Paper Tourist: A Yank in Moscow

By George Plimpton

His metier is writing, his love is sport, and in combining the two he has become a professional Walter Mitty, as such books as Out of My League and Paper Lion attest. His role this time was not to play but to watch, to go to the Moscow Olympics as that rara avis, given the U.S. boycott, an American tourist at the Games.

"The big problem," a friend of mine said just before I left for Moscow, "is what country--with the U.S. out because of the boycott--you're going to root for."

"Do you have any suggestions?" I asked.

"Nauru."

When I confessed that I was not aware of such a country, my friend described it as an island republic in the Pacific composed almost entirely of bird droppings, which its small population exports as phosphates at enormous profit. "In fact," my friend said, "Nauru is literally chipping itself away and will, in time, disappear completely. In the meantime, you can either root for its Olympic team or, failing that, compete in its name."

If there was any group that would know of Nauru's track team and stars (it had neither, it turned out) it was the one with which I traveled to Moscow, a tourist contingent sponsored by Track and Field News. "You are in a group," I was told, "of fans like no other--track fans--who will sit in the rain for four hours to watch someone throw a hammer. It doesn't matter to them where they are. They could be watching in the wastes of the Gobi Desert as long as someone grunts and there's a hammer in the air so everyone can lean slightly forward out of their seats and watch the thing land with a thump."

Whatever their enthusiasm, many of the tourists in my group turned out to have wrestled with the problem of the U.S. boycott. Some had emotional reasons for deciding to come--a string of consecutive Olympics going back to Mexico or Japan (they wore tinkling commemorative pins on their hats to prove it) that no presidential edict (even if they thought well of it) was going to break. A trial lawyer from Washington, D.C., told me that he was in Moscow because he had never seen an Olympics and he could not bear the idea of waiting four years to go to Los Angeles. "I'm not going to Los Angeles," he said firmly. "I go there all the time."

Another member of the group, a Minnesota native, told me he was going for more practical reasons. He was a lighting technician. He would not only be able to watch the track and field events but also check out his fellow technicians' artistry at the Bolshoi Theater. "If I had to choose between a visit backstage at the Bolshoi and watching Pietro Mennea, the Italian sprinter, run the 100 meters, I'd go crazy," he said. "I guess I'd watch Pietro. I'd give up any other track event for the Bolshoi, but not the 100 meters." The other priority on his list was to take a look at Lenin in his tomb. "After all," he said, "we can't see George Washington."

Our track and field group was part of the fewer than 3,000 American tourists of the 18,500 originally expected in Moscow--such a small number that the visiting press here has looked upon us with considerable interest. CBS News spent an entire day with a native of Pasadena, Calif., placing her in front of monuments and getting her to chat breezily, but at the end of the day, while getting her back to the hotel, a large lens was dropped on her foot. She moves to the Games leaning heavily on the shoulder of a friend, her face drawn with pain.

Many of the tourists, even from our track group, have been in Moscow before. Their overriding comment is how much the service has improved and how polite the Soviets, normally the surliest of people in any kind of servile position, have become. "It's an unbelievable wrench of the national character," a girl who had spent a year in Moscow told me in surprise. "Gogol and Chekhov have written about how testy they usually are." Perhaps in a repressive society testiness is the only bailiwick of power left. Whatever, they would typically snap at each other, and at you. At the information booths in the hotels they would turn away if you walked up. In restaurants, you could fall asleep waiting to be served. A bribe might work. Yelling rarely did. One resort you learned, if you lived here long enough, was to ask for the Book of Comments, to write in it how awful you thought the place was. All restaurants have one, and they don't like to have negative things written in there. So sometimes that worked. "But now," she went on, "these people have learned something about public relations. The other night I asked for the Book of Comments, and it was to write something nice in it." She shook her head. "I only hope the practice goes on after the Games."

Security measures, heavy enough in the best of times, have increased immeasurably, the oldtimers say. During the Games the tourist is restricted to his own hotel, into which he is allowed only after showing his passport and an identification coupon. He cannot visit another hotel. The Hotel Sport is a 22-story building entirely at the disposal of "foreign umpires," 700 of them. I would like to have visited the Sport just to say that I had been in the company of so many of these personages--an experience that would be interesting to share with, say, Bill Lee, the irrepressible Montreal pitcher.

The great temptation when faced with authority of this sort is --like a schoolboy--to test it. I had a small list of things I thought I might put in my suitcase to confound the Soviet authorities at customs: a single boxing glove, a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a whoopie cushion, plans for an alternate Olympics for the dissidents in Gorky, five inflatable life-size rubber dolls (Ursula Andress model), blueprint plans for the battleship Admiral Popov, which was absolutely circular and slowly twirled its way down the Volga in the 1870s... but one forgets such flights of fancy as soon as one is involved with the real thing.

The customs officials descend on one's luggage in clusters. Literary material is especially scrutinized ... books opened and the officials settle down to read, often one looking over the other's shoulder, searching for key words to pop out, since their ability to read English is limited. A copy of Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, with its uncompromising portrait of Lenin, was flipped through without incident, but a yellow legal pad on which I had written "KGB --neat shoes"--a reference to being able to spot a secret-service agent by his spruced-up footwear--caused a considerable stir. The officials studied the pad for five minutes.

"Sprechen sie Deutsch?"

"Nein."

An English-speaking official was summoned. He looked at the KGB notation. I was asked to explain.

"It says that the KGB agents keep their shoes nice and clean," I said. I could think of little to add. "They use brushes," I said helplessly.

I was passed finally, and let out into their city. Eerily quiet. Horns are not allowed in Moscow, so the hum of traffic, as one would expect from a klaxon-less society, is occasionally punctuated by the shriek of rubber tires under stress. Not a teen-ager anywhere. They are in the summer camps, we are told. The city is spotless and newly painted -- a kind of Disneyland gilt. The Misha bear, with his Olympic-rings belt, smiles at one from everywhere. He began to get to me after a while -- largely because of the mascot's eyes: astonished above the half-moon smile, they become the demented, loopy gaze of someone who has had too much Stolichnaya, the best Soviet vodka, and is about to venture over, buckling slightly at the tummy, and as disarmingly as possible ask for a small loan to get some more.

What belies the merriness of Misha's smile for the tourists is the pervasive sense that the Americans are not here to compete. Every tourist at a Moscow Olympic event finds himself brought up short when he looks out and fails to see the deep-blue warm-up suits with the red-and-white USA on the back of the jerseys. The reaction has had its odd consequences. One tourist group in Leningrad last week began singing God Bless America in the hotel bar -- "It made us feel good," one of them told me -- and last night about 20 of them had planned to meet and sing the same song in Red Square, near the guards at Lenin's tomb. They thought better of it -- which is fortunate, since demonstrations there are forbidden. They're thinking of singing in front of the American embassy.

"Aren't you going to do something?" one of them asked me. "I packed an American flag," I told them. "A Frisbee, junior Olympic size. And a pair of running shoes. I'll think of some thing."

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