 28 years (unlike
most of the meat-eating, stocky population), resourceful at
getting us special requests, an excellent translator, a walking
encyclopedia of historical and other information. She
complimented us warmly on the bus home from the airport for
coming to talk about peace, in the wake of the Reagan-Gorbachev
meeting, about which Moscovites had been very excited. But the
first few days, she was very formal, almost wooden.
Then, slowly, as our exuberant 60s selves and
the warm receptions we were getting began to get to her, she
started to open up a bit. First, she started to admit why they
were having problems with the housing ("I heard on the radio the
architect of these Kalinin Prospekt buildings, the first ones
built in the 50s, which won an international prize at the time,
say that they were a mistake, they should never have been built
that way, so large with so little nature and shops around
them."); then the Stalin era ("I can admit that we are just
finding out about what happened."); then the rinoks ("Such
things never happened before, even three years ago - so many
people making fortunes by flying in from Georgia with fresh
food.").
When she heard me telling a landscape
architect from Washington D.C. that I met on a Moskva River boat
tour about the greenbelt and the interesting use of forest and
public space I had noticed, she made sure to announce on the bus
the next day that the trees had only been added after the first
apartments had been built without them, in the 50s and 60s, and
people had noticed that they missed having nature around them.
And after hearing us complaining about the food and commenting
about the agriculture (and in fact, hearing the director of her
national research institution identify Soviet agriculture's
problems), she blurted out at one point, "Well, we may be
backward, but at least we don't have to worry about insecticides
on our food." But other topics would make her so uncomfortable
that she would abruptly end the conversation. She had been
glowingly telling us that she goes to the U.S.S.R.'s homeopathic
doctors and hospitals, and how homeopathic medicines are for
sale in most pharmacies, but when I noted that homeopathy was
illegal in the US mostly because the AMA doesn't like the
competition, she changed the subject.
It was the orange that made it all come
pouring out. Geneva and Claire had elected to pass up a tour and
spend more time around the Arbat, even finding a small cafe to
eat lunch in. For dessert, they were given an orange. Leaning on
a wall, later, resting, Geneva had taken the orange out and
started to peel it, when a woman came over and started pointing
at it and talking very excitedly. When Geneva mentioned this
story to Olya later that afternoon, Olya got quite flustered.
"Oranges," she said, "you can get them anywhere." That evening,
at dinner, Geneva was retelling the story as we sat at one of
the two tables assigned to our group. Olya, at the other table
with the rest of the group, overheard, and again got very
flustered and excited, and finally it came spilling out. "It's
very hard for me to admit that anything is wrong, still, even
though it's allright now. It's hard for me to say these things,
that there are shortages, that we don't have everything we want,
that some things are wrong. I'm trying not to do it, but it's a
habit."
. . . . . . . .
Luckily Moscow is not the epitomy of the
U.S.S.R., though the Russians don't seem to have figured that
out yet. Our next stop on the tour (we had been forbidden to
visit Yerevan in Armenia, due to the demonstrations going on)
was the wonderful city of Tbilisi in Georgia. Georgia is rarely
visited by Americans, and more's the pity.
Georgia is a rich agricultural land of wine-
and tea-growing, wonderfully-spiced cooking, and a "continental"
climate that is warm and pleasant even when it rains. The people
inhabiting it seem close in physical appearance and culture to
their neighbors to the south, the Armenians. The Georgians, who
have their own language, culture, and history quite distinct
from the Russian part of the Soviet Union, have a story they
tell about their origins: When God was creating the world and
giving out lands to all the peoples, the Georgians were off in a
corner, busy with what they love to do: picnicing. When God had
given away all the land and noticed them over in the corner,
having a good time and not asking for anything, he decided to
give them a piece of the land he had saved for himself. The love
the Georgians have for their land is as strong as can be implied
from that story, and it is not lightly-felt. For thoughout
history, there has been attempt after attempt to take this
wonderful temperate agricultural heaven just south of the
Caucasus Mountains and north of Turkey away from them. The
Georgians have fought in war after war, every one of them
defensive. Tbilisi has been destroyed and rebuilt FORTY times.
Actually, you don't feel it walking around the
city, for unlike the cold modern architecture of Moscow,
Georgian architecture is tasteful, human-scale, and whimsical.
Like New Orleans, the Georgians love iron work trim and
balconies, and many houses have grape arbors running up their
rows of windows. Crooked little streets abound, carved doors and
pastel paint jobs, flower markets, bakeries, crafts shops
(pottery, weaving) in the old part of town. (I'm told such
"charm" can be found in the central Soviet Union also, for
example in the "Golden Ring" cities near Moscow; Leningrad also
seems to get good reviews.)
It was here, in Georgia, that we had our real
baptism in hospitality. Our second day, we visited our first
farm, a wine-growing sovkhoz in the Kaheetia region. After a
tour of the vinyards and the winery, during which we had a warm
interchange with a party of women who were at work tying up and
pruning the vines, we were taken to the main hall, where we
discovered an incredible feast had been laid out to welcome us.
Later, we found that feeding the visitors is standard, but we
never had a meal so elaborate put before us. There were little
dishes all over the table with breads, meats, vegetables, all
wonderfully seasoned. Banquets in Georgia have formal rules, and
one of the party seated himself at the head of the table,
announcing that the others had asked him to be the host. Our
Soviet guide and our tour leader sat down near him, the rest of
us filled in the middle of the long table, trying to intermingle
with the other members of the welcoming party, all middle-aged
men, who nevertheless wound up sitting mostly towards the lower
part of the table.
Then the toasts started. All toasts are given
by the toastmaster, or with his approval, and with the
requirement that the glass be full when the toast is made, and
emptied after each. The first toast mentioned the historic
Gorbachev-Reagan meeting, of which this meeting was
commemorative. And after that, the six Georgian men at the end
of the table sang their first song, a traditional Georgian song
sung acapella with incredible harmonies and six full voices.
That's when things started to warm up, as several of us had
tears in our eyes from the incredible welcome we were receiving
and the heartfelt realization of our common humanity. More
toasts followed, to peace and friendship, to children, to
mothers, to art and beauty, to the earth, all beautifully
spoken, with songs following each and plates of food still
apppearing. (Georgians believe there should be as much food on
the table when the guests get up as when they sat down.) We
joined in, offering toasts to the seven generations about which
the American Indians speak, to the hope that peace would be
easier now; finally, Wren, the herbalist from Oregon, gave a
toast which our hosts nominated as the best of the banquet.
"It's not normal for women to give toasts in Georgia," she said,
"but women usually work the hardest for peace and that's why
we're here. This place, Georgia, is the first place we've really
felt at home, and that's because we can feel that you, like us,
really love nature. [Nods all along the table.] They say, as you
know, that the world is getting smaller and smaller, that it's
like a boat. [More nods.] Well, we just want you to know that
we're very glad to be in the same boat as you." Evidently the
boat image really crossed cultural boundaries, and the response
was ecstatic.
At about this point our guide, told us
incredulously that the hospitality we were experiencing was well
beyond the standard for visitors. Our sincerity and warmth had
gotten across, and songs and toasts came pouring out, songs
about the beauty of the land, old Georgian melodies that
Georgians often sing when they're together, but which tourists
get to hear only on records.
And then the dancing started. Everyone was
moderately to heavily inebriated by this time. Some of us in the
middle had managed to cheat and not fill our glasses with each
toast, but those sitting near the end had not gotten away with
that. Our hosts, all stronger-than-oxes Georgian farm men, had
not been lax either, though they are so used to wine that they
were still solid on their feet ("As you can see, there is no
`dry-law' in this part of the Soviet Union," joked our guide.)
New musical instruments started appearing, and finally some of
our hosts started dancing down at the end of the table, the
Zorba-like dance the men do, and inviting us to dance. Even our
guide had gotten thoroughly swept away by the spirit, and turned
out to be a good dancer, dancing the traditional steps daintily
and with little hand motions.
Only one woman was there from the farm, a
middle-aged pleasant looking lady who was serving the food to
the table. She was businesslike and serious at first, but after
she started to notice how things were going she disappeared and
reappeared with little black Georgian hats for each of us and
put them on us. It was getting to be late afternoon (we had all,
in unspoken agreement, decided to forget about whatever else it
was we were supposed to do that day), but before we left we
insisted on thanking the cooks who had prepared the meal - three
men, who not having any idea what had been going on, were rather
surprised at the scene when they walked out of the kitchen - and
the woman who had been serving it. That probably did it for
them; before we managed to get out to the bus, they had shown up
with beautiful books for each of us, photo books of their
favorite Georgian sculptor, Arsen Pochkhua, whose wonderful
carvings of women, animals, plants, and mythical scenes really
embodies the Georgian view of the world. And insisted on all
autographing them. We left blowing kisses.
There is more to visit in Tbilisi, too: the
Museum of Georgian Folk Architecture and Life, with beautiful
traditional Georgian wood houses and furniture; the baths; and
nearby Mzkheta, with its church on a hill surrounded by flowers
and its central church ornamented with four old pre-Christian
bull's heads, one holding wheat and grapes.
. . . . . . . .
On the other hand, don't go to Tashkent in
Uzbekhistan unless you have to, and, even then, don't ever go in
late spring or summer. (Ask for Bokhara or Samarkhand at least.)
Uzbekhistan is in that nebulous area few Americans know anything
about, between the steppes and Afghanistan. The people look
Asian, and are mostly Moslem; they wear colorful clothes and
have the highest population increase rate in the U.S.S.R..
Tashkent is a thoroughly modern Soviet city, having been leveled
in a recent earthquake. It is dry and dusty, and unfortunately
we got there right at the start of a record 104 degree heat wave
. . . not a record in amount (Tashkent normally gets this hot in
mid to late summer), but only in its occuring in June.
Unfortunately, we also wound up in new tour buses fitted for air
conditioning, with windows that didn't open . . . and no air
conditioning. If you ever do get stuck in Tashkent, one of the
nicer spots is the Uzbek tea house in one of the parks.
I was interested in the area mostly because it
has the same wet/dry Mediterranean climate as California, and
the same problems: irrigation systems built to bring water from
the Amu-Darya and Sir-Darya rivers to the former "Hungry Steppe"
to grow cotton are now salting up the irrigated land and
lowering the water level in the Aral Sea to such an extent that
the fishing industry there is dying and frozen fish are being
shipped in from the Atlantic, while dust storms of salt sand
sweep across the area. One of the men we met on an agricultural
research institute tour, a very Uzbek-looking college-educated
international co-ordinator for the institute, told us that
people there would prefer to grow less cash-crop cotton and more
vegetables for home consumption (as in other colonized areas, I
thought, but didn't say). "Agriculture is traditional in this
area," he told us. "Families always had fruit trees and
vegetable gardens in their compounds . . . But now I'm afraid
that many of us have forgotten how to farm. Lots of people, like
me, are college-educated, and we aren't used to taking care of a
cow or getting our hands dirty anymore."
The other interesting experience in Tashkent
was the local Soviet guide (in each city you visit, an
additional local guide is assigned to you). Aisha was a thorough
believer and member of the Communist Party. Outside the ancient
mosque in Tashkent, a Moslem requested that we not take any
pictures of an important leader who was about to emerge and get
into a car. "They're afraid of losing control," Aisha explained,
which several of us found understandable, given the history of
vagaries of Soviet policy. "I don't find it understandable," she
snapped back. She explained how the Uzbek culture had been so
backward when the Soviets started to modernize them that women
all wore veils when they went out in public, and related how one
monument stood where women had had mass veil-burnings when the
Soviet government had decreed that veils were no longer to be
worn. But she also related, rather unemotionally, how some eight
hundred women were killed during those riotous times.
Interesting. Made me want to learn more about how these changes
came about. (Try Central Asians Under Russian Rule: A Study in
Culture Change by Elizabeth E. Bacon [London: Cornell University
Press, 1966] to start.)
Alma Ata, in Kazakhistan, wears its Soviet
veil more gracefully. At the northern edge of China's Tien Shien
mountains, it is cool and almost Alpine. We stayed in a resort
area above the city, called Medeo, full of professional young
sportsmen and sportswomen; visited the city's beautiful new
museum which covers the area's unique paleontology and
ethnology, and a folk instrument museum; and met asian-looking
Kazakh descendants.
. . . . . . . .
A diversity of cultures, some much more intact
and vital than others, makes up the U.S.S.R.. Gardener that I
am, the culture of the country reminded me of over-ripe
blackberries too long on the vine: hard & dry, but still sweet.
When will the U.S.S.R.'s people come into their own? Things are
definitely opening up: a main topic of conversation among Soviet
peoples is all the new things that they are seeing happening
around them. Americans are pouring in, and that bodes well for
the flow of new ideas into the country. And many Soviets talked
about how they hoped to travel, now that it was becoming more
possible. (Since everything is owned by the state, not just
permission but money for a trip usually has to come from the
government.)
Our trip organizers were especially amazed at
the difference in treatment our tour got than when Earthstewards
first started leading exchange tours four years ago. "When I
brought over my first group of farm women," Diana Glasgow
relates, "we sent all these letters and got positive replies.
But when we actually arrived, they were aghast: `Farm women???'
They didn't know what to do with us. We got maybe one or two of
the visits we requested." In contrast, our Gardeners For Peace
tour got nearly all of the couple dozen special visits we'd
asked for. Our guide was as surprised and delighted as the
Earthstewards. (Special thanks go to earlier citizen diplomat
visitors who pioneered and opened the way.)
The Soviet Union is opening up to new
possibilities. This is not to say the road to creativity and new
ideas will be smooth. Our first evening in Tbilisi, we went down
to the main square to see the end of the festival of flowers
that had taken place that day, getting there just in time for
the dance performances and beauty contest (another new thing)
which ended it. A big crowd gathered around a raised dais, with
spotlights and microphones. The presentations included both
school children in traditional costume doing traditional dances
and teenage girls dancing to rap music in punk clothes. A young
English language student, a teen-ager with a child, struck up a
conversation with me, telling me what everyone was saying and
which beauty queen contestant was from which school. "Which girl
do you think is the most beautiful?" she kept asking. "Do you
like this music? Do you like these clothes?" She was very
concerned about whether her friends were keeping up with the
latest trends in the west, asking if I'd brought any fashion
magazines with me. I wished I could tell her somehow that it was
her opinion that mattered, that the future would have to be
invented from within.
I had brought along two books which turned out
to be perfect accompaniments for such a trip, and really put
this experience in perspective: Theodore Roszak's Person/Planet
and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. Both of them speak, with
different emphasis, about the change that is happening as both
capitalist and communist countries move into the
"post-industrial" age, a period which no longer will have the
emphasis on standardization, specialization, synchronization,
concentration, maximization, and centralization that the
industrial age valued. This period is "post-industrial" not
because there will not be industry, but because the biggest
changes will now be focused around renewable energy, intelligent
environments, de-massification of the media, new types of
producer-consumer relationships, short-run customized
production, and other trends not encouraged in the past. And as
Toffler notes and Roszak emphasizes, this period will be marked
by people seeking to find themselves as individual "persons",
with their own unique talents, interests, idiosyncrasies,
habits, and destinies. Part of that search is the seemingly-mad
trying on of styles, customs, and ideas which characterized the
sixties: an attempt to learn about Far-Eastern religions,
American Indian customs and crafts, African music, and many
other cultural riches all in one generation. The end result is a
rediscovery of ancients roots and a flowering of individual
creativity such as can already be seen starting today in the
U.S., Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and other western nations.
The trend is so strong that both capitalist
and communist industrialized systems have to step out of the
way, as the U.S.S.R. is currently discovering. But for most of
the Soviet Union, the third wave has not yet hit. And it will
probably be a slow and somewhat painful surge. All printing
presses, radio, and tv stations in the U.S.S.R. are still owned
by the state; xerox machines and computers are rare; and,
although rock and roll groups are included as entertainment
breaks in the standard tv broadcasts, there is certainly not the
variety of musical exploration that has blossomed in the U.S.
(Berkeley is rarified air, I know, but we have Nigerian
highlife, Balinese Gamelan, Japanese taiko drums, Jamaican
reggae, and Peruvian flutes, among other styles, not to mention
the new World Fusion groups.)
For now, Soviet citizens can only dream. Which
reminds me of a scene which occurred at the close of our trip,
waiting around in the airport for a plane which had been held
up. We'd probably been doing our usual complaining about the
lack of variety in the food we'd been eating, when Olya, our
guide, asked Geralyn, the restaurant owner, to describe one of
the salads she might make in her restaurant. Geralyn's
description included, I think, lettuce, bean sprouts, cilantro,
mushrooms, sunflower seeds, carrots, red peppers, and nuts, none
of which we'd had during our U.S.S.R. visit. Olya, rather sadly,
but with a smile on her face, then told us how she used to play
a similar game one summer with some friends at a camp, when
there wasn't much to eat: they would ask each other "What are
you going to ask your mother to make for you first when you get
back to Moscow?" and each would name and describe some favorite
dish in detail, while the rest savored the thought.
Dream on Olya, and the Soviet people, we wish
you well. Someday it may all be yours. Its within your power.
Glasnost is just the beginning. I wish you a "sixties" to get
you all the way there.
Source:
https://people.well.com/user/mareev/publications/essays/ussr.html |