The year I turned seventy was the first of four, 1987-1990, that equalled or surpassed any that had gone before in terms of sheer demand upon my energy.

By 1986 there had been forty years of a consistent, relentless bipartisan U.S. policy honestly and accurately described by one of its founders, President Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as "going to the brink of war" to destroy the Soviet Union. This made possible essentially limitless military budgets to drive the USSR out of business via bankruptcy due to efforts to match us in armament.

From 1982 on, a citizen diplomacy movement gave hope that a groundswell of peace sentiment in the U.S. might have some effect. It was based essentially on an equal mistrust of our government and that of the USSR. A sense of urgency propelled it, brought on by the Reagan budgets and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then, in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, who understood that Americans would only change their attitude toward the arms race if Moscow made the first real moves, came to power.

He initiated steps to eliminate the restrictions on freedom that, aided by lies and exaggerations on the part of the CIA and the media, had alienated people in the West. Gorbachev's measures gave me hope that the socialism I then thought could provide a civilized life would finally be allowed civil liberties and the rule of law. Consequently, both in pursuit of peace and to observe the efforts toward democratic socialism, I participated in the American-Soviet Peace Walks organized chiefly by Allan Affeldt, a man in his 20s from Southern California. They went from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987, Odessa on the Black Sea to Kyiv in the Ukraine in 1988, from the western border with Czechoslovakia to Kyiv in 1989, and in 1990 across Kazakhstan in Central Asia to the nuclear test site.

In retrospect it is fascinating that I lost patience with stagnation in the USSR at exactly the same time as its then leaders, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party. Gorbachev was elected General Secretary on March 11, 1985, upon the death of his predecessor. His first important act gave no inkling of the line he would pursue, rather the opposite. He organized a stupendous commemoration in May of the 40th anniversary of victory over Germany in World War II. There was no way of knowing at the time that this was his way of giving the war-veteran generation the equivalent of a gold watch and sending it into retirement.

In connection with that anniversary, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship flew me to New York City to speak at its commemorative meeting. I had withdrawn from its list of national sponsors nearly thirty years earlier because of its refusal to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This invitation indicated that the organization's top figures had deduced, or someone had told them, that times were changing in the USSR. When I learned that the other principal speaker was to be the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations, I decided that it was time to lay out some home truths. To me, he, not the couple of hundred elders who would attend, was the important audience.

First I sought to get across to the ambassador, whom I had never met or communicated with, that I approached his country with the very greatest sympathy. I detailed the forty-year effort by all in that room, including myself, to combat the Cold War, a phenomenon demonstrated earlier in this book to have been launched by the United States. I described the imprisonment of the postwar head of the American-Soviet Friendship Council, Rev. Richard Morford, and my own blacklisting.

I then quoted an article on the subject of genocide that had appeared only two weeks earlier in Pravda, the Communist Party's newspaper, in which the Armenians were described as victims of that crime, but not the Jews. At which point I exploded, but in measured words and voice: "(This) justifies the gravest of doubts on the part of a Jewish person. It re-opens old wounds, awakens old memories. Why did it take seven years after Stalin's death for the very first beginnings at restoration of Yiddish-language culture, destroyed by him in 1947, to appear? Why has the fact of that destruction never been made known to the Soviet people as a whole?"

I asked why "I still encounter a collective-farm chairman repeating to me the...lie that Ford and Rockefeller are Jews" while nothing was published in the Soviet Union to combat that lie? "Why is it not possible today to take a course to learn the Yiddish language anywhere in the USSR...? Why is there no course in Jewish history anywhere in the USSR...? Why is there not...a periodical in the Russian language devoted to Jewish interests as there was before World War II?"

At this point the chair interrupted and asked me to stop speaking. I said that if I were permitted to conclude the speech it would not go outside that hall, but if silenced I would make it public. This was the first time in my life that I had been prevented from finishing a speech. Not even McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee had been able to do this, because they considered the impact upon the viewing audience and the media. But the same mentality was at work. The chair insisted I stop. I gave the speech to WBAI, Pacifica's station in New York, and published it in the monthly magazine of KPFA. New York friends of forty-five years' standing, the Communist school teacher and husband with whom we had organized a rent strike in our apartment house in the mid-'40s, broke relations with us over that speech. But when the leader of the American Communist Party called Cleveland police to bar dissenters from its national convention in 1990, they quit the Party, re-thought many things, and we are friends again.

My speech could hardly affect the situation in the USSR. Whether in taking on McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in their own hearing rooms, or opposing Khrushchev personally on the bomb-testing issue, or in wiring President Kennedy and phoning men with access to him during the Cuba Missile Crisis, I took it for granted that the individual had the right to try to affect events on national and global levels. Laura X, the feminist friend whose sharp questions and criticisms of the manuscript of my Soviet Women are largely responsible for what I believe to be its lasting value, was constantly urging me to "go to the Soviet Union and fix it."

I did not share her illusions that that was within my power. True, the efforts of Americans from evangelists to Harvard professors to do just that in the '90s gave me a better understanding of the messianic streak, and the arrogance, in our national character. But I thought that every little bit helps. So I looked for the right opportunity to place that 1985 speech in the hands of Soviet people. It did not come until three years later.

I did not take copies along when Tanya and I left to spend the summer of 1986 in Moscow. That was to be my longest period of residence in the USSR since 1932, and I wanted to give the KGB no excuse to cut the stay short, even though there had never been any indication of rummaging through my belongings or other interference during my ten previous visits.

The highlight of that visit came when a Moscow visionary, Joseph Goldin, put me in touch with one of the earliest grassroots movements to spring up under Gorbachev. These were young people, chiefly in their late 20s, usually married and most of them with one child, who had banded together to build what they called Youth Housing Complexes (MZhK). They were tired of waiting a dozen years or more until an apartment was available, and crowding in with parents. A three-generation urban family of four people generally lived in two rooms plus kitchen and bath.

Under the Soviet system, every large enterprise, institution, or office was responsible for housing its employees, and was issued budgetary appropriations for this. But as the agency’s purpose–manufacture, communications, education, or whatever, naturally got first priority, housing construction almost invariably lagged behind schedule, sometimes by years. These young people had gone to their employers and said that, unless they wanted to lose valued employees, they should turn the housing money over to this new organization, which would do the building itself. Its members would contribute sweat equity. Very often they got the money.

If the object were purely housing, I would not have developed the attachment to this movement that caused me to meet with them weekly for three months. But it had a broader vision. They did not like apartment-house living in its usual form, in which one rarely gets to know even neighbors on the same landing. They wanted the new buildings to be youth communities, with cooperatively-operated childcare centers in which they could try innovative approaches instead of the highly-structured schedules of the government's centers. They envisaged, down the line, production activities as well.

Their meetings of twenty to sixty people were as democratic as anything I have participated in, in over half a century of civic activism. Clearly the forms of democracy were present in Soviet life. But in the past they had been used to cloak passage of what the Party wanted. At the end of our stay, the entire leadership of this movement presented me with copies of their major documents, inscribed: "To William Mandel, lifelong participant in all progressive movements."

In 1987 I was back in the USSR again, taking part in the American-Soviet Leningrad-Moscow Peace Walk. I saw my purpose as helping the two hundred American walkers to see the realities of rural and small-city life along our camping route from the perspective of Russian and Soviet history rather than that of Americans. They certainly knew equivalent American realities. Consider some of the places from which they came: Black Mt., NC; Coralville, IA.; Lincolnville, ME.; El Prado, NM;, as well as every major city.

I quickly came to admire these people–an absolute cross-section of middle America. There was a Mennonite hog farmer who wore clean Sunday overalls throughout, a software engineer of Palestinian parentage, students at all levels from graduate to pre-schoolers with their parents, business owners, a Chicano ex-farmworker attorney with his wife and three young children, a Taos Indian, a retired colonel, a former judge, a Hollywood personality who was a household name, a waitress, a Diesel mechanic, housewives, gays and lesbians. This was the most varied group of my fellow countrymen and women I had ever lived with.

The less sophisticated their place of origin, occupation, or education, the more I thought them heroic. The word is carefully chosen. To me, heroism is doing something one believes to be dangerous, whether or not it is. President Reagan's evil-empire-police-state image of the Soviet Union was strong when people made their decision to go. More than one person had been told by family or friends that if they entered Russia, they would never be allowed to leave again. I take satisfaction in the fact that they came to accept and value me. Trepidation in general was present, and uneasiness high.

The walk organizers had invited State Department and FBI representatives to address the orientation encampment before we left the US. Such speakers hardly reduced the tension. Spokepersons for peace organizations and citizen diplomacy were also invited. I secured an invitation to retired Air Force Major General Jack Kidd, a remarkable man of my age, movie star handsome, who had during his career performed acts of high military courage. We had become friends at a bilateral citizen diplomacy conference in Moscow earlier in the year. There he had presented an extraordinarily well-thought-out mutual disarmament proposal, the savings from which, if the plan were adopted, would be used to end hunger and save the environment. The invited Soviet Embassy representative could not attend, because our Quaker camp near Leesburg, Va., was in an area the State Department had proclaimed off limits to the Soviets.

From the first welcoming talk by a female city official at the Leningrad airport to the highly emotional farewells as we boarded our plane in Moscow to leave three weeks later, the walk was a crescendo of stereotype smashing on both sides. Religious Russians would bring large icons from their homes to bless us with as we walked by, in an ancient tradition. Toil-worn, bemedalled Russian veterans (peasant and worker veterans wear their decorations at all times) would spot the overseas caps of the American veterans (or vice versa), and the one-time allies would invariably throw their arms around each other and weep. As the enormity of Soviet losses in World War II sunk in at the mass grave of 900,000 who died in the siege of Leningrad, two American veterans fell to their knees in prayer. The Russians were tremendously affected by the men at prayer, and pictures of the Americans were on the front pages of Soviet national papers as well as on TV. Some people are natural bonders. Pat Herson of Van Nuys, California, a retired music teacher, wore a sweatshirt inscribed "Babushka (Grandma) Pat" in Russian. She didn't know a word of the language, but always approached Russian women in the crowds of the curious who assembled around us when we stopped. Via sign language, she knew in minutes whether they had grandchildren, how many and of what sex, whether their children were married, whether their husbands were alive (rarely, in the case of Russians of the World War II generation). They would bundle her off to their cottages, stuff her with food, and load her with flowers from their yards.

Dick Sherwood, from Utah, had been the hot-shot Air Force pilot and photographer on the plane accompanying the bomber that nuked Nagasaki in 1945. He has never recovered emotionally from what he saw. He spent the entire walk recruiting Russian war veteran couples and harassing Soviet officials for a residential exchange, in which each would live for some months in the home of the other. By the next February, permission had come through.

Acts of spontaneous goodwill were innumerable. Edward and Adrien Helm are both lawyers and church activists. They came with their three children, of whom the two younger had to be carried at frequent intervals. One or another of them was on Ed's back all the way. In Novgorod, a woman saw this, ran off to her apartment, came back with her baby carriage, and insisted that the Helms take it. Broadcaster Jim Bottini treasures a worn monkey doll given him by a Russian child just old enough to understand the meaning of the word, "mir" (peace). An Englishman resident in the U.S. wore pictures of his three children on his back. Two young Russian women realized they must be his and went home for gifts. The entire next day they waited in the town square till we walked by once again. They then indicated by sign language who the gifts were for.

Two young Russian women, who proved to be electronic engineers, fell in step with me on our entry into Novgorod. They had a number of lacquered painted wooden spoons, which were not cheap even in 1987 prices. When they gave me a very small one, I said unthinkingly, "That's just the right size for my greatgranddaughter," whereupon they asked how many children I have, and gave me three more.

Very few people talked politics with their gifts. One young man gave one of our women a large pin depicting Stalin, his hero. A man had read an interview with me in a local newspaper, tramped ten miles to catch up with us in the next town, and gave me a serious book critical of morality in the West, The Distraught Society, in Russian. He was a youthful physician, and said it would teach me more about my country than I knew. We had quite a discussion. The book had copious quotations from Erich Fromm, Toffler, Norbert Wiener, Charles Reich, Betty Friedan, pollster Yankelovich, Vance Packard, David Reisman, Thornton Wilder, Marcuse, Skinner, ecologist Meadows, Freud and others.

What I sought to get the American walkers to think about was this: the United States has had no war on our own soil for a century and a quarter, but the villages and towns along the walk had all been occupied in the 1940s by the Nazis, who had gotten to within binocular range of Moscow. Leningrad was starved and bombed in a nine-hundred-day siege.

One youthful American restaurant owner, son of a state legislator, could not get away from Gulag, Stalin's concentration camps, in discussing the Soviet Union. But the founder and director of a shelter for homeless men in Los Angeles moved from her first impression– that the whole country looked like America in the '50s– to more thoughtful conclusions after her failure to encounter any beggars or see homeless people.

The Americans were struck by the Soviets' warmth and personal honesty. We carried what was for them fabulous wealth in cameras and state-of-the-art camping and backpacking equipment, and were often very careless in leaving it around. Yet there was only one reported case of theft on the entire journey and the police somehow recovered the items. The post-Soviet elimination of economic security has brought a weakening of the morality we encountered.

The Soviets were struck by our mutual helpfulness. They stood amazed as we spontaneously formed chains to get our camping gear on and off the large trailer-trucks provided by the Soviet Peace Committee, which transported whatever we did not choose to carry. The worst of the walk was the weather: endless rain, cold, mud. But the wettest night of all brought a bonding of the two groups as Soviets and Americans helped each other erect tents and carry belongings.

A Russian dissident attached himself to the walk. He carried documents showing he had been in a Gulag camp, and insisted he had been tortured. I talked to him at length, and was convinced he was telling the truth. The Soviet walk leadership banned him. I approached Affeldt, our 29-year-old leader. I urged him to insist to our hosts that the dissident be allowed to be with us, and that for them to refuse would be to reinforce the stereotype of the USSR as the evil empire America must arm against. They caved in.

At general meetings, I was sharply critical of both delegations for the gross underrepresentation of non-whites in our case, and non-Russians in their's. Among two hundred Americans there were only thirteen people of color, of whom only two were Black. Fifty non-whites, including twenty African-Americans, would have been an accurate reflection of our population in proportion to the size of our group. Among the ninety Soviets there was a lopsidedly high presence of Jews in addition to Russians. Total representation from the fourteen non-Russian republics did not nearly match their share in the USSR population. But the Soviet representation of minorities was proportionately far better than ours.

Novgorod, one of the two good-sized cities on our route, welcomed us with open arms. Literally a hundred thousand people, nearly half the population, poured into the streets, many joining us well before we came into sight of buildings.

A Russian walker guided me to a small street-corner rally discussing the country's situation. The chair said to the audience: "Right now, you and I face one major objective: that socialism continue to exist." That remark in 1987 is the earliest indication known to me that any Soviet supporter of the existing system realized that its very survival was in question. Excerpts from my tape of that rally comprise a selection in the 1991 edition of a Houghton-Mifflin reader for Western Civilization courses, Sources of the Western Tradition. The editors understood better than I yet did that belief in freedom of discussion demarked the Western tradition from all others.

In Novgorod, local media had informed the people that we were coming. In Kalinin, another large city, the population was caught by surprise, and lined the route in thin numbers. We were guided into a stadium of about ten thousand capacity, half of it blocked off and empty. At each city or town on route –this was the 14th– we had held a rally with Soviet and American walkers speaking. I had refrained from doing so, but felt that the apparatchiks here had to be pushed into an awareness of Gorbachev's "perestroika" policy, and the people needed encouragement to take part. I told Affeldt that I wished to speak.

My tape records what follows: "I will speak in Russian" (applause) "and translate into English. I remember when even in Moscow one saw people in birch-bark sandals, rag leggings, and homespun. I remember my fellow students at Moscow University going out to teach the workers on the pre-war industrialization projects to read and write. During World War II, I did my best, as Russian Expert for UPI, to make sure that the Second Front–Eisenhower's landing in France–took place as early as possible." Applause. "I remember how after the war you rebuilt without any help whatever from outside. And I want to say that my heart ached in the years of stagnation you underwent recently. That is why I personally deeply welcome the changes your country is now undergoing. For us participants in this walk, the most important thing until now has been the participation of the Russian people in our walk. In other places, there would be simply a few speeches in the central square. But the whole population turned out. In Novgorod over 100,000 people. Perhaps 20,000 in Vyshnii Volochek, maybe 10,000 in Torzhok."

Everyone present knew that the latter two were much smaller than Kalinin, where the apparatchiks had limited attendance to five thousand by using a stadium rather than a square and sealing half of it off. "In consequence all of us Americans are convinced that no one among you wants war." Long applause. "The problem now is what you and we can both do from this point on. For us the job is to spread the word, to interpret what we experienced, when we get back home....What is it that you can do further so that there will be peace? In our country there are two major excuses that are used against you. One is your alleged aggression. That is the realm of foreign policy. Your foreign minister deals with that. The second argument used against you is that your country supposedly has no democracy. It is precisely for this reason that the matter of democratization in your country, about which Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev spoke so eloquently recently, is a matter not only of your internal affairs but has to do with the future of the world. The anti-Sovieteers in our country do their work very subtly. There are not many direct lies about you. But they write about every instance of burocracy. This is why I –I as a member of the first generation of American friends of the Soviet Union –want to say that the sooner you put an end to money-grubbing, burocracy, nepotism, bribery, the more you will do for the cause of peace."

The following year I felt the time was ripe to present the Jewish issue to the Soviet walkers. In 1988 Affeldt led us on a walk from the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa hundreds of miles north to its capital, Kyiv. I took along a couple of hundred xeroxes of that 1985 speech, "Re-opening Jewish Wounds." While Jewish organizations in the United States made very sure that the issue of anti-Semitism was prominent in the American mind, the Ukraine had impinged itself upon us via an event that crossed all ethnic or other lines: the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986.

One evening we erected our pup tents on the grounds of a school in the home village of the Ukrainian national hero, Taras Shevchenko, a 19th-century serf-born poet and painter. As we approached the village, virtually every family living along the road had a table set up to feed us garden-grown fruit, grapes, raw vegetables, home-baked goodies. There was no question of paying. They handed out volumes of Shevchenko's poetry, in Ukrainian. This was obviously spontaneous, because the editions differed in date and elaborateness from giver to giver. In Soviet times, literature regarded as classical was heavily subsidized. These mementos were something people could afford to give, although the peoples of the former Soviet Union simply do not measure hospitality. It is absolute, total.

After dinner that night, a campfire was built and a discussion conducted by the head of the Ukrainian Peace Committee. His purpose was to inform us about the Ukraine. I asked in what languages school was taught. He said Ukrainian, Russian, German, Hungarian, for those minorities. I asked about Yiddish. He replied that Jews could learn Yiddish in their synagogues.

Obviously his answer was a shot in the dark, because the language of the synagogue is Hebrew. It has less relationship to the folk language, Yiddish, than Latin has even to such Latin-derived languages of Catholic countries as Italian, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Synagogues, whether in the United States, Israel, or anywhere else, do not teach Yiddish, except for congregations of the Hassidic sect. Hebrew is related to Arabic, while Yiddish grew out of medieval German.

Moreover, the speaker was from Kyiv, with a large Jewish population active in all spheres of life. Therefore, he had to know that Soviet Jews were secular. American rabbis learned that to their surprise when they tried to get the hundred thousand recent immigrants from the former USSR to attend synagogue.

I was furious at the man and announced that I would conduct a discussion group on the status of Jews in the Soviet Union. About forty people came, about evenly Soviet and American. Perhaps half a dozen were Jews. A Russian woman from Siberia said that in her area Russians and indigenous people had simply, on their own, organized classes to teach the local language, Altai. Why didn't the Jews do likewise? At least half a dozen other Soviet walkers endorsed that approach. A Ukrainian young man from Lviv, which my parents' generation knew as Lemberg, offered to help such an endeavor in his city. I gave him the addresses of three prominent Jewish intellectuals I knew in Lviv. A year later he sent me a news clipping announcing the establishment of a Jewish cultural society there.

In Kyiv we visited Babi Yar, a ravine where the Nazis slaughtered a hundred thousand human beings, mostly Jews, and then filled it in. When we Jews among the walkers–I had my arms around a Soviet woman three of whose immediate family lay somewhere beneath us–broke into uncontrollable weeping, the Ukrainian walkers sobbed from the bottom of their guts. It was then that I distributed my article, "Re-opening Jewish Wounds."

In 1989 I attended a Yiddish-language theater in Kyiv that had been founded during the intervening year, as had Jewish cultural societies in twenty-five cities in what was still the USSR. The founding convention that year of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, RUKH, passed a resolution attacking anti-Semitism. It spoke specifically of "fascist genocide" against the Jews during World War II. It appealed to "all socially-conscious citizens of the Ukraine, members of all nations and peoples living on its territory, to raise their voices against any forms of anti-Semitism whatever, to rise in defense of their own dignity and that of the Jewish people, its culture, learning, religion, right to representation in all elected bodies, and its inalienable right to speak, create, and teach its children in either the Yiddish or Hebrew languages."

I had reason to accept the sincerity of that statement that reached beyond the behavior of the Soviet walk participants at Babi Yar and at my spontaneous seminar. On the 1989 Walk, before reaching Kyiv, we passed through the typical county seat of Medzhibozh, burial site of Bal Shem-Tov, founder of the Jewish sect of Hassidism. Since the Holocaust forty-five years earlier, almost no Jews lived there. Yet the Ukrainian country people living near the overgrown cemetery who came to watch us as we visited it showed very respectful attitudes toward Jews as a people who had long been part of their history.

During the 1988 Walk, two extremely energetic, youthful female reporters for Ukrainian newspapers attached themselves to me. They questioned me so long and vigorously for my opinions on anything and everything, American and Soviet, that I thought perhaps they were KGB. I learned at least as much from them as they did from me, if only from the psychology revealed by the way they put questions and their reactions to what I said.

They showed up again on the 1989 Walk. It became clear that, as on all my previous visits to the USSR, people were drawn to me not only because I could express myself freely in Russian –not terribly uncommon–but because I understood Soviet life and its way of thought. My Communist background and my desire to help their country reject whatever prevented that dream of a good society from coming true–I then still thought it could come true–put us on the same track.

The two reporters repeatedly published extensive interviews with me in newspapers of large circulation among young people in the Ukraine, to the point at which my name in a headline alone served as identification. I said things that were extremely radical in the context of that day, when the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. For example, that if artificial controlled prices were not replaced by market prices, I said, they would never know what something was really worth and would be unable to solve their economic problems. These ideas were published. I failed to reckon with the fact that the predominance of monopolies in Soviet fuel production, manufacturing, distribution and transport would enable them to drive prices skyward, even after privatization, with no regard for the state of demand. (I still believe an alternative could have been found to the subsequent crazy printing-press approach to the ruble that drove prices up thousands of times. It probably would have required retaining some dictatorial elements in government until a market-based economy had replaced central planning and monopolies had been broken up. Clearly, the Chinese leadership proved wiser than the Russians in this regard.)

In 1988 we walkers had visited a village newly built by the government for evacuees from the vicinity of Chernobyl, sixty miles north of Kiev. One of these reporters took me into homes. I was shocked to find peasant couples, although living in comfortable surroundings and receiving ample financial aid, pining so badly for their native place that they were willing to return. They simply could not grasp the meaning of a danger that could not be seen or felt, by contrast to the battles of World War II and the German occupation of their territory.

In 1989 that same reporter told me she was native to Chernobyl and her parents were buried there –they had died long before the nuclear catastrophe. She arranged for me to visit the plant. As soon as our interview with its executives ended, the top man drove off to Kiev to attend the founding convention of the Ukrainian Greens. I was asked to address it. I presented them a one-world ecology flag brought by an American walker, a Vietnam-War exile living permanently in Canada. It flew the following day at the Greens' first mass rally, attended by fifteen thousand people. I was elsewhere that day: the reporter had arranged for me to visit a county seat directly bordered by the barbed wire marking the evacuated zone. The people of this town were demanding that it, too, be evacuated, for the sake of their children's health. Again, as at the street meeting in Novgorod where I was the only foreigner present when people said they were speaking freely for the first time in their lives, it was my good fortune to be present at the birth of a leap in consciousness.

A committee of six, including four mothers, sat at a table with the local heads of government and Communist Party, plus a high official sent from Kyiv on this matter. The citizens berated the officials for evacuating their own children while not moving to do so for everyone's, and for arranging food supplies for themselves far superior to those of ordinary citizens. One woman said, "I am defenseless in this society, among people such as these, our Party leaders. Helpless." This was the first time in my visits to the USSR over a span of then 59 years that I heard ordinary citizens criticizing Party officials to their faces. The people were handing down their verdict, not only with respect to the Party. "It looks as though it's our system we have to get angry about."

Yet this event was openness to a degree I cannot conceive of in the United States: officials permitting a total outsider to be present at an informal meeting when they knew they were susceptible to being damned to their faces both for their official and personal conduct.

In 1990, when American entrepreneurs engaged me as consultant to help develop business in the USSR, I was able to get the national leadership of the Youth Housing Complexes to invite me and another person to tour the country under its auspices. We slept not in hotels but in people's apartments–these new developments averaged one more room per apartment than government housing. It was always possible to find couples without parents who could spare a room for one of us for a few days.

I arranged the itinerary. I made sure we'd get to places that not only offered prospects for our purposes but would enable me to pursue my lifetime agenda of puzzling out where the Soviet Union was going. In 1989 organized labor had emerged as a factor in social change, with stupendous strikes of coal miners in the Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. I included the major coal centers of each of these republics on our route, which took place in the dead of winter.

When I left Moscow on January 26, 1990, I thought I had hit the highest of possible highs. The previous evening, in Moscow's Hall of Columns, where Lenin had lain in state and where, on March 8, 1932, I had heard his widow speak on the occasion of International Women's Day, the Seattle Center for Soviet-American Dialogue had presented me with a sculpted trophy inscribed "bill mandel. For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Soviet-American Relations." When I was introduced, the audience, which included pioneering American businessmen in Moscow and Gorbachev's foreign-affairs spokesman, welcomed me with substantial applause and then gave my brief acceptance speech a standing ovation. I warned against that insane adulation of anything and everything American which continued for another three years until U.S. failure to provide any significant assistance to the Russians, while giving huge sums to Israel, Mexico, Korea, Brazil, and other countries, caused a backlash of disillusionment.

Three days later, I was even higher, both emotionally and physically. Almaty, then still the capital of Kazakhstan, is like Denver, but even more spectacular. Mountains tower twelve thousand feet above it. My local hosts had hired a huge helicopter with a three-man crew to show me the tourist possibilities in the forty-mile width of the range between Almaty and Lake Issyk-kul, which is at the same altitude as Tahoe in California's Sierra Nevada, and several times larger. When the copter put down on its beach–illegally in fact, for the crew had the right to fly there, but not to put me ashore–I was the first American to reach its shores by air. This was within the frontier security zone of the USSR. Except for several writers brought in by the Kyrgyz playwright Ghenghis Aitmatov a couple of years earlier, no one from the U.S. had ever been to the lake at all.

I gazed at the even higher peaks gleaming between the far side of the lake and the Chinese border 30 miles away. And I waded into the gently lapping water in the cold-weather high shoes which my son Dave had carefully waterproofed. Did I dare ever clean them again? "These boots have walked in Issyk-kul..."

On the way back, the copter again climbed vertical walls just a few feet away, hovered over a very wide frozen river two miles in the sky, skimmed glaciers and moraines, and passed above a cosmic-ray research station of impressive size. Has that station survived the post-socialist slashing of all funds for science and culture? I wonder today. Kyrgyzstan, which followed American prescriptions more closely than any other former Soviet republic, is in particularly bad shape.

Below the snow line, we picnicked in a pristine meadow, wildflowers up to our hips. Their scents mixed with that of the conifers climbing the steep slopes on all sides. We lifted off, were deposited at the heliport, and then went by car uphill again to the Olympic-class ice rink, Medeo. Soviet-built, it shares the reputation of world's fastest with that at Davos, Switzerland. On weekdays it is reserved for training, but on weekends –this was a Sunday –it is for public enjoyment.

A short drive above the rink brought us to Chembulak, the only lift-served ski hill around Almaty. It provides a two-mile run, with a pitch adequate for Olympic downhill and slalom, but wide enough for recreational skiing. The head of the tourism co-op, a strikingly handsome half-Kazakh half-Russian psychologist, lent me his boots, skis, and ski overalls. They asked a professional instructor to accompany me.

Later I learned that when they informed him that he was to keep an eye on this then 72-year-old American, he did his best to get out of it: "What are you giving me this grandfather for? He'll get hurt, and I'll be in trouble." Seniors didn't do downhill skiing in the USSR.

The lift chairs were singles, so the video and TV cameramen, who were not skiers, followed the instructor and me. At the top, the instructor simply motioned me to follow him, and I did. When the cameramen got off, we were gone. A myth arose that I was some kind of world-class skier and eventually reached Moscow. It was helped along by the instructor, to whom an elder getting down in one piece was a miracle. In fact, although the snow was excellent, I fell three times. That wouldn't have happened on a similar intermediate-level hill at home. Too much food the previous week, too much unrefusable vodka, too little sleep, no exercise in two weeks, too little time to acclimatize, and ski bindings somewhat to the rear of where they should properly have been, all added up.

We bundled into the car again and drove higher to a cozy camp in several feet of snow, where we ate Kazakh beshbarmak (boiled sheep everything), manty (stuffed dumplings), warmed ourselves at the fireplace, drank of course, and danced.

There was also a night in a marble-lined public bath house built by the former head of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, whom Gorbachev had fired for corruption. Like Roman emperors, Russian tsars, and his Central Asian predecessors such as Tamerlane, this man will be remembered as much for the magnificent structures erected during his reign –this block-square bath, the gorgeous and excellent Museum of Kazakhstan, and the art museum –as for his alleged misdeeds. Kazakhstan has since rehabilitated him.

I also spent one evening with old friends, Tatars, he a social scientist, she an obstetrician-gynecologist. This couple, by then past sixty, represented what I found to be the typical attitude of Soviets of the World War II generation, regardless of nationality or geography. They liked that they could now speak freely, but did not think things were all that bad in the USSR. The husband, who had personally known Kunayev, the ousted Party leader, insisted that he had been pure as the driven snow but had been used and misled by his entourage. I can say only that this couple, whom I have known since we met in Moscow's Red Square twenty years earlier and have visited repeatedly in Almaty, are honest and decent people who built their home with their own hands, have the closest relations with their multi-ethnic neighbors (Slavs, Germans, settled Gypsies) on the block , and got along fine with Tanya and me although they are practicing Moslems and we are atheist Jews.

They were more than just lavishly hospitable in the tradition of the East. They wanted to be reassured, over and over again, that every member of my family, from my then ninety-six-year-old father to my greatgrandaughter, was in good health and otherwise doing well. Was my pillow all right? Was I warm? Eat! Eat! And they reached for whatever was handy to give me as presents.

In Almaty I also visited the Korean mother of a half-Kazakh emigrant then living in San Francisco. This widow, residing in a very comfortable apartment, well-furnished in an old-fashioned way, told me a story to match the worst I’ve heard from Japanese-American friends who had been in our wartime concentration camps. Although Korea was a colony of Japan before World War II, and hated it, Stalin in his paranoia had deported all Soviet Koreans to Central Asia from their homes near the Pacific Coast. Children were forbidden to speak their native language. Yet, despite the terrible hardships of the wartime transfer, once they arrived in Kazakhstan they enjoyed all the educational and other opportunities anyone else did. Her daughter, a graduate of Moscow University, the finest institution in the USSR, later got her Ph.D. in psychology at UC Santa Cruz. Moscow U. had refused to consider her thesis topic: the self-realization of women. I had reinforced her decision to stick to it.

I asked her mother about the ethnic riots in Almaty in 1987, the first anywhere under Gorbachev. She agreed with me that they would not have occurred if he had replaced the ousted Kunayev with another Kazakh, rather than a Russian. After the riots, he replaced the Russian by Nazarbayev, still president of independent Kazakhstan in 1999.

But things had not stood still in Almaty. My hosts in the Youth Living Complex movement had put up one of their own as a candidate in the upcoming elections, and they were campaigning to have the complex recognized as a territorial entity in the city, which would give them some of the powers that incorporation does in the U.S.

From Almaty in Kazakhstan I went north to Novosibirsk, the Chicago of Siberia. Here I discovered Siberian winter, no worse that mild January than Chicago when the wind blows down from Canada. Snow all over. Modern, monotonous buildings. American correspondents raised in cities of private homes never tire of denouncing the appearance of Soviet housing developments. I, who grew up in New York lower-middle-class apartment houses, feel differently. The truly immense courtyards of Soviet apartment developments, frequently containing staffed childcare centers in buildings of their own, were always planted with trees and grass, and provided with play structures for children and benches for adults. Think of what life in American "project" housing would be like if everyone in them had jobs, childcare, and a gathering place.The land planning of Soviet housing was a quantum leap ahead of the use of space in New York or San Francisco, where real estate values cause apartment buildings to be virtually glued to each other and built right up to the sidewalk easement.

The new subway in Novosibirsk was totally walled in against the elements as it crosses its bridge over an immense river. A young man I met wanted Siberia to be an independent republic. Puzzled, I asked, "You're Russians, just like the people west of the Urals, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"So why a separate republic?"

"We don't want to be a colony any more."

I heard that "colony" phrase all over the USSR. Economically it is nonsense. Russia subsidized the development of every other republic, as the Ukrainians and Balts learned in 1993 when, after independence, they had to pay world market prices to Russia for oil and gas, and found they just didn't have the money. Russia also subsidized the development of Siberia. But "colony" was the word everyone outside Moscow employed to describe their subordination to a supercentralized state in which everything of importance was decided in the capital, including the disposition of virtually all products of industry and agriculture.

Later on this trip, an intellectual whom the miners of Kuzbass in western Siberia accepted as advisor told me that after the various regions of the country –Russian as well as ethnic –have gained economic independence from the dictates of Moscow, they would doubtless have to re-unite the economy on a market basis. At present writing, U.S. policy opposes that with utmost vigor.

I did not encounter support, either in Kuzbass to the west of Novosibirsk or Vladivostok on the east, for the Siberian republic idea. But in the Pacific seaport of Nakhodka there was enthusiasm for making that city a duty-free zone where hard currency would govern and Pacific Rim relationships would prevail over ties with the Russian interior. It later won that status, but learned the hard economic lesson that its long-standing integration with the rest of Russia was more important than its foreign contacts.

A few hundred miles south of Novosibirsk is a spectacular region called Gorny (Mountainous) Altai, where the first joint American and Soviet whitewater rafting had been done a year earlier. We traveled there by bus. Maintenance was rough and ready. En route, the bus driver found something wrong with the brake line. He crawled beneath the vehicle in his suit jacket to fix it. Done, passengers helped him brush off the snow, he straightened his tie and hair, and off we went.

Our local hosts were late meeting us at Biisk, a county seat. We killed time by eating at a co-op cafe adjacent to the bus stop. Greasy spoons, greasy food, many Asian faces –the local Altai people. Food was plentiful in 1990, including meat. Prices were obviously within the range of plain working people, by the dress and manner of the customers. Nor were there any beggars, except at the very few churches, where that is traditional in Russian Orthodoxy.

When our hosts arrived, they drove us to the local capital through lovely rolling farm country. This is where then President Gorbachev's wife was born. In one village a farm house had a statue behind it. It was of the fine writer, actor, and film director, Shukshin, who died young in the 1970s. He had promised his mother that he would build her a house with the first money he earned from writing, and this was it. Writers in the USSR were paid well.

The Altai illustrated well my objection to the term "colonial" as description of Soviet ethnic areas. Along the road there were very small single-room log cabins reminiscent of housing in California's Indian country east of the Sierra at least as late as the 1970s. I assumed that was where the Altai lived, but my hosts said the residents of those cabins were Russian settlers. That fact was borne out by the Slavic faces of people out walking. In our hotel, Altai went in and out as guests, and were served by Russian personnel as a matter of course.

Along a river road, the driver stopped at a spring so we could have a drink of fresh water. Trees on both sides of it were hung with hundreds of ribbons. There was a handsome road house a few feet away. The Altai come to that spring to be married and to party in the road-house. They are animists, and the ribbons are prayers.

Back to Novosibirsk on a wild drive. It was a lowering gray day, with signs of a Siberian blizzard in the offing. The road, two-lane of course, was intermittently crusted with an inch or two of hard snow. We were in a Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicle that had been bought across the border in Mongolia, probably illegally in that pre-capitalist time. My hosts bragged about the driver. He did his best to prove they were right. The speedometer crept up to 140 km.–eighty-four miles per hour –and he kept it there as far as possible. My seat-belt was fastened–Russians never use their's–but in an accident at that speed it wouldn't have helped much. The industrial city of Barnaul, two hundred miles north, was our first stop. On that stretch we passed one trailer rig and one car that had gone off the road. Both were right side up, and their occupants were standing alongside.

If Biisk had fed us at a greasy spoon, and Gorno-Altaisk with Altai cuisine, Barnaul offered a disco co-op of good Russian food, with American and European dance videos blaring. My hosts made bitter remarks as we drove past the immense and modern KGB building.

From Novosibirsk I flew southwest to a place of special meaning to me, the Kuzbass coal country, about the size of Wisconsin, where Dad had worked in 1925-26 with other American, Dutch, and English radicals. A book about these foreign professionals and skilled workers, published in Kuzbass in 1990, contains a chapter: "Tradition: The Mandels, Father and Son." They put me in it because of my efforts to promote understanding between the two countries.

In Dad's day, the Kuzbass state capital of Kemerovo, where he was stationed, had been an overgrown village on the bank of the Tom River. I had known the coal country of western Pennsylvania in the 1930s, and expected the same: grimy, smoggy, with no zoning. In 1990 Kemerovo was a handsome, well-planned city of more than half a million, with broad boulevards lined with trees that must have been planted in Stalin's day, given their present height in the Siberian climate. Under the Soviet system land had no price, and was at the government's disposal. For city planning purposes, that was a tremendous advantage.

This mining town had three permanent theater companies–drama, musical, and puppet –in buildings erected specifically for them. Kemerovo also had a theater-people's club, wood-paneled in decorative high relief. There I met with candidates running for election to posts at all levels in the Russian Republic. They were youthful, well-dressed, sharp, and fundamentally pessimistic about the capacity of the Communist Party to continue to lead the country.

The Youth Living Complex movement was exceptionally well-developed in the Kuzbass, with at least a dozen massive residential complexes already built. Its two local leaders were both ethnic Germans. Stalin had exiled their grandparents from settlements on the Volga and in the Ukraine which were built by their ancestors who were invited to immigrate by Catherine the Great, herself a German. One of these men was a former Soviet army officer who retired in his 30s to devote himself to this much more constructive activity. He had no thought of emigrating, but volunteered that his ethnic origin had denied him the gold medal that was given to high-school students who get straight A's–an honor that entitled students to university admission without examination. But he had had no problems with discrimination in his military career.

The other, an architect, had his design of a private home hung up on the office wall. It was planned for the three-generation-family-under-a-single-roof model that most people outside the greatest cities of the former USSR regard as desirable. He had every right to be proud of the design, which gave privacy to grandparents, parents, and children in a three-story, modified A-frame building. The anticipated price was close to what it would be in the U.S. I wondered how people could afford it. He replied that the privacy arrangements made it possible to rent out one or two floors, if the income were needed to pay off the house. Chances are, he has become rich. There's been a significant amount of construction in Russia for the small minority of people who became wealthy in the subsequent Yeltsin years.

A woman was third-in-command of the Youth Housing Complex, and the equivalent of its mayor in its capacity as a self-governing subdivision of the city. The organization's business activities in 1990 included operating workshops and housing for the disabled. Efforts to build a better community lifestyle involved bringing retired people into contact with young families whose children needed pre-school or after-school care.

In the smaller coal town of Prokopyevsk, south of Kemerovo, where the unprecedented 1989 strike had begun, I met with the strike committee. These workingmen (and one woman, representing a very large clothing factory that had walked out in support of the strike) were extraordinarily impressive. They reminded me of people I'd known in Cleveland and Akron in the mid-'30s when rubber, auto, and steelworkers won union recognition in similar massive strikes, and I had been actively on their side. My background made it easy for us to talk to each other in a very different way than when correspondents for the Western media came to Kuzbass. I did not regard their apartment-house dwellings as "project housing." I did not look down upon them because they were less educated.

The Siberian miners looked the part but thought like statesmen. In setting forth what they wanted and how they proposed to get it, they were neither arrogant nor shy. They had won the right to run the mines in which they work–impossible under a capitalist system because of property rights–but they were refusing to exercise that right, because Moscow still controlled all supplies and also stipulated to what customer the coal must go, and at what price. That was still true under Yeltsin. The miners argued that to take over management under these conditions was to have responsibility without rights. They wanted the mines to be transferred to state and local government, with which they would then deal. They wanted Kuzbass, as a region, to have economic independence, with the right to sell its output wherever it could to whoever would buy it, inside or outside Russia, at an agreed-upon negotiated price. In consequence, Kuzbass swung back to giving the Communists fifty percent of its vote in a later election.

I spent that evening at the pleasant disco in the basement of the local Youth Living Complex, whose residents are chiefly miners. Teenagers attending the local high school of music gave us a performance. This was an original hour-long act in the tradition of Russian peasant minstrels, skomorokhi, using instruments the students had made of local reeds and other gifts of nature. These kids from the Siberian hinterland would wow them on American network TV. Is there a mining town of a quarter million with a high school of music in the United States?

Southward the Kuzbass becomes increasingly beautiful, as woods and meadows rise to peaks that have glaciers at less than six thousand feet. The southernmost mining town, Mezhdurechensk ("Between the Rivers": it's at a fork), doubles as health resort for the entire area. Each mine had built its own vacation facility. There are lakes for swimming, the river for boating and fishing, and forests for mushrooming, hiking, hunting.

Our arrival in Mezhdurechensk, in a driving Siberian snowstorm, was out of a movie. A crowd of people, warmly dressed contrary to the American propaganda image, had gathered in the spacious main square, which was handsomely bordered in granite. They were listening to speakers on a permanent reviewing stand. The public-address system was first rate, again as variance with the Western portrayal of anything non-military in the Soviet Union. Our driver, a local helicopter pilot who had quit because the agency that employed him had no copters (!), said, "The miners must be on strike again." The 1989 coal strike, the first independent labor action in the Soviet Union in nearly seventy years, had begun in the Kuzbass.

The actual reason for the gathering was more interesting. This rally was the first ecology demonstration in the city's history. A map taped to the front of the reviewing stand showed the route of a proposed three-hundred-mile surface conduit for moving liquefied coal (slurry) to Novosibirsk. Doubtless this would be more economical than hauling out by train (the method in use) or by truck. But the liquefaction process requires the use of toxic chemicals, and the demonstration organizers feared the consequences if the conduit were damaged or failed. It would also require enormous amounts of water. A dam was already being built in the hills behind a ski jump. The authorities insisted that it was for water supply and hydropower. Speakers said that was a lie, and that the authorities wanted to present the people with an accomplished fact. Speakers also mentioned the silting that reduces the storage capacity of reservoirs over time, and objected to reduction of water flow into the splendid river. They demanded a national park to protect the hinterland forever.

After the meeting, I met with the protest organizers. The leader was a female mining engineer in a mood of utter outrage. Also present was a male in the same profession bearing the surname, Sixteenhundredpounder (Sorokopudov), who became fond of me. His bear hug matched his name. Also present was the head of the local Youth Living Complex, who had quit his mining-engineer job to manage this huge development to house 5,000 people. His English was good enough so that he could later correspond with me in it. He, his wife, and child, were still living in two rooms in a dormitory. Another of the organizers was a high-ranking uniformed police officer, running as a liberal candidate in the elections.

The real power in the room was represented by two coal miners, one the head of the local Workers' (ex-Strike) Committee. The other was a Shorian, of an indigenous tribe, numbering fourteen thousand. So the miners, among whom the Asian-looking Shorians are a very small minority, were sufficiently free of prejudice to elect one of them to their leadership.

I asked a question about the Shorians. The Youth Living Complex head began to answer: "The Shorians want..." but was cut off by the Shorian miner: "Don't you speak for the Shorians," he said, and took over. He wanted no paternalism.

The committee wanted me to get them support from American environmentalists. I told them that I live within walking distance of David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute. Would I talk to him about visiting Kuzbass? I did.

I slept that night in the home of Sixteenhundredpounder. He, his wife, and sixteen-year-old daughter had a nicely-furnished apartment in a standard multi-story building, with a surprisingly large living room. They were very proud of their small collection of paintings by local artists. Most remarkable, he had developed a complete, rounded, and sophisticated American Civil Liberties Union philosophy, although he didn't know of that organization's existence. He was no mere parlor radical. During the strike, he had been fired for supporting the blue-collar miners. Initially they did not support him because of their distrust of any who did not work with their hands in the dark and danger of the mines. Later, they had helped him get his job back.

Our next destination, Vladivostok on the Pacific, is as far from Kuzbass as the distance between our two coasts. En route, the plane put down near the southern end of mile-deep,four-hundred-mile-long Lake Baikal. It contains more than four-fifths of all the fresh water in the entire USSR and one-fifth of all on earth, nearly twice as much as in Lake Superior. The stopover was at Ulan-Ude, capital of the autonomous republic of Buriatia, to which a Mongol people is indigenous. The young woman in charge of the Intourist waiting room at the airport, unmistakeably Mongolian–flat, round face, small nose and mouth, eyefold–spoke excellent English. In a 15-minute conversation, she made very clear her desire for a revival of Mongol traditions, customs, and culture.

In Vladivostok I was arrested–not at the airport, but a couple of days later while eating in a superb new restaurant built by Korea under a joint venture. (Only the waiters were Soviet). My host was an obstetrician who had quit to organize the local Youth Living Complex. We had begun eating when he was called outside, and returned to say that a couple of detectives wanted us to go to the local precinct. I sent word we'd do so when we finished our meal. That was neither foolhardy nor arrogant. I wouldn't dare do that at home, but local Soviet authorities were al))ways courteous to foreigners. I had learned that 20 years earlier in a fuss over taking pictures at the border between Russia and Estonia, when I bawled out a local Russian police chief for exposing film of places I would not be visiting again. He was obviously an admirer of the long-dead Stalin, painstakingly imitating his moustache, hairstyle, and pipe. There had been no consequences.

This time the issue was that we had no visas for Vladivostok. We did have visas for Nakhodka, but it had no civilian airport, so one had to land at Vladivostok. However, we had spent a couple of days there, despite the fact that, as the major Soviet naval base on the Pacific, it was then still closed to foreigners.

I told the police precinct captain that our purpose was to improve relations between our two countries. But the detective who had brought us in after waiting two hours till we finished dining said that, as someone who had visited the USSR seventeen times before, I should know that their laws require a visa for each place one visits. I didn't tell them that I not only knew it, but that I had been the translator of that set of rules for a research quarterly called Soviet Statutes and Decisions. We pledged in writing never to commit this offense again, and we left.

During those days in Vladivostok, I was housed in a Youth Living Complex apartment. Their huge cluster of apartment houses crown a hill with views of the Pacific and the city that in San Francisco would command rents in the thousands per month. I was placed with a couple just under thirty years of age who had a school-age son and a kindergarten-age daughter. They had come to the big city –almost the same population as San Francisco –only two years earlier from a very small town about 1 1/2 hours away. He was a blue-collar worker in a concrete-panel plant, and she in a candy factory. They insisted that I take their bedroom. There was a rug on the wall over the head of the bed. That's not unusual in Russia. But they had mounted on the rug a smallish reproduction of an early Renaissance painting –Giotto, perhaps –and a crucifix. The proportions and positioning of these accent pieces created a sense of sheer elegance.

I had brought presents for any children in families I might stay with. To the little girl I gave a set of crayons, and to the boy a protractor set. The evening I arrived, he carried it around carefully by its packaging mount, and took it to school the next morning. A day later, a boy and a girl his age –eight, I would say –came to the house with him. After being introduced, the girl asked, quite politely: "Are you an American?"

"Yes."

"Say something in English." I did. The children were studying English and departed, satisfied.

Their visit was no accident. My hosts' boy had gone to school and told his classmates that there was an American staying in his home. They had hooted him down and all but beaten him up for this preposterous story. When his father learned of this, he went to school and, instead of storming in outrage, asked the teacher if he might talk to the class. He told them that his son had told the truth, and invited them to choose a boy and girl to come to the house and see for themselves.

When I packed to move on, he gave me a color photo of the family. He explained that it would help me convince my fellow Americans that I was telling the truth when I said that I had slept in the home of a Soviet family! To me, for whom it was the fourth consecutive year of spending the night in such homes, that appeared naive. But he was much closer to the truth than I. Our government, media, and churches had done an effective job of convincing Americans that such personal contact was forbidden.

A year later the Vladivostok Youth Living Complex organizer phoned across the Pacific to tell me he had become a ruble millionaire, and could I direct him to a source of used clothing for resale there?

Next stop was Nakhodka, three hours down the Pacific coast by car. I should really have done a New Yorker-style article on that, "Cow Hunting in Siberia." The driver was Shakespeare's Falstaff to the life, a three-hundred-pounder of huge appetites. He and our host decided they wanted some raw milk. Se we left the road and wandered through village lanes looking for signs that someone owned a cow. Punitive taxation on the assumption that private cow ownership might make someone rich had long since done away with most such ownership in the region. After a great deal of laughter and much very bumpy and slippery riding on snowed-over dirt roads, we finally spotted a cow. But she was about to calve, and the owner did not want to milk her. No raw milk.

Shortly we reached a Navy residential town where Falstaff, who was boss of an efficient "co-op" of seventy taxis, knew that the stores sold foodstuffs not available in Vladivostok. He stocked up. A measure of the collapse of the economy is that, three years later, several Navy recruits died of starvation in a barracks in that very area. The Russian Far East gets most of its food by rail from areas far to the west.

Much of our time was spent sightseeing on coastal roads, for our hosts were busy pushing the ocean shore as a U.S. tourist destination. It is like the less spectacular portions of our Pacific coast, pine-covered low mountains and fine beaches. This is essentially virgin wilderness, with the cleanest of water, fine fishing, hunting, endless back-packing potential. The numerous stories of ecological damage in Siberia presented to the American public are not lies. They are simply blips in a boundless sea of untouched nature. The one exception is the near-extinction of the Siberian tiger, made virtually complete in post-Soviet times by poaching for their skins–something like the disappearance of the grizzly from our Pacific coast a century earlier.

The trip to Nakhodka occurred just after Gorbachev got the Soviet Communist Party leadership to agree to repeal the constitutional guarantee of its monopoly of power, and to try bringing perestroika into the party itself. Radio programs those two days were an uninterrupted series of panels and talk shows about this. The head of public affairs broadcasting for Radio Vladivostok was a progressive running for the parliament.

We listened to hours of radio as we drove. What we heard on the air was that there were rank-and-file members who had suddenly come alive. They demanded to know the Party's budget, which was secret. They insisted that henceforth its local branches, not Moscow, would decide whether they will have paid officials, if so how many, what their salaries will be, and what they will do. I repeatedly heard the phrase: "The Party is ours."

I wrote immediately upon my return home that the months ahead "will determine whether it [the Party] will reform itself to the point of being acceptable to the populace, or whether it will self-destruct, suddenly or gradually. That is obviously of importance to the outside world."

Today we know that the apparat proved stronger than the rebels, and the mass of the members had long since forgotten how to take initiative. So when Yeltsin dissolved it, it did not resist. But a new Communist party emerged in 1993 as the largest political membership organization in Russia and later won forty-three percent of the vote in the 1996 presidential election. I would imagine that people of the kind I heard on the air those two days were active in it.

Our sponsors in Vladivostok thought of their city as conservative, because it was as much a Navy town as San Diego before the population shift to our sun belt. But the Vladivostok voters behaved in the elections more like those of Berkeley after the '60s. One seat was won by a radical academic over a major fisheries executive with quite a progressive reputation. Much more remarkable, the other seat in this overwhelmingly Russian city of macho occupations –the military and sea-faring –had been won by a female anthropologist of the tiny Nanai tribe, running against a general. Yet in a TV documentary made by a cable station sponsored by the Vladivostok Youth Living Complex, I saw a Nanai teenager say to the reporter: "The Russians think of us as an inferior race." Nevertheless, she herself was an illustration of the positive aspects of Soviet ethnic policy: well-dressed and with perfect mastery of the Russian language.

Perhaps the explanation for the election of the Nanai congresswoman is the same as that for the quarter-century of re-election of Black Congressmember Ron Dellums in California. He was the first in the country to be elected by a white-majority district: Berkeley and Oakland. African-Americans there have no doubt that racism is the bottom line in white attitudes. In both cases, white-majority populations have advanced, recognizing merit in individual members of minority groups, while retaining various levels of prejudice toward those groups as a whole.

Congresswoman Gaier, the Nanai, was in Moscow, but I visited and was impressed by her permanent place of employment, the Institute of the History, Archeology, and Anthropology of the Peoples of the Far East. It had published three hard-bound volumes in 1989 alone, one about the pre-Russian history of the area, one on its ethnic traditions and decorative arts, and one on a single people, the Udegei. Her Russian fellow-scholars there clearly had the highest respect for the people they studied. One of them had an extraordinary collection of netsuke, which he had spent a lifetime studying. He contends that these charming miniature carvings, which all others regard as indigenous to Japan, actually originated with the Scythians in Central Asia, from which trade brought them eastward.

On the flight back to Moscow we sat next to a Navy officer just retired from service on an ICBM sub with enough multiply-targeted warheads to destroy the United States by itself. "You know all about ours, and we know all about yours," he said, drunk, in celebration of his return to civilian life. "So I can show you this souvenir model of my boat, even though I'm sworn to secrecy." Being Russian, he pressed upon us his excellent sausage, canned fish, aromatic fresh black bread, and vodka.

From Moscow I traveled, alone, southeast to the Donbass coal country of the Ukraine. A local newspaper published a very romantic account of this elderly American stoically withstanding hours of waiting for a late plane in the Kiev airport and travelling in midwinter in his "light coat." The airport wait was useful: it gave me a chance to watch virtually a full day of TV fare under glasnost. The "light coat" was a woolen dress winter coat with lapels that could be folded up and buttoned tightly at the neck. It proved entirely adequate, over a wool suit and longjohns, for a dry 20 below zero, the lowest I personally encountered that January even in Siberia.

The Donbass, comparable to a state in the U.S., has twin cities: Donetsk, with over a million people, and Makeyevka; with half a million. The former is extremely proud that the World Health Organization named it, year after year in Soviet times, as the greenest industrial city on earth. City government and the people worked very hard to maintain that status. Like Kemerovo, Donetsk consists chiefly of very wide tree-lined boulevards bordered by fairly monotonous apartment houses.

In addition to coal mines, Donetsk does have one steel mill. That plant, immense though it is, cannot overwhelm so large a city. It once had the very un-Slavic name of Hughesovka, for an Englishman, Hughes, who founded the mill in tsarist times. There still remain a couple of what the locals call "glass houses," which he ordered built for his managers and other foreign staff. They're not of glass at all, but typical urban English dwellings of a century ago, gloomy by today's standards, but with much more window space than the local people could afford. When I was there, preservationists wanted to convert them into a pedestrian shopping mall.

Nearby Makeyevka is the quintessential steel town, with stupendous blast furnaces, coke ovens, smokestacks visually dominant. The region was in mourning because of the death of over a dozen miners in an accident the previous day. A formal entertainment to show me what the city could offer tourists was cancelled on that account. Instead I was asked if I'd mind attending the birthday dinner of the wife of one of my hosts. It was in a standard, externally shabby apartment house in a miners' neighborhood. The party bore out the quip of Soviets who had visited the U.S.: "In America there's everything in the stores and nothing on the table; in our country there's nothing in the stores and everything on the table."

It isn't simply that there was endless bounty at that coal-mining family's birthday party. Cooking as well as what I was offered in home after home all over the country demands practice. And you can't get practice if there isn't any food. Both in my Moscow year before World War II and in early visits from 1959 on, the only way they then knew to prepare meat was as hamburgers cooked to death. That simply wasn't true any more. Salads were now superb and imaginative, cakes too rich.

Makeyevka has a particularly striking war monument. A rough-hewn soldier, perhaps half as tall as the Statue of Liberty, with bayonetted rifle, towers over one lip of a shallow valley. On the other rim, perhaps a mile away, are several barren hills –culm piles of coal-mining waste, rock brought to the surface. The local people know that during the two-year Nazi occupation, Germany murdered literally tens of thousands of people here and dumped their bodies into the mine shafts.

As in Siberia, I met with the leaders of the previous year's coal strike. I asked if RUKH, the Ukrainian nationalist movement representing majority sentiment in the western provinces recovered from Poland in World War II, was strong here. A foreman replied, "Look, one of the guys in my team is German. Another is Tatar. There's even a Jew, although they're usually up in some office somewhere. So how can I make them all speak Ukrainian? We speak Russian." He was Ukrainian, as is fifty-two percent of the local population.

In the later referendum on independence, the Donbass voted overwhelmingly "yes." But in 1993, the miners struck yet again for business independence for the mines. Russian continued to be the working language, and there were no reports of cleavage along ethnic lines. In 1994 the Donbass voted for the Communists and other parties favoring close cooperation with Russia, and then helped elect a new president with a similar platform.

One of my hosts gave me a guided tour of the square where the miners had sat down for days on end during the strike. He said, of the 1989 walkout, "We had no political demands. This was simply a labor strike." But then: "See the building on that side of the square? It was the Communist Party's center for political education. Hardly ever used. Marble. Fine furniture. So one of the strike demands was that it be made into a children's activities center. We won that."

I asked, "You don't think that was political?"

"How was that political?" I pointed out that a very militant coal miners' strike in West Virginia that had gained national attention was then in its sixteenth month.

"Those miners would never dream of making such a demand," I said. "In our country everyone regards property as sacred. That building didn't belong to your coal mine management. It didn't belong to the miners' union. It belonged to the Communist Party. Sure, some of you are members, but most aren't. You were able to make that demand, and win it, because you were taught to regard all property as public, and so were those you were negotiating opposite. That's socialism."

Strange, but also significant, that it was I who had to explain to them what socialism is. Since dissidents in the Ukraine believed that independence was a panacea for all problems, they gave no thought to socio-economic change. In consequence, no significant reform had occurred. The Ukraine, which previously had a higher living standard than Russia–hardly what happens in a colony– fell to a very much lower one. A dictatorial economic system continued, with no government dictatorship to enforce it. The new Ukrainian currency, designed to be equal to the ruble, fell to a tiny fraction of the value of the Russian currency, on top of a spectacular fall in the purchasing power of the ruble itself. In 1998 the government accepted an American demand that it cancel proposed resumption of economic cooperation with Russia in the manufacture of heavy transport aircraft and satellite propellants, both of which the Soviets had sited in Ukraine.

From the Donbass I went west to Kyiv and the loveliest experience of that trip. I should have guessed from the nature of my welcoming "committee": no men, but a tall, beautiful young woman and her four-year-old boy. Moreover, she kissed me on the cheek, which is not at all an east Slavic welcome to a male stranger, even one older than her father.

Irina Horobets had been the female lead in a Hungarian film, "Madonna of the 20th Century," at age eighteen. She had fallen hopelessly in love with the director, "first love, of the kind that never happens again," she told me. They parted, and she abandoned film forever in consequence. Now, at thirty-four, she was something like an accountant, but currently engaged in heading the cultural activities of a Youth Housing Complex. One building was completed, another under construction across the street. Her accomplishments thus far were astounding. The walls of the recreation rooms on the ground floor were covered by murals on Ukrainian themes in ethnic style by superbly-trained artists. Partitions were magnificently carved. When I was asked to lecture on America to future tenants during their lunch break from building their own apartment house, it was in a spacious ballet room, one side mirrored from floor to ceiling, a barre before it. Children in the pre-school learned Ukrainian and English simultaneously, in consequence of a three-generation tradition of Ukrainian emigration to Canada. A tourism club showed me slides of its wanderings all over the immensity of the Soviet Union. A member of their photography club took an excellent shot of Irina dancing with me at a memorable party, which I keep on my wall.

One day Irina invited me to go somewhere with her and her son. I asked if I might invite two other Kyivans I knew. One was the reporter who had gotten me to Chernobyl. The other was a most extraordinary woman, Liubov Kovalevskaia, formerly a reporter for the Chernobyl newspaper. She had managed to get an article published predicting the nuclear accident simply on the basis of her observations of sloppy procedures, and was also the author of published books of poetry.

Her personal history is almost a capsule of Soviet and post-Soviet times. Her father, a Polish Communist living in the USSR, was exiled to Siberia by Stalin for the crime of being Polish. He was lucky. Stalin had executed the entire top leadership of that party, living in exile in the USSR before World War II, for what he regarded as nationalism. He had also killed fifteen thousand Polish officers taken prisoners of war after he divided Poland with Hitler in 1939.

So Kovalevskaia was a Siberian of Polish ancestry, native to the Russian language. She was still a member of the Communist Party when I first met her, but already felt the need for spiritual sustenance that it had long since ceased to provide. She had just been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and had a daughter, but no husband. The daughter, in her teens, beautiful, mentally retarded, and extremely affectionate, needed particular care. Liuba herself danced and sang with the abandon of a Russian Gypsy. We corresponded, but letters from her became increasingly infrequent as the Ukraine sank into an amorphous miasma.

My last first-hand memory of the Soviet Union before its dissolution was the 1990 Peace Walk across Kazakhstan to the nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk.

A dozen years before that I had had as guest on my Pacifica radio show the leading poet of Kazakhstan, Olzhas Suleimenov. He was already then famous enough to have had a full-hour reading on USSR network TV. Subsequently he was placed in charge of the movie industry of his native republic. He hosted Tanya and me in Almaty in 1982.

Chernobyl triggered sharp concern for the dangers of nuclear testing, and Kazakh intellectuals were well aware of illnesses caused to downwinders by the explosions. Toward the end of the decade, Suleimenov organized what became the world's only successful anti-testing movement. It was deliberately called Nevada-Semipalatinsk. In 1988 the head of the Soviet Peace Committee, Henry Borovik, a journalist and playwright who had become host of a popular TV show when Gorbachev instituted glasnost, did a sensational broadcast of a mass march onto the test site in Kazakhstan. Pro-test military and anti-test scientists were interviewed. Unlike American protesters in Nevada, the Kazakhs were not arrested, much less beaten by the Soviet authorities. Contrary to the experience of the thirty-years-long anti-testing movement in the United States, Suleimenov's movement gained termination of testing from Gorbachev in a single year. Our 1990 Walk, sponsored there by Suleimenov, helped. In 1998 the U.S. was dodging the comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty by computer simulation of explosions, and in 1999 Clinton proposed a narrower version of Reagan’s Star Wars project.

During the four years of walks in the USSR in which I took part, I had thought the Soviet participants were more or less typical, at least in terms of the professional stratum to which most of them belonged. But during the 1990 walk, and subsequently via correspondence and visits of a number of the Soviet walkers here, I realized they were not. Many of them proved to be people who wanted to emigrate and thought establishing contacts with Americans might find them sponsors. Others saw us as good prospects for future business ventures. Still others sought spiritual sustenance for anti-Establishment viewpoints, particularly of a nationalist nature. They were most certainly for peace and opponents of testing. None sought personal profit from the walks, except for the possible resale of a few things they bought.

Among the Kazakh walkers, I encountered levels of nationalism never felt in my seven previous visits to that republic. A tall, burly sculptor insisted that the independent Kazakhstan to come would need its own army. I asked against whom: Russia, with ten times the population? Symbolic forces have since been established. He wanted it to have its own currency, which is now the case. It is not a democratic place. President Nazarbayev learned from neighboring China to retain tight controls during the transition away from central planning. But because Kazakhstan had not caught up with Russia in processing and manufacturing, its living standard dropped even more than Russia's.

Already in 1990, a year before independence, the Kazakh Walk leaders refused to have the flag of the USSR at the head of the parade along with the American. They insisted on that of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan instead. A Russian woman visiting one of our campsites said she was moving to Russia, although born in Kazakhstan, because she was being pushed aside in favor of Kazakhs in her profession, teaching.

This was not comparable to the consequences of affirmative action to provide jobs for minority teachers in the U.S. I knew from my own research that Kazakhs were already more than proportionately represented in that profession and its administration, thanks to deliberate Soviet policy. What I encountered in 1990 was nationalism pure and simple –ethnic cleansing at the occupational level. The most remarkable aspect of this development, which was happening in ethnic republics throughout the USSR, was that the Russians in Kazakhstan offered no organized resistance, despite being equal in numbers to the Kazakhs. The Russians had been educated to understand that ethnic republics were exactly that. They recognized the right of the Kazakhs to rule their own country. That to me explains the very poor Russian military record in failing to suppress the nationalist rebellion in Chechnya in 1995 and 1996. When retired Gen. Lebed, briefly Yeltsin's National Security Advisor, achieved a cease-fire, an officer said to Reuters: "They are on their land here, and we are their guests." It would be a tragic error to think that Russian response to foreign intervention in Russia proper would not equal their resistance to Hitler.

There were stupid extremist attitudes on both sides during the Peace Walk. A youthful Kazakh, shocked an anti-Communist Soviet Jewish mining engineer and me by referring to the Russians as "dirty, low-down people." He was a teacher of Russian literature by profession! A forty-ish Russian nuclear scientist at the test site referred to the general area as "ancient Russian lands." At this a local Kazakh schoolteacher turned away in silent disgust. Russian Cossack freebooters commissioned by the Tsar, somewhat like Sir Francis Drake on the high seas, had seized that territory at about the same time as the first English settlements in North America. But the Kazakhs, a much more numerous people than American Indians, were already there and always remained a plurality.

Kazakh nationalism was internally reactionary in much the same way as Islamic fundamentalism south of the Soviet border. The young men on the walk pretty universally favored a return to polygamy. Women we met kept silent when that topic was broached. Yet upbringing in a society that opened all posts below the very top to women was evident. The Kazakhstan delegation's field leader acting on Suleimenov's behalf was a woman, and Russian at that (married to a Kazakh). No one challenged her status, or even whispered that her having that position was wrong.

The whole walk was a living demonstration of the contradictions pervading Soviet society. On the one hand, there was use of the territory of an indigenous people for bomb testing, exactly as in the U.S. On the other hand, a cattle town, virtually a hundred percent Kazakh, in these dry grazing plains right outside test territory, had six teachers of English in its schools, also one of German. I was particularly struck by the Kazakh and Russian schoolgirls walking arm in arm, and boys of both nationalities playing together.

The coal city of Karaganda in north Kazakhstan, six hundred thousand population, was another of those contradictions. Built by prison-camp labor in the 1930s, today's miners, ethnic German and Russian, Tatar and Kazakh, are largely the grandsons of those prisoners and exiles. The city itself is very well planned: broad boulevards, trees, theaters, higher educational institutions. There is a splendid miners' community center right on the main avenue, and a permanent circus building of spectacular architecture. To anyone who knows coal mines, those in Karaganda were externally the last word, although they have internal problems due to geology. Coal trucks are not filled to the brim, so none spill over into the streets as I have seen happening in this country.

But the far-off nuclear explosions were felt by the miners underground. In Kazakhstan the Demand Number One of the 1989 coal strike was not economic at all, but an end to nuclear testing. And there were other political explosions. When the walk passed through Karaganda, I asked to speak to the workers' leaders. The meeting was actually in the multi-story headquarters building of the Communist Party. Only a disabled Jewish lawyer representing the handicapped was not anti-Party. The miners were teaching themselves archival research, with the help of a Kazakh professor who was their intellectual mentor. They wanted to go through the Communist Party's records, determine which of its properties had been given it by the government, which it had simply appropriated by virtue of its hitherto untouchable authority, and what were its sources of income other than membership dues, which were not contested. The idea was to return everything else to the people. That of course was resolved when the party was dissolved fifteen months later. In Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev did not permit its re-establishment, by contrast to the situation in Russia.

As we traveled eastward for several days from Karaganda to the test site, one night's stop was near a miners' union vacation resort. Government funded, it stands at the loveliest spot in all north Kazakhstan. A hill a few hundred feet high, then clothed in glorious autumnal foliage, rises from the near-barren plain with its thousands of saddle and meat horses herded by these descendants of Genghis Khan, the most splendid cowboys imaginable. At the top of the hill is a lake sacred to the Kazakhs, at the bottom the resort buildings and an artificial lake-reservoir. We spent a couple of nights in the buildings of a children's camp a short distance away. School had begun, so they were available. A drunken watchman kept order, supposedly, at the showers.

Soviet history was evident even in this remote place. A small town nearby was the original home in Kazakhstan of the Jewish mining engineer referred to earlier. The only non-Asian among the Soviet walkers who had bothered to learn Kazakh, a Turkic language, he had found himself there at age twelve, over half a century earlier, when his Trotskyist mother was exiled. His own son, a cardiologist in Karaganda who had never been abroad, speaks and writes the very finest English. He dreamt only of emigration – to the U.S. if possible, to Israel if not. That someone of his ethnic and political background had been able to rise to the top of a respected profession, as had his mother, also a physician, never crossed his mind in evaluating his place in life.

The evening before we broke camp there was a bonfire. Kazakh youth came from the small town, and sang informally for hours on end. The Kazakhs prize themselves on their musicality. At the end of this walk, in Semipalatinsk, a company of perhaps a hundred children put on an extraordinary performance of song and dance. Lambada was interspersed with Kazakh and Russian dances and ballet. Only kids with long schooling in dance could have done that well.

When American-Soviet Peace Walks were held in the U.S., the national media ignored them. That was also the treatment given by American media to our walks in the USSR. The only exception was when Affeldt recruited the late impresario Bill Graham. He got major rock stars – Santana, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, the Doobie brothers – to perform at a groundbreaking concert in Moscow in 1987. The Soviet media treated us as the most welcome guests conceivable. In 1990 I co-hosted, with a Kazakh woman, a program broadcast over national Kazakh TV. Everyone in that country must have watched, judging by the number of people who approached later along the walk route to say they'd seen me on the tube.

By the time we left Kazakhstan, it was clear that the very foundations of Soviet society were being questioned, not only at the pragmatic and political levels, but, in the deepest sense, intellectually. One of the Kazakh walkers, a pioneer businesswoman, took me to her home to meet her husband, a man of perhaps forty. He is one of those very rare individuals whose profundity, not mere knowledge, awes one at first meeting. He challenged Marx on philosophical fundamentals, giving me a paper of his arguing that the author of the Communist Manifesto had added nothing significant to the work of the German philosopher Hegel.

In 1969 I had published a fifty-five-page essay, "Soviet Marxism and Social Science," in a symposium volume, Social Thought in the Soviet Union, edited by Alex Simirenko, subsequently president of the American Sociological Association. I brought reprints of that paper on the walk, and in Semipalatinsk distributed it to a number of young academics at various institutions, who were eager to receive it. In the months that followed correspondence was already totally free. I received a number of letters from Kazakhstan on other subjects, but there was not one comment on my piece. Marxism had become a dead issue.

Another writing of mine was received very differently indeed. In the January 1991 issue of the KPFA Folio, I published what had been a fifteen-minute broadcast two months earlier, "If I Were Gorbachev." It had been prompted by the first public demand ever in the Soviet Union to cancel the celebration of the anniversary of the Communist Revolution, the major national holiday, November 7th. I was outraged, because at that time I still believed in socialism, and that holiday was sacred to me. Socialism to me is Marxist socialism. Any other kind is too vague to pin down: merely an expression of desired ends, with no clear picture of how to achieve them.

I felt that Gorbachev, who still said he advocated socialism, had never made a good case for what it had done for the Soviet people. I deliberately did the broadcast as though I were ghost-writing for him, in his good-schoolteacher style. And while carefully setting forth the negatives –not merely dumping on Stalin–I wrote:

"Did your greatgrandparents know Dostoyevsky...? They did not, because they could not read....Out of every ten of you who are professionals or intellectuals, only one would have been before 1917....Your greatgrandparents died, on the average, at age 45. The Revolution has given you at least twenty more years of life....

"Do you want to return to the thatched roofs typical of rural housing until a generation ago? Do you want to see mass-scale prostitution as described in pre-Revolutionary novels...? Do you want women in Central Asia returned behind the horse-hair veil, confined to family compounds?

"Women: do you want to be driven out of medicine, or teaching, or engineering, or law, and returned to your prerevolutionary status? Half the judges are women. Where else is that the case?...

"There are serious social scholars and Sovietologists, not Communists at all, who believe the social progress made in Scandinavia and Western Europe occurred primarily because those who controlled these countries were afraid that otherwise their workers would have followed the example of the Russian proletariat." I re-read this five years later, current reports of the rollback of social benefits in Germany before me. Employers were saying frankly that they were instituted "after the war, in a different time," a time when it was essential to match the benefits then being instituted in Communist East Germany. That East Germany failed is a small part of the reason for my abandonment of socialism, but that does not change the historic reason for the granting of benefits to labor, women, children, and the aged in Western Europe.

Returning to my article:

"Yes, it is true that the most agriculturally productive and most industrially developed portions of the country were destroyed in the war, and that we lost 30 million lives....

"It is also true that our opponents in the Cold War launched an arms race at a time when our country could not possibly have launched a war. We had not yet developed the atom bombs, nor the missiles capable of delivering them....

"People talk of the progress made by Germany and Japan. But as the losers in World War II, they were not permitted to build large modern armies, or manufacture nuclear weapons and missiles. They did not have to divert material resources and scientific and engineering brains to this purpose....

"From 1917 to today, thanks to our Revolution, we have moved ahead immensely. If one considers all aspects of life and the conditions of all segments of the people, I do not believe there is any other country that has made as much progress from where it was at that time –particularly when one considers that we alone, among all nations on earth, have faced unremitting hostility for perhaps all but five of the past 73 years."

I mailed that article to all the six hundred Soviet people whose addresses I had acquired on the four peace walks and in earlier years, and to all the Soviet papers of nationwide circulation. Two reprinted it, Pravda and the Teachers' Gazette, then having a combined circulation of four million. So did local papers in cities in Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Kirgizia, that I know of. They all published my home address.

I received dozens of letters from total strangers in six republics, teachers above all, doctors, scientists, retirees, workers– none of them people of prominence. This resulted in correspondence. An Azerbaijani nationalist who has since become a businessman cussed me out. So did someone in Belarus, and, in more polite language but great detail, the Jewish safety engineer Peace Walk participant in Kazakhstan. But a Jewish school teacher in the Ukraine thought the article was wonderful. A Ukrainian gym teacher wrote a heartbroken letter about how impossible it was to do a good job without decent basketballs. I read that on the air simply as a matter of information, was flooded with contributions, and shipped her dozens of basketballs.

The letters as a whole presented so exceptional a picture of life and opinion at the grassroots level that my friends Ethel and Stephen Dunn, who then published a small learned journal, devoted an entire issue to fifty of the letters and the transcripts of my interviews with the coal miners in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, and with the leaders of the RUKH Ukrainian nationalists. The journal was mailed free to every academic Sovietologist in the United States, of whom there are many hundreds. Exactly three acknowledged receiving it, and I am not aware that any has made use of this material as source documents. The interests of the common people in the USSR and its successor states are foreign to all but a handful of them.

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