Iowa in the Ukraine

Fords and Chevrolets honk under a movie marquee advertising a western. Blue notes from a cocktail lounge mingle with the blare of bebop from a drugstore jukebox. "A hamburger and a Coke," says the man in a Tennessee drawl, scuttling onto a lunch-counter stool. It might be Tupelo or Tuxedo Junction--but it is actually Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. The existence of a top-secret finishing school for Soviet spies, made in an exact copy of a small American town, has long been a fantasy of fiction writers, but has also been taken quite seriously as a possibility by U.S. counterintelligenee.

Last week, in the Swedish military journal Contact with the Army, Swedish Major Per Lindgren, a man well regarded as a Soviet analyst, pieced together the available evidence about Vinnitsa. Hand-picked from the most promising Russian university students, the 1,000 "citizens" of Vinnitsa, he reports, lead American lives from morning to night for as long as ten years. They master American dialects, learn American history from U.S. textbooks, gossip about American movie stars, and swap hot-stove-league baseball statistics.

"Everything in Vinnitsa down to the smallest detail is pure American." says Major Lindgren. "The bar serves American drinks, and the restaurant American food. The movies are Hollywood-made, and the stores sell everything from ready-made clothing to chewing gum." The only authentic Communist touch is the high, barbed-wire fence that seals Vinnitsa off from the rest of Russia.

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