Soviet Portrait of America

TO the ordinary Soviet citizen, the U.S. is a country that, as Novelist Konstantin Simonov recently wrote in Pravda, "willy-nilly occupies a vast amount of space in our consciousness." There are only a few ways, however, in which Russians can satisfy their hunger for information about American lifestyles firsthand: examining the few consumer products available in hard-currency shops, attending occasional educational fairs sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, and thumbing through the cultural exchange magazine Amerika, which is popular despite a limited circulation of 55,000. The vast majority of reports about the U.S. appear in the Soviet Union's state-run press, and whether they involve Pentagon plans or kitchen conveniences, they almost invariably carry at least a tacitly unfavorable comment on capitalism.

Though Soviet audiences see the U.S. mostly through the astigmatic lens of ideology, some of the picture does come through in reasonably clear focus. Despite dogma, a new sophistication prevails, most notably in the attitude that for all of America's failings, there is much to be learned from the American experience. In recent months, Soviet media have carried an unusual amount of material about the U.S.

In a wide-ranging portrait of the U.S. at the end of the 1960s, for example, Simonov finds that "Americans love their country," even though they show "indignation" against some of its policies. He contradicts the usual Soviet picture of the U.S. as a nation without ideals, discerning a "new spiritual force," and is particularly impressed by his difficulty in finding a toy water gun for a young friend. Simonov explains that a revulsion against violence prompted many U.S. stores to drop toy weapons.

The most personal of the recent portraits comes from two Pravda journalists, Washington-based Boris Strelnikov and his editorial colleague from Moscow. Igor Shatunovsky, who traveled coast to coast on a six-week automobile tour of the U.S. In an eleven-part series under the title "America on the Right and the Left," they applaud American hospitality, motels, suburbia, telephone orders at drive-in restaurants and skyscraper construction ("The building rises by the minute, not by the day or week"). There are touches of naivete: they believe, for example, that drive-in banks are conveniences only for businessmen. There's also plain misinformation (the series opens with Negro women sweeping a street in front of the White House, though the Washington Sanitation Department employs no female street cleaners, black or white). The most amusing tableau involves the Russians' visit to the reading room of a right-wing organization in Texas. The plump, gray-haired attendant happened to be napping when they arrived, and he woke with a jolt that turned to shock when he learned the identity of his visitors. The two Pravda men speculate jokingly that the librarian "was thinking that he had slept through some important event, maybe even an invasion."

For the most part, Strelnikov and Shatunovsky concentrate on America the 111. Besides the problem of right-wing extremism, they examine the peace movement, the hippies and the generation gap. Some of their statements are questionable (at the Chicago conspiracy trial, they report that the jurors frequently cast "frightened glances" at Judge Hoffman). Some seem hyperbolic: black Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Miss., they report, "has to be guarded more than all the American mayors put together." After visiting several Indian reservations, they note that "even a comparison with hell seems insufficiently forceful." To be sure, Strelnikov and Shatunovsky describe genuine contradictions and crises in U.S. life. But overall, they offer their readers anything but a balanced view.

Interest in their series was enhanced by the fact that it was a sequel to one of the most famous opinion makers ever written in the Soviet Union. In 1935, two noted humorists, Ilya lit and Yevgeny Petrov, made a similar tour of the U.S. and collected their articles in a book called Little Golden America. Though they concluded that the Depression-ridden, gang-infested U.S. was "seriously ill," the two writers provided fascinating (to Russians) detail on American life, such as the fact that refrigerators were a commonplace home appliance. The book became an overnight sensation in Stalin's grim, prewar Russia. Showing the same vein of interest in the recent series, more than 300 readers wrote to Pravda requesting more information on the life of the ordinary American in 1970--what he earns, what he buys, what he reads, how he travels.

The poet's condensed images often capture a country's spirit far better than the more diffuse writings of journalists or social scientists. Theatergoers in Moscow last week were treated to one poet's view of the U.S. in a new review of songs, pantomime and poems by Andrei Voznesensky, the finest younger poet in Russia. Named Look Out for Your Faces, the revue is a plea for individuality and free expression, and it invokes some images of beauty in America. With an arresting metaphor, Voznesensky celebrates San Francisco:

Down there, by the hotel . . .

black limousines, in rows, like shoes,

as if the angels

had flown in a hurry

leaving their black galoshes . . .

In the most popular scene, Vladimir Vysotsky, one of Russia's most popular performers, sings a song likening technological society--and that could mean Russia or America--to a pack of dogs hunting down a noble wolf. The song ends with a line that could become Russia's equivalent of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin': "Today's not like yesterday."

If informed thinking and writing about the U.S. are becoming more sophisticated, that is at least partly due to the two-year-old Institute of American Studies. Director Georgy Arbatov, recently writing in the first issue of the institute's journal, U.S.A., finds a climate in Washington that favors "serious corrective changes" in foreign policy. The journal also contains a translation of two chapters of Theodore H. White's The Making of a President--1968 and an article on management techniques, a subject that is coming in for increasingly unbiased study by Soviet bureaucrats.

A big seller in Moscow at present is the book Business America, by Nikolai Smelyakov, Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade. Smelyakov plainly admires U.S. industrial organization, expressing a bureaucrat's amazement that "the force of the spoken word" can eliminate much tiresome red tape in U.S. factories and offices. He is also impressed with American roads, and at one point exclaims: "One can write a poem about American warehouses." Though he dutifully attacks the "dollar dictatorship," he ends with an appeal that "we utilize the experience of other nations and states, including the U.S., more widely."

On a less technical level, U.S. businessmen also hold a fascination for the public at large. A new television series entitled Rulers of the World has so far examined U.S. Businessmen Paul Getty and Howard Hughes. Like so much else presented about the U.S., however, the programs tend to be didactic, oversimplified morality plays designed to show why the accumulation of money is immoral: Getty is accused of using his to oppress the Arab peoples, Hughes to encourage vice in Las Vegas.

The basic outline of America's official portrait in the Soviet Union is still drawn according to the rigid dictates of such party-line propaganda, flawed by stereotypes and caricatures. But the key point is that in order to deride America's wealth, as virtually every study does, Soviet writers and broadcasters must describe it in some detail. Often it is such detail that commands the real interest of Soviet audiences. In the final sentence of their Pravda series, Strelnikov and Shatunovsky quote their predecessors, Ilf and Petrov: "One has to see the capitalist world to appreciate anew the world of socialism." And yet, a little earlier in the same article, they candidly confess: "We must be objective. We have to admit that we said more often than we would have liked: 'We do not yet know how to do this. It would be nice to introduce it in our country.' "

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