A FLOWER CHILD VISITS THE LAND OF GLASNOST
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.