Chapter 22
After the Storm

The 1970s opened with friends invited over for New Year's Day. In a way, they spanned my life. I am, in part, who I know. Eric Fenster, of our children's generation, had first looked us up because he knew we had been friends of his father, an auto-worker and Young Communist League activist with us in Cleveland in the mid-1930s. Eric graduated UC Berkeley, was a cancer researcher as graduate student at Stanford. But his political genes took over, and he later devoted his life to enabling employed workers to get higher education via TV courses and week-end colleges conducted by universities. This invention of his is now an established feature at many institutions. I am pleased that he filmed me for one such course.

Allan Isaksen, tall and rangy, had been a carpenter when we met him in 1947 when we lived in Berkeley while I held my fellowship at the Hoover Institution down at Stanford. He shared our views and was attracted to me because, "imagine, this guy had actually lived in the Soviet Union." He had been a very good friend, and was a fellow-witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960. When he went back to college a decade later, he wrote a term paper on that event which is the best description anywhere of the political environment in which it occurred.Subsequently Allan became a successful builder, but still detested capitalism, and in the 1990s belonged to a local discussion club of readers of the independent socialist Monthly Review.

Glenna Bryant was also at that party. She, too, is someone we knew from that earlier stay in Berkeley. Glenna was born to be a linguist. She had learned more than a dozen languages, but grew up when women were taught to make a proper marriage and raise kids. That was particularly true of her upper-class American Jewish background, in which the rule was to assimilate and for gods sake not stand out in any ethnic way. She had lived by that, but in the time of the early feminist revival got a divorce, became a teacher of Russian, found she had organizing abilities, and had a later career as college administrator.

Ethel and Stephen Dunn were present. Both have cerebral palsy. Ethel is Jewish, Stephen New England Yankee. Ethel was one of the early M.A.-equivalent graduates of Columbia University's Russian Institute. Stephen's Ph.D. thesis was about the Jews of Italy -- he is not Jewish -- but he knows everything about everything non-technological, pretty near. She is practical, a demanding house-manager, a determined scholar. He is the classical academic scholar, immensely thorough, cautious, weighing all facts and factors, gentlemanly, but utterly determined in upholding conclusions once arrived at. Steve has the rare capacity of doing so without ever being untactful. He is the more severely disabled. Both live in wheel-chairs, but enunciation requires great effort for him, and his hands have limited function. The prejudice against "cripples" lost America a great professor in barring him from teaching. Although I know of upwards of a hundred books by others in which I appear, the fact that Steve quotes me as authority on Marxism in his highly-specialized Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production gives me special satisfaction because of his very high standards.

Once, when I had assailed him for something in a letter, Steve wrote me that his feeling for me is as close to love as it can be toward any male. Today he does his writing into a voice-actuated computer, a real godsend to people with his disabilities. My friends are never out of my mind. Skiing at Heavenly Valley that year, I found myself seated at table with a couple of Molokan descent. The Molokans are a Russian religious sect which the Dunns have studied for many years. I told my dinner companions that, and asked if they would be willing to help Ethel and Steve. They were.

Laura X should not write an autobiography, because she wanders even more than I do. [If "Memories on a Coffee Table" is used, where she is described more fully, there is minor duplication here on Laura.] But a book should most certainly be written about her, in addition to those in which she has already found mention. She comes from very wealthy WASP and German parentage: her father is rich enough to have donated a wing to a hospital. Laura decided in the '60s that Malcolm X was right in not using his slave name, and believed that women were fundamentally no less subject than slaves to their fathers and husbands. So she borrowed his X and personally founded the field of women's history by collecting every possible news clipping, leaflet, and periodical of the feminism that revived in 1966. Untrained, she filed them in accordance with her own weird and wonderful notions, i.e., "Women as Bitches." Astounded by what she discovered of the role of women in 19th-century Russian revolutionary organizations, she started SPAZM, the Sophia Perovskaya and Andrei Zhelyabov Memorial Co-educational (her emphasis!) Society for People's Freedom through Women's Liberation. The 17 people she invited as founding members included three Mandels -- Tanya, Phyllis, and myself. One-quarter were males. That had been early 1969.

This New Year's gathering marking the opening of a new decade became focused on discussion of an article in Monthly Review which said women are a reserve labor force in all industrial societies. I held that was not true in the USSR, where their role, particularly in the professions, continued to rise after the shortage of men caused by World War II had ended.

The argument became heated, and a grand time was had by all. Ethel said I had "chickened out" of pursuing debate with Steve and her in Current Anthropology, to which I then had access. Steve put in that if the choice was between ruling women and being ruled by them, he preferred the former. I compared Laura's wing of feminism to the Black Muslims ("all whites are devils") by contrast to the then significant Black Panthers, who regarded white working people as potential allies. (Although Laura had included four males among the founders of SPAZM, in practice she has always treated me and some others as inexplicable exceptions.) This led to a discussion of just what kind of social entity African-Americans constitute. Steve saw it as did the pre-Communist Socialist Party, which thought of Blacks only as poor members of the working class.

Thinking of the broader implications of the issue of nation vs. class, I said that Hitler had succeeded in turning the world from a trend toward internationalism to nationalism. I thought that the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War represented the highest point ever reached by internationalism, but Hitler's aid to the Spanish fascist, Franco, reversed the course of history. Steve responded that I ought to write an article about that, but disagreed with me completely. A quarter century later I was shocked to see plain citizens in a TV discussion of President Clinton's intervention in Bosnia justify it by reference to the Lincoln Battalion of Americans in Spain in 1937. To me that is sacrilege.

I am in utter agreement with Laura's unwillingness to be satisfied with anything less than total equality for women, the remoteness of which is indicated by their absence from the top positions in the Fortune 500 companies as this is written a quarter century after that New Year's Day. Nor is the nomination of a woman for the presidency yet considered by either major party. But Laura sometimes resorted to irrelevant arguments when things didn't go her way. That's a personal characteristic and has nothing to do with feminism. She published the Spazm Newsletter. I had been angry with her because, after repeated pot-shots in it at me and at the USSR, she wouldn't print as reply what I had had to say about women in my essay in a published symposium volume. My piece had been reprinted in books and periodicals with 100 times the circulation of her minuscule newsletter, whose feminist readership I did want to reach. Yet at this party she said the reason I was on the outs with her was that I wanted to see my name in print, and presented me with a snapshot of myself taken at a recent peace demonstration, inscribed: "Pig of the Year, because you will not understand."

In that previous year, I had publicized to the feminist movement a trailblazing book, Women and the Law, by Prof. Leo Kanowitz. I had said on a broadcast that KPFA should have a women's liberation series, to the shock of the manager because I did it on the air. I had provided endless information to Laura about significant women in Russian history, in American and worldwide labor and radical history, and in branches of culture other than movies and musicals, of which her knowledge was encyclopedic.

Ethel, having listened for a very long time without saying a word, turned to Laura and said: "You hate men." Tanya, an extremely fairminded person except when protecting her children, came down heavy on Laura and later said to me I shouldn't communicate with her, as a matter of self-respect.

The party ended, as all New Year's do. The next day I sent a proposal for a book on Soviet ecology to a publisher. It got nowhere, but the following year I had a roaring debate in print over the environmental situation in the USSR with a Harvard professor, Marshall Goldman. He had written a standard everything-over-there-is-bad book on that subject. The leading magazine in the field, Prof. Barry Commoner's Environment, asked me to review that book. I did, Goldman responded in the following issue, and we both had at it in yet a third. The essence of my argument was that it was just not possible for things there to be as bad as here, for three reasons. First, the total output of industry was very substantially lower than in the U.S. Second, the number of automotive vehicles was a tiny fraction of ours. Third,the Soviet Union being nearly three times as large as our country, there was a vastly larger volume of air and of water to absorb emissions. His response ignored those factors.

I differed with Commoner, too, because he placed equal value on ecological wisdom and economic-and-social justice. I wrote him: "Has a non-fertilizer ecology ever been famine-free? What is your explanation of the rapidly lengthening life-span of women during the very period that labor-saving materials and machinery (using energy, of course) have become available on a mass scale? It is under 'natural' technologies that women's lives are shorter than...or equal to men's..., and men's are shorter than under modern technologies."

That week I also shipped off to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin the first batch of xeroxes of the William Mandel papers. They had asked me for them the previous year for their Social Action Collection. I replied that I wasn't dead yet, so they provided a copier which Tanya spent many months feeding stuff into. At the end, she said: "You never stopped trying." I needed that. The Chief Archivist of that very highly respected repository, F. Gerald Ham, wrote me in 1974: "Several of my staff have commented about the richness of the research material you have sent....Hell, Bill, if Nixon could ripoff nearly $600 grand for his crap, think of what we might have gotten for the Mandel Papers." In fact, they couldn't, because they didn't get the originals.

I rejoiced in the regard shown by people whose side I had taken in difficult situations. Moslems in the United States have never had it easy. The American oil barons did not want Near Eastern countries to control their own petroleum. Sympathy for the Jews in Israel was a handy cover for this. Three years earlier, I had publicly opposed Israeli seizure of parts of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the face of manic hysteria on the past of American Jews, who regarded me as a traitor to my origins. Thirty years would pass before Israelis admitted massacring hundreds of Arab civilian prisoners in that war. So I was very pleased when a Pakistani student requested that I moderate a forum on war crimes at U.C. Berkeley's International House.

My activities in the '60s -- and the fact that that wide-open time made it possible for me to go far beyond the Soviet Union in answering questions on the air -- led to invitations to be part of all sorts of things. A friend of a student fellow activist in the Free Speech Movement asked me to go to the Central Valley in support of Cesar Chavez' organizing of farm workers. I did go, but only to bring food and participate for a day in the pilgrimage.

I engaged in affirmative action for Blacks as opportunity offered. Melvin Whitfield was high-school leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That party was founded when the white leadership of the regular Democratic Party sought to bar African-Americans. Upon graduation, Whitfield came to the San Francisco area. He lived with friends, including us, and I was of some assistance in getting him into college. At that time there were no Blacks whatever in Sovietology. I encouraged him to take courses that would enable him to take over my radio broadcasts at some future date. He preferred public health, as a field with which he could be of help in Africa, and acquired a couple of M.A. degrees and a doctorate. When he left the Bay Area, African-American friends organized a farewell party, well attended, on the Peninsula. The tributes were very warm. Apparently he had been of much service to the local Black community. Twenty years later, he and his wife put us up for a week's vacation in Washington, D.C. It struck me that this was only the third Black home I had ever been housed in, in a lifetime. How utterly segregated American society still remained.

When Chicano self-awareness arose, I helped as I could. The first Chicano group ever to visit the USSR consulted me before departure. This was in 1971, after my brief stint on the Berkeley faculty. I was now conducting a less formal student-sponsored course, and members of that group spoke there on their observations.

My standing with minority students was such that in 1969 Dr. Paul Wong of the university's Ethnic Studies Program invited me to fill the post of Visiting Scholar in which I'd be available to have my brains picked by them. Although the university had other plans, to me that expression of confidence in an old white male was a high honor.

The student movement had very briefly forced open the doors for me to teach in the late '60s at UC Berkeley, San Jose State and San Francisco State universities. In the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley I taught a graduate course in Soviet Social Thought and an undergraduate course in Soviet Civilization, both of my devising and not previously in the curriculum. Otherwise my teaching had been under special arrangements outside the permanent structure. Before my Sociology appointment, UC Berkeley, under severe student pressure, allowed outsiders to teach only if regular faculty took the responsibility of granting the credit. In my case, professors in six different departments -- sociology, philosophy, history, psychology, political science, and comparative literature -- did so in advance for the civilization course. I wonder if anyone has ever, previously or since, here or abroad, had the distinction of being thus certified competent to teach by colleagues across so wide a spectrum.

At San Francisco State there was the Experimental College, which lasted a few years. At San Jose State, the Associated Students hired and paid me, along with '60s activist and later California state senator Tom Hayden, in my case for credit to be given by the Philosophy Department. When the university president simply proclaimed, under attack from the Far Right, that there would be no credit, the professor chairing philosophy let it be known he would resign in protest. I persuaded him that the institution needed a man of his character, and he took a year's leave instead.

Many scholars asked for my assistance and aid until exactly when President Nixon's policy of detente was ended by his ouster via the Watergate scandal. A biochemistry professor wrote on the assumption that I knew about research in his field in the USSR. I did not, but was able to guide him to sources. Kanowitz, then at the Law School of the University of New Mexico, asked me to review the manuscript of his second book before publication. Howard Sherman, in the Economics Dept. at UC Riverside (I had played some role in nominating him for the job) did likewise, with respect to his Radical Economics. Noel Mottershead, Chair of Philosophy at Chico State in California's Central Valley, proposed it set up a pilot one-term or year study program in the USSR with me heading it. It didn't eventuate.

Single appearances in courses taught by others were frequent. Bob Cirese had been a student of mine at Berkeley. One day he had me speak to his Labor Economics class at Golden Gate University, consisting overwhelmingly of workingclass people. The majority stayed an extra hour after class, several stayed yet a third hour. One said he would be two hours late for work. I came home and cried. I do love to teach. A friend, Virginia Franklin, who won a variety of high-school teaching honors and also taught in junior college, would invite me to speak to her classes year after year.

Virginia was a big, hearty blonde, classical golden girl of the West, with a huge laugh and a tremendous zest for life. She told of nude swimming with her students in white-bread agricultural northern California during the hippy 60s. On the other hand, African-American militants in Oakland during the Black Panther period paid her the enormous compliment of listing her as the only white teacher they wanted to continue at Merritt College. She required her students to read my books in her courses on government, to provide them with a notion of a system other than her own. She would send me their term papers. To one of her students at Merritt I wrote:

"No one before you has ever written 23 pages on that book [my Russia Re-examined]. I am now writing another book. You cannot imagine what an effort that involves. But the thought that, eight years after it is published, someone may be affected by it as strongly as you were by R.R. is, is, without any sentimentality or phoniness, the kind of thing that gives one the strength to go on."

On another occasion, Virginia invited me for a full day at San Rafael High School in upscale Marin County, with the kids free to come or go. Attendance increased from period to period. The last two ended in applause. Younger teachers then had been 1960s radicals. One brought to class an article I had written five years earlier to ask a question about it. Two had heard me when they themselves were high-school students in the previous decade. One teacher asked for my help with information on the world economy for a textbook he was writing. A Black male teacher attended three of the six periods.

Much later, Virginia's son Warren became a major figure in the special effects end of movie making. In 1972, when he was not yet 30, I wrote to back his acceptance as a member of an American youth delegation to travel in the USSR and meet youth there: "I believe it more important that Warren go than any other individual. American youth today are not responding on a mass scale to political militants of any persuasion whatever. Film is the medium that turns youth on. So when one has a young person who is already an established film-maker and who is even interested in going to the USSR, one should grab the chance to have him go." When Virginia died in 1992, Warren asked me to preside over the memorial, held at San Rafael High School. I was shocked and depressed that only one of the students to whom she had given so very much showed up.

Oakland Tech is a ghetto high school. After an appearance there, an African-American teacher wrote me: "You really were the highlight of the session for the students, and they relied more on your presentation for material for their work than on any other source. The final product of the group was a very amusing tape made by the students doing 'on-the-spot' interviews with Russians and Americans. It was not only entertaining but reflected a great deal of thought. It also showed that they learned very much from your talk."

I was always happiest teaching people who wanted to learn for its own sake, with no discipline enforced by the need to make grades or to be marked present or to justify parental support while studying. When Angela Davis was on trial for murder in 1971 for allegedly having provided weapons used in an attempted prison break, I conducted that kind of class for the Bay Area United Committee to Free Angela Davis. The subject was "How to Read the Newspaper," and its purpose was to equip activists, mostly young and Black, to do their own research in the most easily available sources and use their findings. I wrote a leaflet to attract students, reading in part:

"Last week we started out rapping about: the Attica Prison Massacre and why the establishment press would print the coroner's report that the hostages had been shot after they had printed the lie that the prisoners had cut the throats of the hostages. Does this mean that the establishment press is fair and impartial? We ended up talking about: who owns the newspapers? Who advertises in them? Who goes to prison in the U.S. and why? And what is the capitalist interest in the working class?"

A year after my appearance in Cirese's class at Golden Gate University I received a letter from him: "As an elected faculty representative to the Selection Committee for the Dean of the [new] School of Public Affairs...I would like to invite you to submit your resume for consideration by the Committee."

At the end of January, 1970, Prof. Ralph Anspach of San Francisco State phoned to ask if I could, and would, teach the Soviet economy in its Economics Dept. I said yes, but only at full-professor salary, as I had by now been a Soviet-affairs scholar for thirty years. It was more than twenty since I had held a fellowship at the Hoover Institution by invitation. All of my books had been used in higher education by others than myself, and I had published numerous articles in august journals. He agreed, but the title would be lecturer. In accordance with procedure, I met with an interviewing committee of three professors.

Within a week of his first call, Anspach told me that, although all three interviewers had approved me, and the whole Economics Department had voted for me 15 to 3, someone turned to an "outside" person -- the president? -- who vetoed it. The faculty didn't want to fight, I was told frankly, because of exhaustion from the strike the previous year. Anspach said: "Guess who will be teaching it? Howard Sherman," who was on sabbatical from his regular professorship. Howard had gotten his first knowledge of the Soviet Union from me when he was in college because of some relationship to people I knew. I phoned him and said taking the job would be scabbing. He agreed not to. I wrote a friend about that whole episode:

"Because the American learned community is more brainwashed and has less guts than the Soviet...there has been no need for any U.S. government agency to take any step against me since my last witch-hunt hearing 12 years ago."

When Sherman's book appeared, I was not listed among those thanked for "reading and criticizing an earlier draft of the whole manuscript". Instead, I was buried among 20 of whom he wrote "important improvements to particular chapters were suggested by." But I had kept a copy of the manuscript, with notes on every chapter. I concluded that I was regarded as not safe to have with the five honorees in group A, so I broke relations with him.

Within two weeks of the San Francisco State fiasco a Prof. Braunstein at the California College of Arts and Crafts phoned. Like Anspach, he was a stranger to me. Did I want to head their Sociology Dept. then being established? I spoke to the dean of Humanities there and told her I was not interested in general sociology teaching. I suggested Ethel or Stephen Dunn or Robert Allen. None of them got it. Allen did some teaching, at Mills College I think, before finding his calling as editor of The Black Scholar and author of well-received books.

Another African-American, Prof. Bill Brown, geographer then teaching at UC Santa Cruz, volunteered efforts to get me an appointment there to teach Soviet geography, a field in which I was one of the earliest writers both in learned journals and as author. But this was a year after the offers described above, and academe was that much farther removed in time from the student pressures of the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement. He ran into a blank wall, as did Cirese at Golden Gate with his nomination of me for a deanship.

Quite naturally, the roughest treatment came from the discipline specifically created to wage the cold war, sovietology. The New York Times wrote, April 3, 1965: "The second advance" in academic study of the USSR, "was said to have been correlated with the deterioration of American-Soviet relations, the intensification of the cold war, and the Soviet technological achievements beginning with the sputnik." Many sovietologists directly served the CIA. That was publicly admitted when interest in that field began to decline and it began to plead for money, pointing to that service as one reason to meet its needs. In Slavic Review, journal of the discipline, Prof. John Kautsky wrote, March 1967: "the government's need for information about Communist countries and the mobility of personnel in this field between government agencies and universities have bent some of the scholarly work in it in the direction of intelligence work."

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies was dominated by sovietologists. In 1972 I delivered a paper, "Urban Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union," at its convention in Dallas. The paper was the first ever to point out that Russians were the largest such minority. This fact became quite a political issue in the '90s when the newly-independent non-Russian republics began to force Russians out of all kinds of jobs. More copies of that paper were picked up by attendees than of any other. But the general session was offered a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for its treatment of dissidents. I offered a friendly amendment, adding a paragraph, in exactly the same language, of criticism for American academe's treatment of dissenters like Angela Davis and myself.

The chairman, Prof. Holland Hunter, was properly courteous. It would have difficult for him not to be. His mother had told me 25 years earlier that he had chosen the field of Soviet transport economics as his specialty after reading my very first published paper, "Soviet Transport Today and Tomorrow," which appeared in 1941. At least one distinguished figure at the convention, John Hazard of Columbia, this country's first expert on Soviet law, had greeted me earlier with: "Bill, it's been forty years!" Actually, it had been nearly thirty since we'd seen each other, but certainly a long time. However, neither he nor any other academic present I had known, said a word when the hall responded to my amendment with shouts of: "Shut up!" "Sit down!" Academic decorum, anyone? These were the same people -- I'm thinking specifically of a Stanford historian -- who had been outraged when students found they had to express themselves vociferously in the '60s to get a hearing for the notion that they, too, were part of the university, and not only the professors and administrations.

Nonetheless, academic recognition did continue for another couple of years, until the worsening Cold War that followed Nixon's ouster in 1974 made association with someone of my views entirely unsafe. In 1974 I participated by invitation of Ohio State professor ZumBrunnen in a panel on Ecology in Banff. That year, too, Prof. George Breslauer, political scientist at UC Berkeley, who had audited my course when he arrived there in 1969, sent me an article of his for comment, as he had done on previous occasions. After I read it, we had an hour-long conversation by phone. He said: "I'm getting an entire education." I confess that I would write such things down immediately afterward because I had to be able to look at them to convince myself when the going got rough that I really belonged in there against an army of opponents.

In that peak year of recognition, 1974, before the long night closed in, permanent as far as academe was concerned, an article of mine on Soviet ecology brought requests for reprints from universities in Sweden, Mexico, Australia, Czechoslovakia, Israel, and a government department in India. No World-Wide Web yet existed to help scholars to discover such articles. In this country there were requests from university departments of geography, rural sociology, political science, psychiatry, and a jet propulsion lab. A single collection of essays, Soviet Politics & Society in the 1970s, carried seven citations of my article, "Soviet Women and Their Self-Image."

I took the initiative in advancing equality for women in the ways available. The simplest was by lecturing. The opening of one presentation at San Jose State University in late 1970 makes my position clear:

"Has any woman here ever been denied a job because of her sex? Changed her educational plans because she knew the field she wished to enter is closed to women? Anyone here have a pre-school child you would like ot place in a nursery but can't? Have you previously postponed returning to school because of that? 3rd World people ditto all above? Has anyone here never paid for medical or dental care? Has anyone dropped out of school for want of money to live on?"

I submitted a proposal for a panel on women in the Soviet Union at the next Far Western Slavic Conference. I was asked to organize it, and did so, with a majority of female panelists. That was utterly unprecedented. Ethel Dunn was among them. I managed to get the male chair replaced by Prof. Olga Matich of the University of Southern California. From a letter to her: "As I wrote professors Dmytryshyn and Berton [both male], to have a panel on women in which both the organizer and the chairman are male is to reinforce the very situation that women today are protesting against. That applies to me as well. In letters to women here and in the USSR, requesting information for use in my paper, I stated: 'This paper should preferably be done by a woman....I'm doing it because it has to be done, and there is no woman in Soviet studies out here who wishes to undertake it....If you would like to have another [discussant], may I suggest tht you phone Prof. Rose M. Somerville..."

The paper I presented, "Soviet Women and Their Self-Image," was well enough received that I was allowed to go on for 40 minutes, more than twice the time allotted. I later offered it for publication first to Slavic Review and then to the weekly National Guardian. Neither would publish it, quite typical in my experience: I was too Left for one and too Right for the other. Later it was published in the American Behavioral Scientist and a separate book reprint of that issue. One-third of all the instructors of women's courses nationwide in 1971 ordered copies of an offprint from me. An association of women in the field of Slavic Studies came into being some 20 years letter. I'm not the least bit ashamed to say that I'd like them some day to acknowledge the role of this male in helping open the doors for them in this discipline.

The upsurge of the women's movement and, to a lesser degree, the rise of academic interest in it, made me feel it was time for me to write a book. In 1975, Doubleday published my Soviet Women, contracted for during the period of detente. GettingSoviet Women out wasn't easy. I wrote my Moscow friend in that field, Riurikov, about the editors assigned to it:

"In typically American fashion, she has no sense of history whatever, and no understanding of the point of view of workingclass women....Both editors are influenced, sincerely and stupidly, by the current American belief that China is the new Utopia. As you see, things do not go as fast in America as you might think."

Reviews in periodicals of the young and still radical women's movement were overwhelmingly favorable, but the review I treasure most was that by my boss of 35 years earlier, Jessica Smith, who had been a suffragist when I was born and had written the first book on Soviet women half a century before mine. She wrote: "One could not ask for greater sensitivity to women." And a lifetime of activist participation in the struggle for equality for African-Americans brought its reward in this regard. When Angela Davis wrote a fine review for The Sun Reporter, San Francisco's Black weekly, its publisher, Dr. Carlton Goodlett, suggested that I send a copy to the Executive Director of the National Negro Publishing Association. "You are to say that Dr. Goodlett has asked you to send the review and that he requests publication in all of the NNPA papers." All 140 Black papers across the country did carry the review.

I had many Soviet friends, including one woman, Raisa Tselikman, who was totally fearless in private conversation. But when entrusting her thoughts to the mail, which might be opened, even she, in long, frequent, meaningful and beautifully-written letters, would offer ideas on the situation in her country only by commenting on my descriptions of what was happening here. Rarely, she would use Aesopian language, such as referring to her own surname as "unbecoming" in referring to the fact that it was unmistakeably Jewish. But she insisted on using it, not that of her husband, the fine sociologist of literature Vladimir Kantorovich. Only with respect to life in earlier Soviet times would she spell things out. She was an unreconstructed early 1930s feminist, totally contemptuous of young Soviet women of the '70s who wanted wedding gowns and rings, in which they were supported by officialdom.

Because of that, I took particular satisfaction in a letter from her after we had known each other for five years, both through two visits of mine to Moscow and regular correspondence:

"Since you are such a defender of women, I am proud of you, only you! I never congratulate anybody about anything, and have trained all my friends and acquaintances not to offer [meaningless] congratulations, but I congratulate you on the occasion of [International] Women's Day!!! Live for the joy of us all, write about us, hail the easing of our lives, fight for our rights: that is a worthy and good cause! Because we have so many enemies! Even my son said to me in a demonstrative fashion: 'the world is rolling down hill -- the [British] Conservatives have chosen a woman as their leader' [Thatcher] And that was so that I would hear that and know my place."

Knowing that I had the approval of so staunch a feminist, and of every Soviet woman who has read my book, I did not hesitate to confront the lioness herself, Gloria Steinem. I had met her through Laura. When Soviet Women appeared, I wrote Steinem: "Obviously, I'm waiting to see how Ms. will review it....In your first 31 numbers you carried exactly one article on women in Russia, and it dealt with the persecution of Jewish women...seeking to combat emigration restrictions....I personally am aware of four letters to the editor...one from me (the only male) saying that there is a great deal else that Soviet women are doing...that Ms. readers should also know about. None of the letters were published."

When no review appeared in the next three months, I wrote the magazine's book editor, with a copy to Steinem at her home address. Ms. had published a full-length review of a book critical of the status of women in Czechoslovakia, while the book editor had informed me that mine would get a "capsule" review. I wrote: "A paragraph to the Soviet Union and columns to Czechoslovakia? And Gloria assures me that 'there is no strong anti-Soviet feeling here' [at Ms.]. With your only article on the USSR thus far on the mistreatment of dissenters? How naive can one get?" I guess that worked. In any case, Ms. published a review long enough to catch a reader's eye, which was considerably more favorable than unfavorable.

The worsening atmosphere intimidated liberals as usual. I wrote Carey McWilliams, renowned editor of The Nation:: "The failure of The Nation to review my book (even negatively) [it had given more than a page to the book putting down women's progress in Czechoslovakia] simply reinforced my conviction that your attitude toward the USSR is identical with that I describe on the part of most of the Stanford conferees in my enclosed comments. But then I think, Carey McWilliams did once write Factories in the Field. So maybe one can get through to him."

He replied: "It is an odd experience to be charged with anti-Soviet attitudes in view of the long years in which The Nation has been charged with exactly the contrary stance." None so blind as those who will not see. It is a matter of record that in my 57 years of publication in the broadest possible range of periodicals popular and scholarly, I have never appeared in The Nation except by the courtesy of the letters editor. Friends think of me as a knight sans peur et sans reproche against the far Right and the doctrinaire Left. In fact, liberals accepting the taboos of the very structure they inveigh against have been a significant obstacle over a lifetime, in publishing, academe, or whatever.

Prof. Gail Lapidus, then at U.C. and subsequently at Stanford, utilized a totally unique set of Soviet research papers I had brought back from the Soviet Union and loaned to her when she wrote her book, Women in Soviet Society. She made no acknowledgment in her book, which followed the chapter organization of mine. Clearly, her book was written as an attack on mine, without specifying that. Her book, appearing in 1978, served the purposes of the Cold War, whatever her personal attitude toward that may have been, as mine served detente.

She wrote Professor Roberta Manning, teaching at an Eastern university, asking why the latter was using my book as required reading in her course instead of Lapidus'. Manning sent me a xerox of Lapidus' letter, but denied me permission to cite this in a letter for publication. I wanted to charge that it was a violation of ethics. She explained she might have to work with Lapidus in the future. Just a year earlier, Lapidus had asked me to review a paper of her's -- not the first time -- and we had had lunch to discuss it after I wrote her my comments. It was titled "Modernization Theory," and my letter, January 13, 1974, offers a concise summation of my disagreement with Establishment scholars:

"Soviet per capita industrial output is below ANY European country but Portugal, Albania, Bulgaria (I'm not sure about Spain without checking). If one disregards that continuing relative underdevelopment, it becomes imossible to understand the level of persistence of peasant attitudes in the self-image of each sex, and that opens the way to unhistorical put-downs of what has been accomplished there re women, and what as-yet-insufficient change in the material base has not created the foundation for."

In mid-1975 I had been a discussant at the conference at Stanford on "Women in Russia" referred to in my letter to the editor of The Nation. A presenter whose work I praised winced visibly as though that were the kiss of death. Laura X subsequently told me that at a post-mortem meeting of the conference organizers, Prof. Martin Malia of UC Berkeley, a bitter cold warrior, said that I should have been barred. In fact, of course, as one of the three founders of the sub-discipline, study of Soviet women, it was preposterous that I had not been invited as one of the 17 presenters. Malia's expression from the standpoint of the dominant political trend of the day may explain why the discussion paper I had read was omitted from the book, edited by Lapidus and another, of materials from that conference. But there were four citations of me in the contributions by others. Malia was a man I had invited onto my TV show 15 years earlier in full knowledge that he was at the opposite political pole.

I had no illusions about why such things happened. Four years earlier, I applied for a Phi Beta Kappa Bicentennial Fellowship. The theme set by that body was "Man Thinking in America." I proposed to study "Continuing Crippling Effects of Anti-Communism on Man Thinking in America." I stated my proposal thus:

"My thesis is that, in the past half-century, anti-communism has become almost irretrievably interwoven with American culture in the broad anthropological sense and with academic culture in particular, and that its effects continue to be devastating. With that as my working hypothesis, I will make an across-the-board examination of social thought, cultural expression, and the behavior of the intellectual community, to determine the degree and identify the evidence of anti-communism as the factor that has stultified our progress and crippled our rense of responsibility and morality as well. If I fail to prove it, I believe my career is a singular demonstration of the intellectual honesty required to admit that. In any case, others would no doubt be able to find the holes in my argument. If my hypothesis is correct, I will have made a contribution to the purpose for which these Fellowships are granted."

That I did not get the fellowship came as no surprise.

I did several lecture tours to publicize Soviet Women. In Kansas City an extremely intelligent female reporter interviewed me, and asked the most profound questions, even about whether I thought real women's liberation is possible under capitalism. She wrote the story absolutely straight. As a consequence, the roof fell in, not from her bosses but in letters from readers.

The lesson from my treatment by academe was clear. No one known beforehand to be an opponent of the Cold War and to strike at its foundation by demonstrating the falsity of the Evil Empire paradigm was to be allowed to teach, once the organized student demand for free access to information had died down. But there were individuals with whom good relations remained.

While I fought with outrage the denigration of real social progress in the USSR, I was equally outspoken in assailing its shortcomings to audiences of its defenders. Perhaps more so, because I was then still of the belief that if it would only straighten up and fly right it could become a beacon for humankind. I would make such statements particularly when Soviets were present, in the hope that the message would be taken home. A delegation of perhaps 20 of them were in attendance early in 1971 when I was invited to address the Los Angeles Association for Cultural Relations USA-USSR. I criticized the then head of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev, for "crude economic determinism," in still using steel production as measure of economic advancement in the age of plastics. This was before computers and entry into the information age became the proper criterion.

I was brutal in the realm of foreign policy: "The Soviet leadership obviously believed that its position would be stronger as a consequence of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The notion that the hostility of 14,000,000 people who previously were grateful to and respectful of Moscow is more significant than forced adherence to Moscow's version of socialism by the power of half a million troops is apparently beyond the understanding of today's Soviet leaders....When Moscow offers no objection to Rumania's new law, permitting foreign investors to own up to 49% of Rumanian companies and to take their profits out, one can hear the whispers from Czechoslovakia that all that Brezhnev can understand is old-fashioned rule by the Communist Party, and he doesn't care what happens inside a country so long as that is permitted.... There are wider repercussions....How can the present leadership in China not fear the possibility of Soviet intervention?"

I was not kind to my own government: "Similarities in the behavior of the leaderships in Washington and Moscow extend into other areas as well. Both show a significant, and politically important, disregard for world public opinion. The attitude of the entire world toward the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, for years now, has been too well known to require discussion. With respect to the matter of the Soviet Jews, the shoe is on the other foot....Why does it [the Soviet government] not ask itself why any group of its citizens..., native-born citizens, youthful and well-educated..., should be so alienated as to take the risks involved in so desperate an act [as highjacking an airplane in order to emigrate]." I wondered about "the continuing Soviet economic aid to Cuba, despite Castro's inability to turn the corner in solving that country's economic problems."

Few in the audience were pleased. The organizers railed at me in a post-mortem meeting, as someone present wrote me: "I can't restrain myself from expressing my anger and disgust with the arrogant and insolent attack on your speech." It was five years before that organization invited me again. When they did so, it was because even they could not fail to realize, from listening to my broadcasts carried in Los Angeles by KPFK, that my fundamental purpose was to combat the cold war, and in the course of so doing to call attention to many things in the USSR I looked upon favorably.

I sought unsuccessfully to get the speech published. I sent it to, among others, Irwin Silber, an editor of the National Guardian, then on the verge of its shift to Maoism. I had little hope that it would be accepted, writing: "'Revolutionary' publications that refuse to think of so petty a problem as keeping the world from being blown up while they try to change it will regard it as 'liberal'." My article was rejected, of course.

A few months earlier I had had a head-to-head clash with a man I regard as a tragic figure. Aaron Vergelis was a Soviet Jewish poet, veteran of World War II, and editor of the Yiddish-language cultural magazine, Sovetish Haimland, which he had politicked tirelessly to get permission to launch in Moscow. Even the editor of our State Department's Problems of Communism, himself a Jewish scholar, thought very highly of the literary qualities of Vergelis' magazine. But Vergelis functioned in an atmosphere in which there was great suspicion that Soviet people traveling abroad might by "turned" by the CIA, Zionists acting in Israel's interests, or whatever. On a visit here by a quasi-official delegation, including other literary people, he got up at a reception to read one of his poems. Claiming that he had forgotten to bring it in its original tongue, he read his translation of it into Russian. That was unquestionably so the KGB informers in the delegation would not think he might be offering unapproved thoughts.

By not reciting in Yiddish, he provided ammunition for the tireless anti-Soviet campaign in the American Jewish community. I was present and said wrathfully, first in Russian then English, that there was no such thing as a poet in Russia who did not know his own work by heart. Upon returning home, he attacked me in his magazine, ascribing words to me that I simply had not uttered, as everyone present knew. The attack was translated into most of the languages of the world when published in Sputnik, tthe Soviet equivalent of Reader's Digest. It was sent me by Nils Wessells, then a junior researcher at the conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He wrote: "Anyone who has detractors in the Soviet press and at the Foreign Policy Research Institute must be doing something right."

That organization published a magazine, Orbis. Despite my knowledge of its bias, I submitted an article on foreign policy, which was rejected. I was getting tired of that sort of reception, so I wrote its editor: "If you read the chapters on foreign policy in my A Guide to the Soviet Union, Dial Press, 1946..., you will find that it offers a rational explanation of what Moscow is doing today in world affairs, despite the fact that there is much on which I was either naive or just plain wrong. I challenge you to point to a volume of that date representing the views that came to govern American foreign policy which paints an at-all recognizable picture of reality today, a quarter century later."

KPFA remained the center of my activities. Its long-time program director, Elsa Knight Thompson was fired in 1974, and the second KPFA strike ensued. The basic issue was that which simmered for another 20 years, when I myself and many other programmers were ousted. In the earlier struggle, it was claimed by the national board of Pacifica Foundation, which held the broadcasting license, that the station "needs professionalism." I presented a paper, "Headline Mentality, Utopianism, Ethnocentrism," to the first board meeting after the strike, pointing out that the board's own report said KPFA produced the best original programming of the then three stations in the chain. But I too was critical: "Its public-affairs broadcasting and news coverage show very strong signs of the headline mentality and ethnocentrism that are characteristic of this country, and the Utopianism that typifies those who would like a better world in a hurry."

Another outlet for my energies was gaining my attention. The marvelous weekly Berkeley Barb, organ of the counterculture, which at one point hit 100,000 circulation nationwide, had treated me as a 1960s celebrity from the outset. It also published a great deal of what I offered it.

The Barb's hippie focus wasn't militant enough for a splinter group, the yippies. They, in fact, wanted to preserve the militancy of the '60s artificially. The yippies also objected, rightly, to an advertising gold mine the Barb had discovered -- sex ads of all sorts. Many of these were unquestionably exploitative of women. The yippies founded their competing paper, theTribe, and I attended its community meetings. Stew Albert, the leader, was one of the few whites who won the lifetime confidence of the Black Panthers. Stew had been a student of mine in an informal course on Marxist philosophy I gave on campus. He and the vast majority of the militants of the '60s rejected the Soviet Union as stodgy. They sought their model first in Cuba. Their idol was Che Guevara, who died trying to make revolutions in South America the people didn't want, not Castro, doing the thankless job of trying to make Marxist socialism function. Then they turned to Mao in China, and finally, of all places, North Korea.

But I had to know what the USSR really was, where it was going, and what Soviet people thought. I would try to persuade visitors from there, graduate students under the cultural exchange, and the Soviet Consulate, to meet common Americans, not only the wealthy whom they had to know for business purposes and my own comfortably middle-class, largely academic, friends. I would deliberately take them through ghettoes, and explain why they existed, and the causes of the poverty and crime. My guests, while polite and courteous, could hardly have been less interested. Their model for their own society, and themselves, was upward mobility. The America that attracted them was that which spelled success. And when Gorbachev fell, they accepted every promise of aid from Washington, every formula for shock economic therapy, as automatically right because it came from America. Two-thirds of the pledged aid was not delivered. They got shock but no therapy. In consequence the people at large moved in an increasingly anti-American direction, whereas previously they had been blindly pro.

The Soviet visitors who got to know me well enough to open up were graduate exchange students at the University of California. They were lonelier than those from other countries, because they were usually older and had wives and children back home. Also, at that time, the teaching of English in the USSR was not yet as good as it became later, so there was the additional stress of reading, listening to lectures, and communicating with professors in a language in which they were not fluent. I would take them on day-long drives into orchard country, starting in February when almond trees carpeted the south shore of the Sacramento River around Antioch and the hills above with pink-tinted white blossoms.

Annual day drives to the almonds and to later-blooming cherries, redbud, poppies, apples in turn, each in different areas, were usually alone, just Tanya and myself. They were one way of relaxing from a very intense life. We generally did not have the radio on. We would keep totally silent for an hour or more at a time and just look at the scenery. Then we'd stop for long strolls under the blooms, hug and kiss. The silence was not a planned therapy. We certainly knew each other well enough, and would speak only when something had to be said, or a thought arose. That's still true. But she could never break me of the habit of interrupting her reading of one section of the morning paper at breakfast with a quote from the part I was reading, even though I knew perfectly well she would get to it. Besides, I can't read anything whatever without underlining, bracketing, entering question marks, exclamation points and comments. When I translated a psychology journal for some years, I once found an article saying that that practice is an unconscious way of reinforcing memory. Certainly my memory for things that interest me is excellent.

Tanya was the organizer of our cultural recreation: subscriptions to theater seasons, reservations for individual performances of various kinds. Fortunately, our tastes are quite similar. We both love opera, but have been able to afford it only since becoming old enough to qualify for senior rush prices. For years we would dash across the Bay Bridge for the one-hour free lunchtime Brown Bag Opera at which the finest young prospects could be heard. We had been raised on records of the very best voices, and in my case live performances of the Bolshoi heard regularly during my year in Moscow, 1931-2. Consequently, we had little patience with any organized company but the San Francisco Opera. Donald Pippin's Pocket Opera was an exception. His musicianship and, above all, the humor with which he translated the libretti of "lesser" works and read his delicious synopses made up for the unavailability of first-rate voices. But by the 1980s and, certainly the '90s, the broadening of Americans' cultural horizons led to the emergence of even companies in Berkeley worth hearing.

With the Music Department at the University of California at home in Berkeley, and the Conservatory in San Francisco plus the Music Department at San Francisco State University, there was never a lack of exciting instrumental music. Living only 15 minutes' drive from UC Berkeley, there were years when we would attend the free noontime concerts at Hertz Hall quite regularly. Low-cost venues such as the Capp Street neighborhood music center in San Francisco's Mission District, the Old First Church, and free offerings at San Francisco State and the Conservatory made frequent concert-going possible. At Christmas there were years when we would immerse ourselves for weeks on end in the choral presentations at churches in the area.

Yet in the classical forms, Tanya and I have never advanced -- if it is advance -- beyond those composers whose work is fundamentally melodic. Music later than Stravinsky generally loses us.

I imagine that the problem is generational. Music, or at least music in modern societies, seems to be the only art so delicatedly attuned to the sequence of generations, and even to decades and single years. My sound designer friend John Whiting thinks pop music is an artificial capitalist artifact, more so all the time. The monotonous thump-thump-thump of rock and roll is primitive to our ears, as is its notion that the louder and shriller the better. But our children respond to it, as do virtually all of their generation.

Jazz is cross-generational. In the mid-'90s, a branch of the Oakland Public Library in one of that city's poorer neighborhood became the official site of its African-American history museum. That branch library launched a cultural program that reminded me, although on a very much more modest scale, of the magnificent Houses of Culture that used to exist in every city of the Soviet Union. The library has, at this writing, among many other things, free summer Sunday afternoon jazz jam sessions. We attend regularly. The participants range from early teens to late sixties, Black and white, female and male, straight and gay: the American mix at its very best. And one afternoon I heard a Black trio, drummer in his 40s, female vocalist in her 50s, saxophonist in his 60s, playing music so very far out that it resembled contemporary "serious" music. So I recommended to them that they seek an audition with Kent Nagano's Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, which emphasizes new music.

Our tastes have not stood still. The great Ali Akbar Khan made his home in the Bay Area, and we are regulars at his concerts.

We go to less and less folk-type vocal music. That is chiefly because the combination of our own declining ability to hear, unpredictable sound systems and acoustics, and an insistence upon use of the microphone makes it less intelligible to us. Why can't today's singers enunciate as Pete Seeger still does, and as Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Malvina Reynolds did? I had a better-than-average voice and deep emotionalism. I knew and sang a very large repertory of revolutionary and ethnic songs in many European languages, and English-language folk and labor songs. I am quite proud that Black friends said to me, literally: "you got rhythm," when I did their music. But the social meaning that characterized the songs of our generation is either gone or watered down or obscure in current songs. And neither of us hears well enough any longer to make out the words in rap.

As a should-have-been professional dancer, I see all the dance I can. Tanya shares my fondness for this art. We are cold only to the angular, formal, motion-and-posture-for-its-own-sake groups. San Francisco has an ethnic dance festival each June. It had remarkable freshness in its early years. We are humanists with complete confidence in the capacity of any people whatever to develop its folk expressions to high art .We saw that phenomenon launched in dance by the Soviets' Moiseyev company, generously funded there specifically due to belief in that capacity. So we take great pleasure in seeing nationalities emerge on the dance scene. Most recently, in San Francisco, the Filipinos have done so.

The folk dance that ranks above all others for us is flamenco. We regret only that men take less and less part in it. Where are those tiny Gypsy roosters of yesteryear, with their ramrod-straight backs, stomachs flat as ironing boards, the commands issued by their drumming heels, their arms and eyes unashamedly masculine? But it is nice that nationalities other than the Spanish are making it their own. Female aficionadas particularly go to Spain to study and return to dance with skill and excitement. A most pleasing aspect of flamenco, at least in the Bay area, is that the mutual "olays" on stage are reflected in real life. The various groups attend each others' performances and bring their children and parents and extended families. They chatter away in Spanish, although the present generation is entirely American-born. Some learned Spanish when grown because it is so inseparable a part of their art.

Ballet is something else. In this we are snobs, for the best of reasons. Although I did see the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow in 1931-32, its greatness then lay in staging and the forever unparalleled magnificence of Russian choral work. Soviet soloists in those years had not been abroad to study bel canto. Their heavy breathing and constricted sound in the upper register of the particular individual's range was clearly inferior to that of artists with Italian training. But the Bolshoi Ballet was at that time simply in a class by itself. (In Moscow I never saw Leningrad's Mariinskii which later became the Kirov).By the time we left New York, the City Ballet was tolerable by the standards I had developed. When we first saw the San Francisco Ballet in the late '50s it was so bad that we giggled. The intervening years have made a stupendous difference. It is now world class, and perhaps unparalleled in doing works on themes from the white component of American culture. Yet I think for fluidity of line, for the sense that each member of the corps de ballet is an artist of individuality and not a mechanical member of a chorus line, and that each soloist is acting -- embodying a particular character -- in her or his dancing, the Russians still have no equals. In American and west European ballet, form takes precedent over content.

Tanya is immoderately modest in everything, and in recent years insists that her memory is failing. Certainly not where theater is concerned. In our 40 years in Berkeley, plays have been a bigger part of our cultural diet than either music or dance, or museum and gallery visits. It is only to theater that we buy full-season tickets. We subscribed to San Francisco's A.C.T. from its founding until ticket prices plus parking costs downtown put it beyond our purse. Since then we are regulars at the senior matinees of the truly excellent Berkeley Repertory Theater. I enjoy the plays and acting immensely when they are good, but usually forget them immediately afterward. When they are poorly produced, or offensive to my taste for whatever reason of content or production, I am quite capable of getting up and walking out. It is very rare for Tanya not to stay to the end. Yet our final evaluations are generally, not always, quite similar. But she remembers: plays, actors, productions. I do only rarely, but sometimes for a lifetime, as an incomparable Lear at the San Francisco's Actors' Workshop half a century ago, who later simply became a high-school drama teacher . Or Siobhan McKenna. Or Rene Auberjonois of the early years of A.C.T., whose Tartuffe has remained with me forever.

I treasure the memory of the English-language performance of Norway's leading actress -- I've forgotten her name -- in Ibsen's "The Woman from the Sea," at the Berkeley Rep, which put her in my pantheon. And it certainly added to my pleasure when Geoff Hoyle, a comic actor outstanding enough to have had a solo show there, spotted me in the audience during an after-performance discussion and introduced me to the theater's director as the man who had given the Un-American Activities Committee its hardest time thirty years earlier.

We have been fans of San Francisco's Mime Troupe since it got started in the '60s. Its founder, R.G. Davis, was a forever supporter of my broadcasts. In the many years since the troupe parted company with him, it has never lost its merciless social edge. It employs an Americanized commedia d'arte style using language and images and characters truly comprehensible to the person in the street . Yet it does not cater to the vulgarity or porn that Hollywood and TV seem to think is all the average citizen can understand. Nor have I ever seen another company, local or from anywhere else in the country, in which white, Black, and Latino actors play both ethnic and cross-over roles as easily and naturally. To me, the Mime Troupe is the finest single expression of the best in the American character and its eternal struggle for democracy and against injustice at home or in foreign policy to be found in the arts nationwide from the 1960s to the present. Thanks to touring performances, documentary films, and PBS TV, I have seen enough of the country's art production to venture that judgment.

I was endowed with gifts in music and dance of which I made almost no use. The successful histrionics of my committee hearing testimonies suggest I might have done well in theater. By contrast, I have never had the slightest desire to do anything in painting or sculpture. Yet painting, drawing, and sculpture can move me more than any other cultural expression. We began visiting Europe west of the Soviet Union in 1974, and have been to Italy three times. On each occasion Florence and Rome were in the itinerary. Invariably I stood in front of Michelangelo's David and wept. His Moses in Rome is visible only by artificial light which is turned on by dropping a coin in a timer. I come with loaded pockets and remain there until I have spent them all. Ravenna is to me the extraordinary dark-blue star-studded mosaic vault of Galla Placidia's tiny 5th-century church. It also means standing in front of Dante's tomb and reading aloud his long passages carved in stone for the sheer pleasure of the sound. I understand little more than half his Italian.

A change of planes in Paris would mean a wild dash to the Jeu de Paumes to see the Impressionists. I took really good slides there without tripod and by natural light back when my hand was steady enough to hold for a full second. The projector light reflected from the tiny beads of the screen yields a glow that I think the painters would approve of.

London, to me, was the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, plus lots and lots of theater. The former is the Impressionists and Rembrandt of course. But what makes the British Museum special to me is Rubens' brown period, which I didn't know existed. Perhaps the absence of his usual lush color focuses me on his marvelous draftsmanship, and a humanism that does not normally strike one in his work. It is like van Gogh's early "Potato Eaters," or the poor acrobats of Picasso's blue period, or Rembrandt's etchings. In all of which it is what the artist says, and not how he says it, that stays with one. Is Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son" the greatest of all paintings? Or does it simply have more humanity than any other? Is there a difference between those concepts?

But I go to the Tate for the very opposite: Turner. He abandoned content, "pictures," for color, anticipating the Impressionists by most of a century and in some respects going beyond them. He can hold me for as much time as there is. Yet I never miss a small painting, "The Faerie Feller's Last Trick" -- I think that's right -- by someone whose name I can never recall, showing a leprechaun in a field of colorful flowers seemingly designed to look artificial and three-dimensional.

My interest in art brought friendship with the oddest couple. Hela Norman grew up a member of the Hitlerjugend -- Hitler Youth -- as a matter of course, being a teenager in Nazi Germany. Irving Norman, her husband, was a Lithuanian-born Jewish-American lifelong Communist. He had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade trying to stop Hitler-aided fascism in Spain before World War II. At the end of the war she was 18, and emigrated to the U.S. shortly after. They met on a city bus in San Francisco. He was attracted to her, pursued her, married her. He was nearly twice her age.

He was a painter, and won recognition only in the early 1970s, late in his career. She was trained as a gardener in Germany. In California's Half Moon Bay she rose to where her employers sent her with an entire four-engine cargo plane full of plants she had selected for the new palace of the Queen of Iran.

On one occasion, she insisted on loading our station wagon with as many gardens-in-a-pot as it could carry. I was idiot enough not to take them indoors when a hard freeze struck our hilltop street some years later, and lost all but one. But the feathery sprays of that one -- I have no idea what it is -- live on and still decorate my study bathroom after a quarter century.

Came 1988, and a live utility wire blew down in a windstorm next to the Norman's house. It caught fire. Everything went: house, his works in it (most were by then in collections and museums), all the birds, the priceless garden. The utility's lawyers, the best money could buy, persuaded the court that this was an Act of God, and the Normans won no damages.When Irving died, Hela, then in her mid-60s, built a fine new home on the site of the old, with her own two hands, walls and windows designed to frame several of his paintings. She has birds again.

I had met the Normans through Irving's interest in my broadcasts. He defended me against all attacks, bought my books, and contributed financially to KPFA. But we had sharp differences. We first visited their home in 1972, the year before he won his first recognition. I was appalled by his paintings, and said so. His composition, draftsmanship, use of color (although they too reflected pessimism) were superb. His style was unquestionably original, even unique, as is true of every artist who has a vision all his own. He called himself a social surrealist. His theme was always human beings, en masse. When it was a gathering of the rulers of the nation, his obvious hatred for them was understandable in the light of his politics. But often it included, or even consisted of numbers of the common people. The blank, expressionless uniformity of their faces seemed to me utterly at odds with what I regarded as the humanism of Marxist socialism. I told him that. But he was an admirer of Joseph Stalin to the end, although Stalin would at the very least have had him barred from the Artists' Union for his paintings, because they lacked all optimism. It is clear in retrospect that his work shared the dictator's view that the people would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the projected heaven on earth.

Before that first social contact, he apparently thought me a cold logician. The next day, he wrote me a letter: "sorry to have disturbed you at some points. You are quite a combination, a man of science, and of deep -- very deep -- feelings. I consider it very beautiful." So we remained friends. Since Irving's death, we drop in to see Hela every time we spend a day enjoying the intersection of redwoods and shore south of San Francisco.

My interest in sculpture is as great as in painting. The greatest contemporary sculpture I know is the monument at a former Nazi death camp in Latvia, Salaspils, ten miles outside the capital, Riga. Its emotional impact is the equivalent of Picasso's "Guernica" in painting. It consists of separate angular human figures of colossal height, done in rough concrete, spaced unevenly over the flat field where the camp stood. The central cluster is of four men, the bones of their skulls protruding through almost fleshless, but not grotesque, faces. One can no longer hold himself erect, and has fallen back into the arms of another. The latter stands as though waiting to be shot, but unyielding. Another has his fist up, arm bent at the elbow, in the Communist salute. In front, the fourth figure has his fist high in the air. A separate figure is of a man fallen to the ground, supporting himself on one extended arm. I treasure a photo of Tanya placing flowers at his feet. I hope the post-Communist Letts have not falsified history by removing or mutilating the figures that carry symbolism of the previous period.

Architecture, too, is worth special trips to me. As soon as we began visiting Europe, I fell in love with cathedrals, above all that of Cologne and Gaudi's wild and wonderful creation in Barcelona. Add Milan, whose flying buttresses and statue-crowned spires provide lightness and grace to a hall seemingly as big as Madison Square Garden. And Mont St. Michel off the French coast, not a cathedral but a religious structure in simply perfect harmony with the island out of which it seems to grow. Canterbury and Salisbury are quietly lovely, but they don't thrill me.

Film is the art of the 20th century. In earlier chapters I described my great good fortune in growing up with the movies of Chaplin and the other great forerunners, and the classic Soviet films from Vertov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Ermler on. My internationalist upbringing and convictions were a blessing in attracting me to European films as soon as they made an appearance here. Subsequent to World War II, I saw the films of India, Africa, Japan, and other lands as they mastered that art.

The producer Tom Luddy started as manager of a repertory house in Berkeley and went on to found the excellent Pacific Film Archive at the University of California before making films on his own. We know each other since the activism of the '60s. On a few occasions, I was asked to give introductory talks when new Soviet films were shown at the Archive. I was amazed that the professors teaching about the USSR at the university almost never attended. I myself never failed to learn something from those films, whatever their quality as cinema. And through them I got to know some interesting Soviet figures. One was the legendary war documentarist Roman Karmen. His physical courage was limitless. He had covered every revolution and war from China's Long March to Chile's Allende and Castro's Cuba, and was the head of the Soviet teams filming the Russian front in World War II. He himself was up where the fighting was fiercest.

During the one full day I had had with him -- I gave him the patented Mandel grand tour of Berkeley -- he told me a great story. During the Cuba Missile Crisis in the last week of October 1962 he was on his way to the Caspian Sea to work on a film on the offshore oil fields. The phone rang, and the voice at the other end was Anastas Mikoyan, the #2 man in the Khrushchev administration. "What are you doing, Roman?" "I'm packing to go to the Caspian." "How would you like to come with me to Cuba?" "When?" "Tonight." "But I don't even have time to get my equipment." "It's already on the plane."

They flew to Cuba, where it was the job of Armenian Mikoyan, by far the smoothest member of the Politburo, to break to Castro the news of the withdrawal-of-missiles deal. Karmen filmed. Then they flew on to Washington, where Mikoyan was to dot the i's and cross the t's to render ironclad President Kennedy's promise that the U.S. would never try to repeat the CIA's Cuban-exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs and would soon withdraw nuclear missiles from Turkey.

Mikoyan was ushered into the Oval Office. After a while, someone came out and called for Karmen, who was in an ante-room full of the very top U.S. and world news and camera people. As he picked up his tripod and followed the official, the room exploded: "Who the fuck is this little shit who gets in there, and we can't?"

Another Russian I got to know through Tom is feature director Andron Konchalovsky, who was able to divide his time between Hollywood and Moscow even before Gorbachev. We housed the Kyrgyz feature film maker, Tolomush Okayev, and he later hosted us in his remote corner of Central Asia north of the Himalayas. Twenty years later, when he became Kyrgyzia's ambassador to Turkey, he sent regards to us via Judy Stone, film critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.

It is normal in America to ask for freebies to anything one has some association with. Generally speaking, I'm too proud. So there were lots of Soviet musical concerts, dance groups, opera and even sports events for which I had helped built audience by radio broadcasts that I did not get to because I was not on the promoters' lists. Of course, we'd pay our way into the must-sees. Rarely, I would ask for, and get, tickets. But Luddy provided me with passes to the San Francisco Film Festival the many years he ran it. The young woman who founded the Jewish Film Festival did likewise.

My attitude toward films is essentially simple. I enjoy comedies because they are fun, if they are fun. So-called humor at the expense of a race or ethnic group, women, disabled people, or whoever, is not for me. I get up and leave, fast. I thought "Forrest Gump" was a fine film. Its huge audience demonstrated to me the basic decency of Americans with respect to race, war, sports, the disabled, something I was badly in need of proof of at the time.I enjoy the distinctively American art of the musical. The physical beauty of the performers, great tunes, and dancing of the kind that comes natural to me.

I detest horror films, although people I respect and love like them. Bad horror films are just awful. Good ones frighten me, and in a world full of stress I don't see the point.

Love stories that are truly about love are fine. Likewise tragedy in the classic sense. All life ends in death. That does not of itself make life not worth living. Films that help one understand the human condition, no matter how they do so, are fine. If one understands it, one can do something about it. Films that discourage I'm against. Likewise phony uplift. It is reality one must grapple with, and anything that helps one do that, no matter how removed from reality the style, is fine.

Real reality -- not its reflection in film or whatever -- requires that one understand one's place in it. I have often had to force myself morally. I don't like to be hurt physically, or suffer the indignities that go with jailing, or put my life in danger. So when such risks existed, it has been my convictions, what Europeans call civil courage, that carried me into and through them. It was only fairly late in life that that kind of response became automatic. There is a newspaper photo of a picket line at the Oakland Airport during a demonstration, organized by son Bob, to demand that a CIA airline supporting contras in Central America be forced from that city-owned airport. I was then about 70. The picture shows motorcycle police hemming us in very closely indeed. I am closest to the cops. That was no accident, yet entirely spontaneous on my part. I was outraged by their arrogance in seeking to intimidate by using their vehicles to try to herd us. Yet before the demonstration I had thought very carefully, as always, about the possibilities of police violence and arrest. Both aspects of behavior were typical of me.

For the 20 years of my salaried job, I would do the things that really interested me from morning to mid-afternoon, and the translations from 3:30 to ll p.m., with a break for supper. The freshness necessary to keep that schedule was maintained by daily swims at about 2 p.m. from May to October in a lake five minutes drive from us, and twice-weekly climbs of the ridge behind our own the rest of the year. I still do that, but don't climb as religiously. As my arteries have narrowed, the water is too cold to take in early spring most years, and I start some time in June. I just don't understand working out indoors except for simple stretches and calisthenics.

Has anyone studied why it is that humanity is so widely agreed that one day in seven is needed for rest? I certainly need it. For each day off Tanya and I spent with the arts, probably two were given to long drives. In earlier years I would head eastward to the high Sierra on fourteen-hour sunrise-to-late-night outings, most of which were consumed by driving. But if, in May, they took me through just-opened Sonora Pass with snow many feet high on both sides, and back via corkscrew Ebbetts Pass, I would sleep like a log that night and wake up refreshed. Tanya hated the virtually non-stop driving, and made me quit this practice sometime in the '70s.

I had superb reflexes and was an outrageously fast driver. I once burned out an old six-cylinder station wagon by pushing it to 90 on the way home from the Sierra. With my eye on the mirror, I never got a ticket away from town. I loved fording streams and taking four-wheel-drive-type tracks high in the mountains with my ordinary two-wheel-drive vehicles. Tanya was invariably scared to death. I got no pleasure out of frightening her -- or anyone else, ever -- but fast driving and making it on difficult roads for many hours on end was my way of accomplishing what others turned to drugs or alcohol or cigarettes for.

Downhill skiing to my limit -- I never skiied enough to be really good -- had the same purpose, but when I was 40, I decided that with three kids and an already sick wife to support, it made no sense to risk crippling injury. So I stopped going over leaps that were above my skill, and turned to controlled skiing, but fast wherever that could be done safely. That wasn't my attitude toward cars, but our budget couldn't take the loss of one. So, after I ruined the station wagon, I cut my road speed to 75, then 70. Now I'm often down to 62-65 and, on small roads, real slow for the pleasure of just looking. I admit to a feeling of satisfaction when a taxi driver who was a long-time KPFA volunteer said to me on an across-the-bridge-in-traffic trip to San Francisco on which, for some reason, he was my passenger: "You sure can drive: you enjoy it, don't you?"

The quiet loneliness of the coast north to Bodega Bay or even as far as Mendocino was also a great attraction. It still is. Southward, however, we would dash non-stop at least to Santa Cruz, if not to Monterey and Carmel. But Tanya's worsening heart ruled high mountain passes out. I eventually lost my taste for very long drives for their own sake. So we rediscovered the California we first knew when I was at Stanford in 1947, and found details that gave special pleasure.

San Francisco is cut off from the peninsula to the south by San Bruno Mountain. It runs east-west from the Pacific to San Francisco Bay. That steep and bulky ridge is the top of a T of mountains. The shaft is the westernmost branch of the Coast Range, extending southward. The town of Half Moon Bay exists because it is the closest spot on the coast to the first pass through that range south of the city. There an east-west road joins coastal Highway 1. Immediately south of the town, blacktop Purissima Road runs inland toward the unattainable crest. It snakes up and up following arroyos and gullies, but finally gives up and hairpins back to the coast farther south. Precisely at that turn, giant coast redwoods, elsewhere far above the road, line it for no more than a hundred yards. The road was built a century or more ago to log them, and a tiny parking lot occupies what must have been the loading area. It offers access to an easy trail ascending very gently a hidden canyon lined with 150-foot second-growth redwoods along a lovely stream. Tanya can still manage that, bad heart, accident-caused limp, tremor and all. We walk a very slow mile and then back. Bicycles pass now and then, but never so many as to break the wilderness feeling. Were we able to manage another couple of miles, we'd reach Tunitas Creek Road uphill from Hela's.

South of there we take each successive road up to Skyline at the crest, and then down to the Pacific again. No two of the coastal valleys are alike. That at Pescadero is flat for a few miles inland, and lined with farms. But it is an island in time. Only in 1995 did the original stagecoach inn pass out of the hands of the family that built it. The foothills are populated by horsey types. But higher up there are genuine mountaineers. Earlier they had been loggers. Now their offspring work for the state or on farms or road or gas and electric maintenance, or for the wealthy or in service. Rain and windstorms here are catastrophic, as Hela and Irving learned. Slides have killed many in the years we know the area. Earthquakes help along, because the geology is young with relatively little rock, the mountains exceedingly steep. But on a sunny day, with the shade of the redwoods breaking the heat, or on the frequent calm foggy ones, there is a sense of peace that makes potential dangers seem as remote as though one had read about them on a distant continent.

It is a region where one can pick berries paying the farmer for the privilege. Or, virtually across the road, watch gargantuan sea elephants that come to Ano Nuevo Point to breed. No more than a couple of miles away, I drive leisurely past one of the tallest and most beautiful lighthouses anywhere. Or suddenly encounter an area whose microclimate is well-suited to apple orchards, one of only three places in California where that is true. Or ride a long-established private railroad but a couple of miles long. Yet its trestles must loop over each other to climb the fierce slopes. Right next door, one walks a redwood grove where, for some genetic reason, the trees have more varied candlestick shapes or spiral bark patterns than anywhere else this species grows. One may marvel at natural bridges where the land has left them high and virtually dry. There monarch butterflies by the millions hang in massive clusters from eucalyptus trees during their annual migration. Or drive or walk the lovely clifftop shore west of the University of California Santa Cruz campus. Its buildings are wondrously studded among redwood groves on an immense ranch that has largely been left untouched. Or watch the surfers catching great waves where the cliffs give way to the calmest of sand beaches. Or I can clamber over the immense rocks of the rip-rap pier protecting the charming yacht harbor, keeping an eye on Sam, the chunky, beautifully-coordinated, marvelously intelligent and downright nice little grandson of our dear friends the Hirsches in Santa Cruz.

Just a few hundred yards south, pelicans nest in a quiet untouched lagoon, driftwood poking above the surface and sprayed across the narrow strip of sand separating it from the ocean. A couple of miles more and one happens into Capitola. There a similar sandbar denies access to the ocean to a short river on which one canoes to its head under virgin redwoods. Farther south are more state beaches. A glance at the cliffs at their ends show the ruins of very recent luxury homes whose owners refused to believe what the Pacific (pacific?) can do to the firmest shore when it is angry.

Then come the strawberry fields of Watsonville. Here undocumented Mexicans are free to toil to place fruit on our tables but were left totally outside the social safety net when floods ruined the crop and filled their foundation-less shacks with a foot of mud. Then Sam's grandfather Fred, retired Jewish union plumber, came down from Santa Cruz and organized the cannery workers to protect their jobs against runaway employers. The Spanish he learned when the whole Hirsch family lived in Caesar Chavez' organizing compound in the Central Valley a quarter century earlier came in handy.

And on past the mouth of the Salinas River, where Vietnamese fisherfolk do battle with the ocean for its bounty and with their Anglo and Portuguese precursors for the right to earn a living while senators and other wealthy vacation on a nearby road bearing a Russian name. Does this date from when the Russians visited the colonial Spanish at Monterey, not very far away, or was it simply developed by some noble refugee from the revolution in the 20th century?

The fishing village lies directly across the road from a stupendous fossil-fuel power plant which guards the entry to the artichoke country just south. This gives way to the enormous expanse that was Ft. Ord, from which infantry left to kill and be killed in every war up to the undeclared one against Iraq. Rifle ranges cut from the sand dunes parallel the highway. The area is trying to recover from the catastrophe of peace having broken out between the United States and Gorbachev. Sand City, where soldiers' relatives lived, is the worst hit. But Monterey next door seems depression-proof. Its sea otters floating on their backs and cracking and washing crustacean food on their chests, its truly charming colonial buildings from Spanish times, the magnificent aquarium on Cannery Row, the street made famous by an author whose best book glorified the militant struggles of the Okies during the Great Depression, the golf courses for those to whom a depression means only that the government may no longer pick up the bill. Just beyond, the genuine beauty of Carmel, where the state park at its south end provides a never-ending spectacle as two ocean currents clash on its rocks beneath the rusty lichen-covered cypresses.

All this within two and a half hours of San Francisco, or that many days if one wishes to stop briefly at its wonders. And if one lives as near to it as we do, and has done so for some forty years, one can only say "come see" to the friends who never understood why we didn't return to New York. When they do, I provide what I can honestly brag is the best tourist guide service conceivable. And to San Francisco and Berkeley and the coast northwards and inland along the Russian River. And, if they wish, south to Big Sur and Nepenthe and even to the Hearst Castle, for all of its flavor of Las Vegas without the slot machines. And east to Tahoe and tiny Wright's Lake far above it bordering Desolation Wilderness, and south from there to the real West in places like Bridgeport en route to Mammoth Mountain, where the endless variety of skiing excuses the condominiums for the visitors from another world, Los Angeles.

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Until the USSR collapsed in 1991, the overriding consideration in my life after World War II was contributing my knowledge of that country and my communication skills to helping prevent nuclear war between it and the United States. KPFA and two other of the stations then carrying me are controlled by Pacifica Foundation. In 1964, I asked its Board of Directors to name me Pacifica's correspondent in Moscow, unpaid of course. I had the agreement of my employer, a New York firm, to do my job of social science translation from Moscow as I had been doing it by mail from Berkeley. I was named correspondent in December 1965. But now the Soviets refused to accredit me, because that would unbalance the exact numerical equality of each country in the other, and the U.S. refused to accept an additional newsman from Moscow.

I eventually lost patience and wrote the editor of the Soviet Embassy's English-language magazine: "I am sick and tired of a situation in which every goddamn cold-war professor is allowed by your government to stay in the USSR under the cultural exchange program; every filthy liar from our major media....; lots of Communists who have no influence in the U.S. whatever...can make long visits; but a person like myself, who has influence with students, with the academic world, and a substantial radio audience and readership for my books, and who has fought the cold war uncompromisingly from the beginning, is not accredited as a correspondent.

"I don't know what stupid bureaucrat is responsible for this, and I don't care. This is an angry letter, intentionally so. I know that you do not make the decisions in such matters. But I know very few Soviet people. You at least are in the newspaper field. You understand something about these things. You are also in the exchange journalism field. So I ask you to do whatever is necessary to get a decision on this matter -- quickly."

To back this up, I wrote Holland Roberts, a national authority on reading and former Stanford professor who had resigned to head the now-defunct California Labor School. I have always been amused by the alphabetical sequence of names in the index to his 1946 Pocket Book, Good Reading: Malraux, Mandel, Mao. The Mandel was for my book of that year, A Guide to the Soviet Union. As it had gotten an excellent review in the New York Times, he could justify its inclusion. In the 1970s Roberts directed the American Russian Institute of San Francisco, fundamentally a friendship society with close ties to the Soviet Consulate.

In my letter, I cited Ethel and Stephen Dunns' The Peasants of Central Russia: 'William Mandel...was our guide through the thickets of Soviet affairs and the interpretation of Soviet sources.' I referred to the assistance requested of me by professors Sherman and Kanowitz with their book manuscripts, and by high school teachers with their subjects. "This week, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars at the University of California asked me to provide materials on the Soviet attitude toward the war in Indo-China and the latest events in Cambodia'."

I also wrote Jessica Smith, suffragist before women got the vote in 1920 and my boss in 1940 when I did research for her magazine, Soviet Russia Today. She too had standing with Moscow. My letter to her is interesting because it also explained to her that I had no time to edit an article on environmental problems I had submitted. I listed my current obligations: finishing the writing of Soviet Women, doing the quota of translations that earned my salary, producing a weekly broadcast, and preparing for a lecture at Stanford on the USSR and genetic engineering, another on Central Asia at U.C. Santa Cruz, delivering my regular lecture in Virginia Franklin's class at Merritt College, and writing a promised review of a book on Central Asia for a scholarly journal.

Jessica replied saying she could do no good in getting me admitted for a stay in the Soviet Union, and added something apologetic about being a sick old lady. I replied: "I'll always remember you as you were when I worked for you in 1940. I thought of you -- to use a phrase of an even earlier time -- as a 'golden girl' glowing with health, intelligence, vigor, and looks that I was able to appreciate even though you were 44 and I 23! And for an old lady nearing 78 you're not doing so badly editing a magazine. If only the country were doing as well--."

I never was accredited by the Soviets as a correspondent, so continued to make visits of not over a month each. They were both helpful and misleading. Our trip in 1970 included a visit to Stalingrad, where the tide of World War II was turned. Aboard the same Volga cruise vessel was a German who had fought there, where it was destroyed as no city of modern construction has been since then, anywhere. He said that he had thought it could not be rebuilt in 50 years, and here it was, bigger and better than before, in half that time. I had no way of knowing that the time of our visit was precisely when the inherently burocratic nature of the Marxist economy would make it begin to run out of steam.

Raisa Tselikman-Kantorovich gave me insights into matters other than feminism. She described how she spent her first half century in communal apartments in which one knew every detail of everyone else's life, and regarded that as quite normal until Vladimir finally acquired a private apartment in a housing complex for writers. That was important to me, for it helped me understand that people then judged their condition by comparison to their own past, and not what they read about the outside world or the prerevolutionary nobility. About our first encounter she wrote me:

"I'm afraid that that was the first time I had seen a live American!!! And I was very pleased that you were utterly natural...and were dressed so unspectacularly that you immediately won my confidence. And besides, you praised the dinner very highly and declared that my apple cake was just like American apple pie!"

In another letter: "To read -- in a foreign language -- the thoughts of a person who lives so far away, in an entirely different society, but who has seen so much and given so much thought to so many things -- this is the first time in my life this has happened to me, and is more interesting than a dozen books." Subsequently she not only read Soviet Women, but translated it orally, word for word, to her husband. A third letter retains its significance in terms of our understanding of what occurred in the Soviet era:

"Is Soviet Russian literature really so little known in the U.S.? For we love American and read it so much!....This year I've managed to read no less than 30 books in English....It is hurtful to think that Americans do not know our contemporary writers. There is no question but that a splendid literature has been written here these nearly 60 years. And it will be studied for a long time to come."

I wrote her in 1975 that a Soviet exchange professor was teaching their literature at San Francisco State University, and that only a single person had registered: "Do you know why? 'Freedom,' American style! Our 'free' press and radio and television and damn-fool writers (I am thinking of a very prominent survivor of the Hemingway group I know personally) [Kay Boyle] have convinced the American people that there is only one significant writer in the Russian language today, and he lives in Switzerland." The reference was to Solzhenitsyn, who had not yet moved to this country. My omission of his name was a way of getting around Soviet lack of freedom: mail censorship. "And frankly, I am suspicious about who that one student is. There is another, secondary reason, in my view [for the non-enrollment]. Only in the last few weeks have most Americans of student age become aware, because of articles in our press, of the fact that the FBI and CIA pry into the lives of ordinary citizens. Do you think the effect of such as 'expose' is greater freedom? For most people, it is greater fear! After all, a student wants to get a job upon graduation, right? And if his record shows that he took a course from a Red Russian Communist professor? Ai, ai, ai! Yet in your country, when our Prof. Bridgman recently taught at Moscow University, was there any lack of students wanting to hear him? Perhaps there is less fear in your country? Ah? [This] story is a measure of how effective my own life's work has been in changing American attitudes: zero."

In view of the value Russians place upon friendship, and of Raisa's very independent nature and uncompromising views, one letter left me walking on air: "We have many friends, but you have taken your place among them. Somehow, it is very good to feel that far, far away there is a good person who sometimes -- more than that is not necessary -- thinks of one, wishes one well, respects one and one's work."

Viktor had yet another heart attack at the end of 1974. She wrote us a most moving letter about him. I sent a wire in which I informed him that I was translating one of his essays for publication in the American quarterly, Soviet Sociology. Raisa wrote in reply: "This gave him much satisfaction. After all, man is weak: one always wants to believe that one really is of use to someone."

Of course, that describes me exactly. Upon recovery, he wrote: "You even said that literature still needs me. That is the kind of exaggeration only a friend can indulge in, but it is balsam for the soul."

Her letter about his illness called forth a response to them both: "Raisa, when I read to my wife your words about you 'most worthy, very special, very thinking friend, the man I love,' she cried, as I had when I first read them myself. That is very, very beautiful. Vladimir, you are a very lucky man to have such a wife....I always like to write about 'serious' matters, but after all, what is really more serious than relationships among human beings?"

Vladimir died in the late '70s. I broke relations with Raisa in the early '80s, stupidly, because the gap between us in understanding each other's countries had become too wide. I was emotionally not capable of accepting the truth of her picture of her society by that time, for it logically led to the conclusion that the system was corrupt beyond reformation, which I devoutly desired. But that is very much a part of my further development, and will be told in its proper place.

The Kantoroviches introduced me to Yury Riurikov, his wife Rita, and their then very young child, Sveta, who also became close friends and tireless correspondents. Yury was the one Soviet writer on love, and made it possible for me, working on Soviet Women, to have the first-ever frank discussions with Russian women about sex since the early '30s. His best book, which exists only in Russian, is called The Three Attractions. He inscribed it to me, in his native tongue: "To Bill Mandel, American womanologist, from a Russian historian of amouristics and sexonautics. P.S. Better three-time-three attractions than three infections."

But the Riurikovs were very serious about helping me understand their country. For one thing, they fed me as they would feed themselves, not with the host-impoverishing luxury that is Russian tradition. He also had me meet people from whom I could learn things totally censored out of the Soviet press. His upstairs neighbor had one of those names the early post-revolutionaries inflicted upon their helpless children: Radium Fish (!), son of the prominent Communist journalist Gennadi Fish. Radium hated the regime with a fervor I did not encounter elsewhere until people of his views began to set the country's intellectual tone in the Gorbachev period. He was an infantry veteran of the Far Northern European front in World War II, had been an Arctic seaman, and was a distinguished Turcologist. This was a man whose opinions deserved attention. He managed to get published, jointly with a Tajik scholar, a book on the history of the Soviet period in that remote country on the border of Afghanistan that enabled me to understand the bitter rebellion and civil war which occurred when the USSR broke up. But only when that happened did I accept the implied conclusions of his book.

On another occasion Riurikov invited to dinner with me a man who had been sent into Czechoslovakia with the Soviet invasion of 1968 as a propagandist. He immediately realized that the Czechs didn't want the Russians there, and quit. Contrary to our image of instant and savage retribution for such behavior, he was simply brought back to the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow, severely lectured, and turned loose when he would not renounce his convictions.

Listener mail told me who was out there. 1970 opened with a greeting card reading: "Happy New Year. Old Black Drifter," enclosing a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor he thought I'd find interesting. A very different African-American wrote me this one: "I am a 15-year-old high school student. I'm black and my parents are upper middle income educational administrators....I would sign this, but my parents are afraid of government reprisal. I have listened on Sunday mornings, while preparing for church, for two years over WBAI." That was long after the McCarthy era, not from the deep South before Martin Luther King, but from New York City. And people wonder why I am contemptuous of those who think -- do they think? -- in absolutes about us as the land of intellectual freedom and the Soviet Union as having been the opposite.

But fan mail had declined, because -- I didn't know that then -- the '60s generation used the phone instead of the post office. So when a New Yorker wrote me: "One of my minor sins is never writing fan-mail," my reply let it all hang out: "Not writing fan mail is a sin, albeit minor, for I get desperate, but can't beg for letters more than once in three years. When I do, the results are wonderful, but I do need reassurance more often than that, because there are so many other things in the world to do that are socially useful..."

People asked for copies of the program I devoted to Paul Robeson when he died. I made it a practice to digress from Soviet subject matter when people who had made a difference passed on. Another such brought a letter from feminists: "We are grateful for your eulogy of Anna Louise Strong. I hope this morning's broadcast reached many of the younger generation who will have learned of a great American woman." On the other hand, a Communist listener objected to my saying that the Soviet leadership had treated reformist Party chief Khrushchev as an unperson from his ouster to his death in 1971. She made some reference to the Soviet Constitution. I wrote her:

"Bluntly, you're naive. The top leadership pays absolutely no attention to the Constitution, and I'm not talking only of what it says about freedom of assemblage, speech, and the press. Time after time, the Party changes laws as it wishes, and the Constitution is (or is not) amended after the fact."

Listeners began to give me presents, although the one I value most was from KPFA itself, which came in my third year on the air. It was a speaker, part of the state-of-the-art equipment at the 1940 San Francisco World's Fair which the station had salvaged to start its operations a decade later. Twenty years old when the chief engineer built a sound box for it and hung it near my study ceiling, it still functions perfectly, well over half a century since manufacture. To me it is a reminder of a time, very long gone, when KPFA was a family, albeit we most certainly had the squabbles of family as well.

In 1971 a Fannie R. Williams in Los Angeles, KPFK listener, "old and disillusioned," wrote: "I am not affluent, but I'll give you my most prized possession." She was 79 -- my next birthday at this writing -- but ancient from my standpoint then. She sent me: "a Chinese bowl of the Kung Dynasty,about 962 A.D., bluish green with crackled veins." It stands beneath the speaker. I wrote her: "I've put your bowl where I can look at it when I feel 'disillusioned'."

But no material gift meant more than some letters. A younger woman, also in Los Angeles, wrote: "I am a working mother, with husband and 3 young, under 12 years, children. My radio listening is very rationed....I choose your program as very special and a must....I know nothing about politics but I love people....It is because I understand human conditions and want to learn about them that I listen so attentively to what you say on your programs."

Sometime later in the '70s my brother brought from New York a splendid artist's proof of a highly competent large lithograph by a WBAI listener who said he wanted to express his appreciation for the broadcasts in that way. It depicts a street in Palermo as the artist saw it when a soldier in World War II.

In the 1980s the wife of a maker of furniture that had been shown in museums phoned before Christmas to say: "Eben is making something for Bill." The Haskells and I knew each other only as listeners and broadcaster. We had visited them up in Grass Valley, once a gold-mining town, when I did an autographing session in its book store, which advertised in the KPFA program guide. I imagined a reading stand, and was greatly flattered. Just before the holiday, a panel truck pulled into our driveway. Father, mother, and daughter staggered in under the weight of a loveseat of exotic South Pacific and California woods with fixed chamois and leather cushions, standing on a short knuckle-like post supported by five thin rough-hewn branching legs of uneven size. Sounds awful, looks magnificent because of its fine proportions and irregular but harmonious design. Its great weight is the consequence of being built around a slender wrought-iron skeleton totally hidden by the wood, enabling the seats cantilevered to either side of the post to be used without supports at the far end.

Gifts went both ways. Hale Zukas is disabled by cerebral palsy to the point of having to communicate via a stylus strapped to his forehead with which he uses his computer. His voice is so distorted that only those in daily contact with him can understand him. I can't. Yet he graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in math and a minor in Russian, and has been organizationally effective on behalf of the disabled to the point of having been appointed to Pres. Carter's national body on that problem. He listened to me all 37 years I was on KPFA, from his teens. At one point his helper called to ask how to get a Russian-English technical dictionary. I bought it for him. He wrote me: "I appreciate --another much-abused cliche -- the thought involved. Gifts such as this, made when an opportunity happens to arise, make much more sense and are more meaningful than those made as part of some ritual occasion."

WBAI dropped me for the third time in four years. In 1967 the reason had been that in that year's war with Arab states, resulting in Israel's greatest expansion, I did not accept Tel Aviv's position as automatically correct. In the eyes of the management of that station, functioning in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, this naturally made me a Soviet spokesperson. That made it unnecessary for the station to ask itself whether it was violating the principles of free speech to which it proclaimed adherence. The second occasion was when WBAI acquired a new Public Affairs director, the most politically naive in its history up to then. To this person, the mere fact that my program most often consisted, openly and deliberately, of readings of my translations from Soviet publications, automatically made me a propagandist. My response asked whether reading from official U.S. government statements, a normal aspect of the news broadcasts, made the station an agent of Washington.

On this third occasion, the station had gone ultra-New-Left in its outrage against the Vietnam War, and saw the USSR as selling out Vietnam and the R-r-revolution in general. So I wrote the Program Director, with copies to the station manager and the national office of Pacifica, informing them of communications from WBAI listeners in 1969. The editor of Natural History had asked how to get permission to publish an article by a Soviet geographer I had read on the air. The attorney for an environmental organization wanted to know how to sue the USSR for whale hunting. The editor of Film Comment wrote regarding a broadcast in which I mentioned a Soviet magazine interview of him. A Columbia sociologist inquired regarding a broadcast I had done on differential social mobility. He had informed the internationally-renowned Prof. Paul Lazarsfeld, who wanted to include some of the findings in a paper he, along with Jean Piaget, also a top world name in the field, and others, were preparing for UNESCO. A listener at Monmouth College, N.J., sent pages on the USSR from a 6th-grade textbook, asking my comments and for a list of materials for a social studies unit on the Soviet Union at that level. Another Jersey teacher had asked about his chances of teaching in the USSR.

Another letter from a listener corrected an oversight in one of my broadcasts regarding the length of the workweek. A third informed me of articles in Le Monde and France-Observateur contending that the average Soviet citizen was probably the world's most cultured. And there were the forever questions: "is the USSR progressing to a true socialism?", "will it be a democracy by 1980?", and "are there slave labor camps in the USSR?"

As on each previous occasion when I had been dropped, listeners demanded my reinstatement. Many sent me copies of their letters. One wrote in a manner that anticipated precisely the mail to Berkeley's KPFA when it fired me a quarter-century later: "If our station means what it says about avoiding the broad-based middle to bring in all of the unheard voices, where else is there a William Mandel, bringing an immensely scholarly, first-hand, objective yet friendly view of contemporary Soviet life?" He was a schoolteacher. With the copy, he sent me a covering note: "If it was BAI's choice [my not being on the air: no announcement had been made -- I just disappeared], I would not renew my eight-year-old subscription, for you represent that rare combination of vast first-hand knowledge and different viewpoint which the station must treasure [his emphasis] to preserve its function. And I told them that in my letter."

WBAI put me back on the air. When it dropped me yet again in 1974, one of the letters it received contributed a new perspective: "Having just returned from a year's work and study in Hannover, Germany, has strengthened my appreciation of WBAI. Dropping William Mandel would be disastrous. There is nobody in America or Europe who reports in such depth and with the integrity that can only come of intelligent and dedicated research. And his contribution has not been small -- the extremes of right and left political thinking that are otherwise foisted upon us leave no room for the hope of peace in a better world. Please keep Mandel on the air!"

The earlier teacher's letter about the sixth-grade textbook was similar to one a couple of years earlier from a teacher in Oakland. Such things led to a totally new phenomenon: the publication of radio broadcasts of mine as articles in scholarly publications. I know of no previous case of that happening in the history of radio. In 1965 the academicSlavic Review ran my analysis of an outrageously ignorant article about the treatment of American history in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The editor ran a comment specifically recommending my piece to the readers, and described it, rightly, as "acerbic." The annotators had made asses of themselves by relying on translators who knew neither Marxist terminology, Soviet alphabet soup, or U.S. labor history. One of them was a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian at U.C. Berkeley deservedly famous for his fine books on this country's treatment of Blacks. That is why I save him the embarrassment of mentioning his name. I had done my critique as a broadcast, and U.C. Prof. Reginald Zelnik, a Russian-history specialist with whom I was close, had suggested that I submit it to the journal.

My authority as translator was unassailable. In 1970 the president-elect of the American Translators Association nominated me for an international translation prize: "I must leave to you [the committee] the heavy task of resolving the (for me) unresolvable question of whether and how so broad and well-rounded a man shall be squeezed into the narrow category of 'literary translator' or scientific translator,' when he obviously (and necessarily) is both." My immediate boss, who dealt with numerous translators, wrote in support: "Mr. Mandel has no equal in the quality of his work. It should be added that he has performed an enormous service to scholarship and international communication in his translation of important Soviet social science and literary material into English. He has been uniquely faithful in his rendering of the Russian and in his constant effort to make his translations understandable to both specialists and non-specialists."

Translating poetry is murder. Translating single lines or stanzas quoted out of context in a critic's article, with the title of the particular poem not given, requires research equal to that needed for a term paper unless one has a fair knowledge of the body of that poet's work in one's head. I usually had enough at least to know where to start looking for the original. I had had to go through that process for poets as difficult in their imagery and sheer invention of language as Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, Voznesensky, Yesenin, and Yevtushenko. A major university in Germany once offered me a Ph.D. if I would simply write them a thesis on translation. I didn't want to bother. Yes, I worked conscientiously, but I never got over the sense of insult that the blacklist forced me to make a living not in my own field but in rendering other people's work from one language to another.

In 1967 California Social Science Review, issued at Stanford, published my broadcasts analyzing the horribly biased textbook treatment of the USSR in high-school textbooks used in the state. They had been provided to me by a teacher, Gene Bergman, who at present writing heads the Board of Realtors in Berkeley. He recently said to me: "We even have a Communist!" She makes no secret of it. Only in Berkeley.

In 1968, Issues, organ of the American Council for Judaism, published my broadcast, "Soviet Jewry Today." In 1975 I tried to convince the publishers of Russia Re-examined, my most successful book, that I should do another revised edition. One of the partners now protested that my attitude was uncritical. I wrote four single-spaced pages listing quotes to the contrary from the earlier edition, and commented: "I was absolutely correct in my sentence: 'It is quite conceivable that United States farm produce will find a permanent and large market in the USSR.' Another: 'Villages still look shockingly poor to Americans.' Still true. Further: 'Russia is fifty years behind us' in rural roads. Still true."

Those were the years when a sing-Johnny-one-note named Solzhenitsyn was trumpeted to the American people, and those of the entire NATO world, as at least the successor to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The unending publicity given him by every U.S. government agency here and abroad, plus the mass media, led by the Times and the N.Y. Review, earned him $6,000,000 in royalties. His was the official Western Truth about the USSR. The bubble did not burst until he was invited to address Congress (see what a cultured country we are? we invite a writer to speak to our law-makers!) and lectured them upon the fallacy of democracy and how a theocracy would be better. In the early post-Communist period, when anything approved by the U.S. was taken by the all-too-gullible Russians as the word of God, Solzhenitsyn's return to his native land was publicized there like the Second Coming. But he was off their front pages long before his intentionally slow journey by rail westward from Vladivostok reached Moscow. Not even Yeltsin wanted a Russia ruled by the Orthodox Church, and the public heard nothing from the returning exile that addressed their bitter practical problems except that corruption and crime were bad.

Listener letters dealt with the same issue, but in concrete form. One wrote, in 1970: "I am trying to put together a research course in the study of art and art education and how they relate to political and social issues." I sent a full-page single-spaced response including a bibliography of eight readings, and recommended that he consult a scholar at New York University. My letter sheds further light on how I looked at things Soviet:

"I don't think it is good for art or for anything else for the exhibition of non-representational art to be suppressed. I don't think any art is purely utilitarian. I think it is one of the things in human life that is a value in itself. Artists are not remembered for what any ruling class or party thought of them, but for whether they are good artists....I don't think Soviet artists are helping to bring about social change even within the objectives and program of the Communist Party. Look at contemporary Soviet posters. Truly incredibly dull. Then look at the wonderful things done in that regard in the early years of the revolution, until the Political Bureau set itself up as art critics....I am certainly not putting down what is done in the USSR to give the mass of the people a desire to look at art."

Listeners in the arts who had clearly been pro-Soviet shared my view. One in Beverly Hills wrote: "If there is no stuff of relevance or excitement or stimulating coming from Soviet film makers, how come? How the hell come? How the god-damn Jesus Christ mother-fucking hell come? Etc."

My listeners covered the spectrum of political views. A man with a German name wrote: "We simply believe that all evidence shows that the Russian people are a simple-minded and cowardly lot. The rest of the Soviet nationalities have been carrying the dead weight of the Russian garbage for 53 years. Many people are already convinced that stupidity is now genetically fixed in the Russians and Russian refusal to react to renewed [American] bombing and invasion of North Vietnam is making us feel that way too about their obvious cravenness."

A listener to a Seattle listener-sponsored station carrying me wrote it that he would subscribe if they took me off the air. The manager sent me a copy of his stinging response: "I gather that you listen to KRAB frequently. For this privilege you pay nothing and in fact sponge off the community whose financial support makes KRAB possible. We assume that the people who support us financially do so because they value freedom in broadcasting. They listen to the programs they like, not the ones they dislike. KRAB advocates free access to the media. If we did take programs off the air because certain listeners dislike them, we wouldn't have anything left to broadcast. Fortunately for KRAB, there are people in this community who recognize the value of freedom in broadcasting and are willing to support a station that practices it."

Nor had the Establishment ceased trying to use my broadcasts as an excuse for silencing Pacifica. In April 1970, Barron's Weekly editorialized against renewal of our license: "Herman H. Kahn of New York expressed concern about a WBAI broadcast of a news report from Moscow consisting of verbatim quotations of Pravda and Izvestia concerning the assassination of Dr. King." Kahn was a grey eminence of the cold war. But a white downtown church in Berkeley reprinted that broadcast of mine for its parishioners.

My past was always with me. Senator Javits of New York forwarded to the Federal Communications Commission a Jerseyan's complaint about WBAI, quoting Barron's: "During the 1963 [Senate Internal Security Subcommittee] hearings, William Mandel was identified as a frequent writer for the Communist Daily Worker....[Untrue even when I was a Communist, and totally false since, which embraced all my years on KPFA. I had indeed written a couple of letters to the editor.]....At the time Pacifica emphasized that he was a regular broadcaster but not a commentator. Today, it lists him as a regular commentator and 'authority on the USSR'."

Listeners were not troubled. If there were such a thing as a "median" attitude in the mail, it came through best in the following letter: "Your basic humaness [the writer's spelling] is almost palpable. I hope you are teaching young people. It would be very good in many ways."

Not a chance.

In the summer of 1970, Tanya had accompanied me on her second trip to the USSR. Her on-air report brought a letter to us from a friend who remembered Elsa Knight Thompson's interview of her after her first visit th