MEDICAL STUDENT DIPLOMACY:
A REPORT ON A JOURNEY TO THE SOVIET UNION
In July 1985, a group of 22 medical students from five Western countries traveled to the USSR and met with Soviet medical students in Moscow, Tashkent, and Kiev. The trip took place immediately after the Fifth Congress of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) held in Budapest, Hungary, June 28-July 1. Physicians active in the Soviet branch of IPPNW hosted the Western students during their tour.
IPPNW was founded five years ago by American cardiologist Dr. Bernard Lown and Soviet cardiologist Dr. Evgueni Chazov, and now has 140,000 member physicians in 41 countries. Recently IPPNW was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize because, according to the Nobel Committee, it has “performed a considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.”
Public opinion polls indicate that the physicians’ efforts have had a major effect. In 1982, according to a Yankelovich poll, only 46% of the US public thought a nuclear war could not be won. In 1984, that figure had jumped to 89%. The wide coverage of IPPNW Congresses in the official Soviet press and the results of American psychiatrists’ interviews with Soviet children indicate that the Soviet physicians have been similarly effective in spreading the knowledge of nuclear war’s destructiveness among the Soviet public.
Yet not a single warhead has been dismantled as a result of IPPNW’s efforts. The planet still bristles with some 50,000 nuclear bombs. In fact, the crisis continues to worsen. Not only do we continue to build more bombs, but we are building ones that are faster, more accurate, and more threatening. What is more, we are on the brink of extending the arms race into the heavens.
Why has the growing concern about nuclear war not slowed this upward spiral? One answer is that public knowledge about nuclear war is countered by a fear of the opposing country. A clear majority of the American public believed, in 1984 that “the Soviet Union is like Hitler’s Germany—an evil empire trying to rule the world; that the Soviets respond only to military strength; and that they will attack us or our allies if we are weak.”
People feel caught in a dilemma between the fear of nuclear war and the fear of the “enemy.” Yet 68% of the public, increasing to 78% among those under 30, believes that if we keep building missiles, “it’s only a matter of time before they are used.” There is no rational basis for this dilemma; proposals such as the Comprehensive Test Ban do not require trust of the Russians because compliance can be verified by independent technical means. Yet many people are unable to hear this argument because “What about the Russians?” is thundering in their ears.
Major changes in attitudes are required if humanity is to survive beyond the next few decades. Americans must reassess their stereotypical image of the USSR as a homogeneous, “1984-like” empire devoid of the diversity and individual personal qualities so characteristic of our own national self-image. On the other hand, Soviets need to learn that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy is not solely the profit-seeking military-industrial complex, but also the American perception that the Soviet system is “evil” because it “oppresses its own citizens,” and that flat refusal to admit to any internal problems only fuels the fires of mistrust.
The governing principle of relations between nations must become cooperation, not confrontation. One step toward creating this new thinking is to open channels for dialogue between professional colleagues in the East and West for sharing information, discussing issues, exploring solutions, and establishing personal relationships and trust.
Medical professionals have a special responsibility to help open these channels of dialogue because a nuclear war would be the final epidemic for which there is no cure, only prevention. They have an extraordinary opportunity to open these channels because the medical tradition is a humanistic one that transcends national boundaries.
In this spirit, Medical Students for International Exchange (MSIE) was founded in October 1984, by four students—David Kreger and Rob Saper of Harvard Medical School, Sarah Braun of the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, and Gale Warner, a freelance writer and literature student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston—for the sole purpose of organizing a medical student trip to the U.S.S.R. After MSIE received the endorsement of Dr. Bernard Lown and IPPNW, we met with Academician M.I. Kuzin, the director of Moscow’s Vishnevsky Surgery Institute, in February 1985, in Boston, and proposed the trip. Academician Kuzin graciously invited us to be his “guests in the Soviet Union.”
That our trip fell under the powerful aegis of the Soviet branch of IPPNW offered us the opportunity to make this no ordinary tour. During the spring we sent a flurry of letters and telexes to Dr. Kuzin and the Soviet affiliate of IPPNW requesting, over and over, “informal meetings with Soviet medical students,” even going so far as to submit sample daily schedules featuring large blocks of time labelled “informal gatherings” and “free time.” We received nothing in return, except one telex which said: what was your Intourist reference number again? And we celebrated wildly. They had at least gotten the idea that we were coming!
We drafted a statement of purpose to be handed out in the USSR which outlined four specific goals of the journey: (1) To establish personal relationships with our Soviet peers; (2) To learn how medical students and other Soviets view war and peace; (3) To promote long-term east-west study exchanges of medical students; and (4) To create a slideshow of our experiences to be shown extensively in our home countries, in order to encourage others to become involved in “citizen diplomacy,” and to help put a human face on the “evil empire.”
Meanwhile, we sent letters to all 161 chapters of Physicians for Social Responsibility in the United States, and all 41 affiliate countries of IPPNW, inviting students to participate in the trip. All participants were responsible for their own funding; the students in Boston, however, raised $7000 from individual donors, primarily physicians in the Boston area. Some of this money paid for the expenses of organizing the trip and for the post-trip report and slide show; the rest was distributed to participants on a need basis. Amity Tours of Redwood City, California, a travel agency with much experience in planning citizen diplomacy tours to the U.S.S.R., handled the arrangements with Intourist.
BUDAPEST
The Fifth IPPNW Congress was a massive affair, involving 1500 people from about 60 countries and about 100 medical students from 20 countries, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria, and the U.S.S.R. Since this was the first IPPNW Congress in a socialist country, the number of participating students and doctors from socialist countries was unprecedented. While many of us found the scheduled sessions at the Congress educational, others chose to spend as much time as possible taking advantage of the unparalleled opportunity to engage in freewheeling discussions with students involved in the peace movements of the socialist countries of eastern Europe.
The common bond of working to prevent nuclear war is a powerful one indeed. To look into the youthful eyes of a new friend—but someone who lives “behind the iron curtain”—and to contemplate with them the total destruction of the planet, draws out the essential humanness we share. The differences between our countries, grave as they are, seem thoroughly temporary when compared to the timeless certainty of destruction.
Yet our conversations were anything but melancholy! We eagerly “talked shop,” shared insights into each of our countries’ political systems, offered our visions for how peace movements could lead to changes in government policies, asked each other hard questions—all with the freedom to admit our countries’ shortcomings.
One future surgeon from Budapest said privately that he’d never want to join the Communist Party because of its stiff hierarchy; yet, he is an editor of his university’s newspaper and was an active worker at the Congress. His close friend Eva, however, is in the Party; in fact, she is the vice-president of the youth section of the Hungarian Peace Council, the government-approved peace group, a demanding post she can hold in addition to her medical studies only because of her seemingly unbounded energy. Why does her group never publicly question the policies of Hungary or the Soviet Union? “We have tremendous debates in private, during our meetings with government officials,” she replied. “The newspapers always say there is unity, but that is after consensus has been finally reached on the inside. I’ve been to some of those meetings, and believe me, they can get pretty heated.” Her dream is that Budapest will become a meeting place for people from the East and West. During the IPPNW Congress, her dream was coming true.
At an official student meeting, we discussed nuclear war curricula in medical schools and organized a penpal program to be run out of the IPPNW office in Boston. (A notice about the program was later published in a Polish medical journal and as of October some 20 letters from Polish medical students had arrived.) The IPPNW International Council passed two resolutions concerning medical students; one directed the central office to begin raising funds to support an East-West exchange program, and the other established the posts of “medical student liaison” to the IPPNW offices in Boston, Europe, and Moscow.
A high point of the congress came on the last night. After a huge outdoor barbeque at a hotel in the hills of Budapest, a few students gathered for some impromptu singing. Soon some 40 students from nearly as many countries were following an American guitarist, in Pied Piper fashion, to a nearby open grassy field with a view of the city. Two young doctors from Africa led the midnight gathering with a spirited African chant, then asked everyone to sing their country’s national anthem. Anthem after anthem peacefully echoed in the darkness, in language after language: Hebrew, Hungarian, Swahili, Spanish, Norwegian, Czech, German, Swedish, French. As people from each country stepped into the center of the large circle to take their turn, it became clear that we were celebrating both our diversity and our unity at the same time. For one night, on top of a mysterious hill in central Europe, we created the united world of our dreams.
The next day 22 exhausted and inspired medical students from the US, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia retreated to the Hungarian village of Szentendre to prepare for the Soviet trip. We established a “buddy system” for rapid communication, reviewed logistics such as restrictions on photography and customs, and agreed to eschew meetings with dissidents to avoid possibly embarrassing our hosts and endangering the IPPNW network. Three students who spoke fluent Russian—Jeff Rapp from Philadelphia, Patrick Wedlake from Fort Worth, Texas, and Colin Cameron from Montreal—gave the rest of us a crash course in survival Russian. As a group, we made a commitment to help each other reach our common goal of making personal connections with Soviet people and encouraged each other to remain open, flexible, and good-humored in the face of uncertainty.
David had seen Academician Kuzin at the congress, and before he could remind him of who he was, Kuzin recognized him, broke into a big grin and slapped him on the back, saying in English, “You will have informal meetings with medical students.” Our mantra, apparently, had come through loud and clear in all those telexes and letters. Kuzin also said that one Soviet medical student and one doctor were going to travel with us after we left Moscow. Other than that, and the fact the Intourist had reserved hotels for us, we knew nothing of what was going to happen.
“The Soviets will show you only what they want you to see” were the words of warning running through our minds. Would we be trapped on an Intourist schedule that would account for every hour, morning to night? Would we have the feeling of being watched? Would our meetings with students be stiff and formal? Would we be free to explore on our own? Would people speak their minds to us, or would they simply repeat the party lines? We did not know.
We set our expectations accordingly. Patrick, despite his fluent Russian, said he would be satisfied if he simply had honest eye contact with one Soviet person. Laurel Wills, from Boston, who is fluent in sign language, wanted to meet a deaf Soviet person. Rob wanted to give a Russian a massage.
MOSCOW
The bus from the airport dropped us off at our hotel two blocks from the Kremlin. Our Intourist guide, Julia, went home; our first afternoon and evening were unscheduled, so we split into small groups and set off to explore Moscow. Many of us had brought phone numbers or addresses of people to meet. By the end of the evening, more than half of our group had wound up in a Soviet family’s home.
In one home, the grandmother of the family taught three members of our group a Russian dance, sang them songs on a guitar, and applied a home remedy to one person’s cold. When she learned that they were on a mission of peace, she told them, “When you go home, you tell your people that the Russians are good people and they don’t want war. And if they don’t believe you,” she said, producing a picture of her grandson with pride, “you tell them about my grandson Sasha.” The implication was that her grandson was such an obviously outstanding member of the human race that no one could continue to dislike the Soviet people once they had become acquainted with Sasha.
Colin and Peter Hanrath from the Netherlands went to the home of a member of the Communist Party, a pediatric oncologist whom Colin had met in Montreal. They were treated to a 12-year-old bottle of cognac and a running commentary on the evening TV news. We should pull the troops out of Afganistan, he said, but continue aid. He also said he did not have much respect for Brezhnev. “Did you say that when he was the Chairman of the Party?” asked Colin. “Yes,” he answered, “but in the right way and to the right people. Your freedom to yell at the government from the street corner,” he added, “is a meaningless right, because it accomplishes nothing.”
Meanwhile, Laurel and four others decided to wander the underground corridors of the Moscow metro. In the first five minutes on the subway car, she spotted some people signing to one another, and she immediately signed “Hello, we’re Americans.” Laurel spent much of the next three days with her instant friends, Vasily and Natasha. “Being deaf in a hearing world seems to involve the same issues the world over,” Laurel said later. “They were not Russians who happened to be deaf; rather, they were deaf people who happen to be Russian.”
The next day we began our tours of medical institutes. In the morning we visited the Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery, of which Academician Kuzin is the director. The chief of cardiac surgery, a dark-eyed, stocky man, greeted us at the door and immediately asked, “Who is interested in surgery?” Thinking he meant, “Who plans to be a surgeon?”, only a few people raised their hands. He signaled with a wave of his arm for them to follow him into an elevator. While the rest of the group toured the angiography department, eight of us changed into surgical scrubs while he asked if anyone had ever assisted an operation. Patrick nodded. Minutes later we were on the floor of an operating room watching Patrick (who fortunately once worked as a surgery technician at Stanford, and also spoke Russian) assisting Dr. Arnold Kaidash in open-heart surgery. We gaped at Dr. Kaidash’s extraordinary speed. “He’s the fastest around,” boasted a resident, “but he has to be—he’s the head of the department.” Dr. Kaidash, we later found out, would be the IPPNW physician designated by Kuzin to accompany us to Tashkent and Kiev.
We then set off for the First Moscow Medical Institute, the country’s foremost medical school. We were received by about twelve students and the dean of the pediatrics department of the institute, Academician Ludmilla Alexandrovna Isaeva. On a tour of the pediatrics hospital, we were shown a modern neonatal intensive care unit, and we played with a computer-controlled pulmonary function testing system; they seemed eager to show us their most modern technology, in a striking example of the national urge to appear to be “up with the West.”
We then were ushered into a conference room. On the wall hung a portrait of Lenin. Below was a color photograph, larger than Lenin’s portrait, of a baby with soft big eyes peering out from under a blanket.
Dr. Isaeva told us about her recent trip to Texas and how she was almost always warmly received. With good humor, however, she demonstrated the frozen smiles of the few with which it was not possible to establish an emotional connection. She spoke of international cooperation, exchange, and of our shared humanity. “She seemed to be speaking as she would to her family over a meal,” wrote Dan Gunther from California, afterward. “She was expressive, tender, compassionate, clearly embodying all the human qualities that are indispensable in a good healer. Yet she was Russian! In my first experience with a person of authority in the USSR I expected efficiency, no small amount of pomp and bombast, perhaps veiled antagonism, and here I was steam-rolled by a 60-year-old woman whom I am forced to describe as a cross between my finest medical school professors and my grandmother! Where were the hallmarks of the crushed human spirit?
“The eye contact in the room was constant and electric. Worry or distrust evaporated quickly in the air of mutual fascination. Across the room sat a dark-haired woman whose rapt attention to her dean was repeatedly broken by locking eyes with me over a table laden with Russian mineral water and American notebooks and ballpoint pens. The ambivalent sense of anticipation and hesitancy felt somehow like a junior high school dance. Who are you? Can we meet and talk? Will we have anything to say?”
Dr. Isaeva presented each member of our group with gifts, and to our delegation as a whole, gave a small reproduction of a statue located near the school which commemorates the Soviet doctors and nurses who lost their lives fighting the Nazis in World War II. In a short acceptance speech, Dan acknowledged the sacrifice of the USSR in the war, which left 20 million dead and 35 million wounded. Our countries worked together to end that war, he said, and now must work together to prevent World War III. As he embraced the dean, tears welled in her eyes.
That evening at the International Youth Festival Club, small tables, loud music, the ever-present bottles of mineral water (the trademark of citizen diplomacy in the Soviet Union), and about 35 medical students greeted us. In addition to the students whom we had just seen, there were East Germans, Czechoslovakians, and Hungarians, who happened to be in Moscow on a two-week “study tour.” Their English, in general, was much better than our Russian. We spoke of our homes, schools, family, career plans. But there was a level of intensity to the discussions and attendant eye contact which was often out of proportion to the content of the conversations.
Some conversations, however, did turn to politics. Anne-Thea McGill from New Zealand introduced Gale to Dmitri from Moscow, who “wanted to meet an American.” Dmitri had two burning questions. Why doesn’t the US declare a policy against the first use of nuclear weapons, as the USSR has? And why is the US so vigorously pursuing Star Wars? His tone revealed that his aim was not to provoke controversy or score points; rather, he sincerely sought to understand an unedited American viewpoint. “America is a great country,” he said, “but I can’t make any sense out of these policies.”
David explained the American political system to three Czechs who listened with rapt attention. They were amazed to hear that the U.S. Congress can actually overrule the president. And having always pictured the American peace movement as standing completely outside of and in opposition to a monolithic government totally controlled by military generals, the military industry, and other capitalists, they were surprised to hear that some members of the government, such as some congressmen, are closely allied with the peace movement.
The smallest and most unexpected things sometimes seemed to have the greatest impact on them. Merely listening to how we had independently organized this trip was mind-bending. One future pediatrician was shocked to hear there really was no equivalent to Komsomol, or the Young Communist League, in the United States. One Moscow student was taken aback by a beautiful photograph of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona; U.S. Indian reservations are often obliquely equated to Nazi concentration camps, complete with barbed wire, in the Soviet press. “Can the Indians leave the reservation?” he managed to ask. An analog would have been listening to him cheerfully describe his two-week vacation in a Siberian labor camp.
Earlier that day, at the end of our visit to the Vishnevsky Institute, we had locked horns with Julia, our Intourist guide; we had wanted to stay and talk informally with the young doctors we had just met, and she wanted to get us to lunch so that we could keep to the schedule. She had had no prior warning that we were on a special mission and had “come to talk.” But by the end of the first day, our enthusiasm—and tactful, thoughtful explanations of our goals—had won her over. At the youth club, she was having a wonderful time translating some lively political conversations. To our amazement, she called the hotel and postponed dinner two hours so that we could continue talking!
Julia accompanied us for the entire trip and irrevocably altered our stereotypes about Intourist guides. Every day the student leaders—Rob, Gale, and David—met with Julia to reschedule appointments to allow for maximum time in informal meetings with medical students and to cancel sightseeing tours to allow for free time to explore the cities. She never once asked where people were going if they were not joining the group; often, less than half the group attended the few tourism events that were scheduled, but this presented no problem. Flexible, helpful, sincere, fascinating in her explanations of how the Soviets view various issues, Julia took care of all the many details and left us free to concentrate on diplomacy. By the end of the trip, she had joined our late-night parties and become a friend.
The next day we visited the Second Moscow Medical Institute. In the chemistry library, we spotted a poster titled “From Whence the Threat to Peace,” depicting large color pictures of American weapons and a map showing a dark brown North America bristling with missiles bearing down on an innocently pink USSR from over the north pole. The biochemistry professor’s polite speech was interrupted as we gawked and snapped photographs. “What, have you never seen pictures of American weapons?” teased Julia. We have, we assured her—what’s fascinating is seeing them here.
About forty students were waiting for us in a large auditorium; after welcoming speeches by a dean of the school and Academician Galina Savelyeva (an active member of the Soviet branch of IPPNW), the dean said, “Now it is time for our informal discussion; are there any questions or comments?” His vision of an informal discussion was 70 people talking through one microphone! Rob whispered to Academician Savelyeva that we would prefer small group discussions; she nudged the dean; moments later, he said: “Well, I think we’ve done enough talking about what we need to do. Why don’t you students just start doing it? Make friends and save the world. You don’t need us.” He and the other administrators promptly filed out of the room, leaving us smiling at each other shyly. In a few minutes, conversations were going full swing.
Jeff spoke in Russian with several students who eventually invited him, and the rest of our group, to dinner at their medical-school-operated summer camp on the edge of Moscow the next night. The entire next day was unscheduled, and that evening, about half of our group rode the subway to the last stop, where we had arranged to meet these students and ride with them on a bus to their camp. They met us on the subway platform, and we instantly knew something was up. Sveta and Dima began to speak rapidly in Russian with Jeff. The rest of us—eight Soviet and ten American and Canadian medical students—waited to hear.
“There’s a problem,” Jeff explained. “They say their camp is just outside the 30-kilometer limit for foreigners, and we’d need special permission. So we can’t go.” They looked as disappointed as we did. How about if we all go out to a cafe or restaurant near here and just talk? Jeff suggested in Russian. The students looked uncomfortable. “We don’t have time, because we have a lot of work to do at the camp and we have to get back,” said Dima. We felt the gulf between us widening. “How about if we just go up to the surface with them and take a look around?” an American suggested, and Jeff translated. “Of course,” they said, and we headed up. Everyone seemed relieved to have a course of action. Meanwhile, nagging uncertainties had set in. Did their supervisors tell them to disinvite us? Did they themselves change their minds? Did they want us to come, but couldn’t justify the risk? The risk of what? Or were they simply telling us the truth?
We stood amidst the high-rise apartment buildings, weedy fields, and construction cranes that mark the outskirts of the city, next to a wide boulevard with cars and buses whizzing past. Jeff and the Soviet students came up with another idea, and soon the whole group was heading down the sidewalk toward the city; our ostensible goal, “to see the institute down the street.” This metamorphosed into “seeing the university,” which meant taking a bus ride for two stops and walking another mile.
All mention of “having to get back to work” faded as animated discussions erupted on all sides. We showed photographs, traded words of Russian and English, and sang with the guitar that one American wore strapped over his shoulders. A serene 19-year-old woman named Lena said she had studied the piano intensively at a high school that specialized in music before she decided to become a doctor. She also loved poetry, so David gave her a copy of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island.
Things were going so well, in fact, that at one of our intermediate destinations — a sculpture in a park near Moscow State University commemorating the Soviet students who had died in World War II—we suggested simply sitting down in a circle together in the grass under the trees, the better to trade music and stories. The Soviets hesitated. Finally, Sveta said, apologetically, “We don’t feel comfortable sitting down here with you.” Once again we were conscious of how close to the boundary of what is possible and what is not possible we were hovering, how we were pushing things up to their conceivable limits. It is okay, barely, to give the crazy Western students a tour. It is not okay to sit down with them in a park. The mere fact that the Soviet students so clearly were wavering — were not completely sure what was okay and what wasn’t—showed us that this “line” was tacit, not explicit, and subject to individual judgment and personality. Already, we sensed, their strong desire to be with us had made them go way out on a limb. We accepted their judgement about sitting without a murmur. And kept walking.
There were many times in Moscow when the 22 people on the tour split in 22 different directions, and the list of individual adventures is too long to include here. For example, four of us attended Sunday morning services at a Baptist church in Moscow. The church was overflowing with people; the staircases and halls were filled with worshippers listening to the sermon on a loudspeaker. We were quietly ushered into the main hall, which was packed with more than six hundred people— many “babushkas” in brightly colored scarfs, but also a number of young people and children. A strong-voiced, 100 member choir sang many hymns during the service. The emotional intensity in the church was deeply moving; many Soviets cried during the service and embraced us afterward.
After the service, we met one of the church pastors in his office. He explained how they do their best to work within the system; for example, religious classes are not allowed, so they have three different choirs that meet three times a week for two-hour-long rehearsals that “happen to include” discussions of the Bible. He explained how they have worked in a nonconfrontational way to slowly build the church, and said with pride that they have 17 Baptist churches in the Moscow area and nearly 10,000 Baptist converts a year in the Soviet Union. Officially, the church supports the government’s economic and political policy, but officially differs from Party ideology when it comes to a belief in God. Nevertheless, the church has a license and leases its buildings from the state. When asked what changes he would like to see in government policy toward religious worship, he looked us straight in the eye and said, “What we have in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
One member of our group and a woman medical student whom he met at the Second Moscow Medical Institute were immediately and powerfully attracted to one another. He wrote a poem on the spot to win her home phone number. They spent a remarkable, emotionally intense day and evening together in Gorky Park and her apartment. The reality of the divided world we live in—the painful boundaries between our nations that they knew would inevitably force them apart—made their time together bittersweet. Yet their instant deep connection with one another illustrated yet again the artificiality of those boundaries.
TASHKENT
Tashkent, the capital of the Republic of Uzbekistan, is the fourth largest city in the USSR and is located near the borders of Afghanistan and China. With a complicated 3000 year history of ruler overthrown by ruler, its 70 years as part of the USSR forms only a veneer over an ancient Central Asian culture. A dozen students from the Tashkent Medical Institute greeted us with carnations at the airport in the 105-degree heat.
The next day we toured the Tashkent Medical Institute, where researchers are currently testing 80 plant alkaloids isolated from traditional herbal medicines for pharmaceutical utility. We discovered what some of us considered to be antediluvian attitudes about population growth, which is encouraged because more people means more workers, which means more development of the vast reaches of the USSR. While abortions are common, contraceptives are difficult to obtain.
In the kidney dialysis unit of the Tashkent Medical Institute, we asked a physician what criteria they used to decide which patients get first priority access to dialysis machines. He said, “Everybody who needs dialysis gets dialysis.” If there are limited machines in the West, there must certainly be here. For a Soviet representative to honestly answer a question like that in public requires a level of trust that often doesn’t exist. It requires admitting an inadequacy of the system to foreign strangers, who time and time again have ridiculed the Soviet system.
And they really feel it when we do that. Julia said that she’s seen in Western magazines such as Time unflattering photos of the USSR. When people in the West see those photos, she said with a twinge of pain, “They must be laughing at us.”
After we toured the institute an Uzbekistan television crew handed a microphone to Rob, Jeff, and Myrto Contogouris from Montreal, and gave them two minutes each to say whatever they liked while the cameras rolled. Jeff spoke in Russian, which made a great impression. They appeared that night on the evening news. Later that day we were interviewed by a staff reporter from, the eastern edition of Pravda, and two days later an extensive article quoting David, Rob, and Colin appeared together with a photograph of some of us talking with Uzbek students. While we made other appearances in the Soviet press—with, various members of our group, for example, airing on Radio Kiev, Radio Tashkent, and Radio Budapest—the Uzbekistan press seemed particularly interested in us, perhaps because fewer Westerners travel there on citizen diplomacy missions.
At a Tashkent Friendship Society meeting, however, we ran head-on into some of the paradoxes of Soviet attitudes toward foreigners. In general, our IPPNW connections meant that we had little contact with the two Soviet organizations which usually handle receptions for foreigners, the Friendship Society, and the Peace Committee. However, we explicitly requested one meeting with a Friendship Society so that we would know what that aspect of Soviet citizen diplomacy is like. Although enthusiastic lip service was paid to the need for more communication between Soviets and Americans, most of the meeting was absorbed by speeches, and we had only talked informally with the two dozen medical students present for 30 minutes when we were literally shooed out the back door for a group photo and then to our bus.
By this time we had learned to think quickly in such situations. A number of us told Julia that the bus could leave without us—we would walk back to the hotel. The Tashkent students lingered with us in front of the Friendship Society building. Someone suggested going for ice cream. A dozen of us wound up in an ice cream parlor and continued talking, swapping pictures, and telling jokes for several hours.
One of them, Elmira, spent the entire next day with three women from our group. Elmira loves Tashkent and could imagine living nowhere else. She was happy to show her city to her new American friends. She is proud of her Uzbek heritage but appreciates the changes the Revolution wrought in the status of women; she wants to become a pulmonary physiologist. Another student entertained three members of our group in a park until midnight, telling them stories about life in Tashkent and his 96- year-old Armenian grandmother.
The pace of life in Tashkent, in general, was more mellow than in Moscow, and the government seemed more removed from daily life. Few of the Tashkent students had burning political questions, and they seemed more relaxed about being seen with foreigners in public. After our intense bout of citizen diplomacy in Moscow, we were ready for some comparatively restful tourism, so we requested a bus trip to Samarkand, an ancient city on the old silk trade route, where the many beautiful mosques and courtyards prompted one member of our trip to say, “It was just like stepping into an Arabian Nights fairy tale.”
While most of the group went to Samarkand, Rob stayed in Tashkent to rest, but then happened to make eye contact with some young Uzbek men who were standing around in the shade. Rob speaks very little Russian and no Uzbek, and the only English words the three men knew were “Camaro,” “Z-Z-Top,” and “Mick Jaggar.” But somehow, Rob learned they had a car. And for the next four hours, they cruised the streets of Tashkent—picking up girlfriends, dropping them off, stopping for gas, and being, of course, cool. It was American Graffiti. Uzbek style. There was no hesitation in these young men about adopting an American for a day. Rob felt thoroughly accepted as “one of the guys.”
Tashkent was also where we started really getting to know Vladimir Popov and Dr. Arnold Kaidash, the Soviet medical student and cardiac surgeon who met us in the airport just before leaving for Tashkent, and who accompanied us for the rest of our journey. Vladimir, whom we had met at the Budapest Congress, quickly became “Volodya,” and was always ready with a good joke, quick assistance in translation, or a detailed answer to our endless questions. It was a privilege to come to know at least one Soviet medical student for a week instead of hours. Dr. Kaidash, meanwhile, quickly became “Dr. K,” and he fondly referred to us as his “kindergarten.” Dr. K encouraged us to speak out, to say what was on our minds. “Did you tell this to the Pravda reporter?” he said after David presented him with an impassioned argument for why student exchanges were vital. “Next time you speak, say this.” Although he had an incorrigible sense of humor, he answered our questions about the Soviet Union thoughtfully and seriously. “You have 12 days here,” he said once, “and you should ask 12 million questions.”
KIEV
Arriving in green Kiev was returning to Europe, a familiar part of the world. On our first morning, we toured the Kiev Research Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and Gynecology, and met the director, Academician Elena Lukyanova, who is a leader in the Soviet affiliate of IPPNW as well as the chair of the Ukrainian Women’s Committee. She gave us a hearty reception and again emphasized the importance of contact between East and West to increase understanding and prevent war. While touring her institute, we learned that acupuncture is routinely used to minimize pain during deliveries, and saw hypnosis being used to treat pregnancy-related anxiety. While in Kiev, we also visited Ukraine’s largest psychiatric hospital, a primary-care “polyclinic,” the Kiev Institute of Gerontology, and an institute which researches occupational health.
By this time we felt an urge to say something in response to all of the speeches we had heard about the Soviet desire for peace. We wanted to ask provocative questions, the sorts of questions we were going to get asked when we returned. We began asking about Afghanistan and dissidents. The Holy Grail we were after was some kind of deviation from the party line, some kind of admittance of a variety of opinion, with iying possibilities of flexibility and change. We submitted them to a kind of litmus test for trust; the more they would publicly disagree with their government, the more we would trust them.
Yet in a public forum, these questions never produced anything other than typical responses. Someone in our group asked Dr. Lukyanova, “What about Angola? Ethiopia? Afghanistan?” Her polite answer, summarized, was “What about Viet Nam? Nicaragua? The Philippines? Chile?” It went nowhere. We got the ego-rush of asking “the real questions” for the sake of asking them, not with any thought of how this made our Soviet friends feel, or whether this line of questioning was a productive way to increase understanding.
A meeting with about forty students at the Kiev Medical Institute soon illustrated even more vividly the importance of really trying to understand how the Soviets view things, even when we don’t agree with that view.
After several physicians and deans gave welcoming speeches, the Komsomol (Young Communist League) leader for the school, who was running the meeting, called up several of his classmates to give rather similar speeches (all of which had to be translated) and then invited one of us to speak. Rob gave a very short speech emphasizing our desire to break into small groups and get to know one another. Apparently ignoring the hint, the Komsomol leader motioned to another Soviet student to give a speech. Then he asked for another speech from the American side. We began to catch on: his idea of a medical student meeting was trading speeches ad infinitum. We—as well as many of the Soviet students—grew restless, and started introducing ourselves in whispers. Progressive anarchy ensued as the whispering became so loud that the speech-makers could barely be heard. Finally, one of us stood up and explained so directly that we wanted to start making friends on a personal level that the Komsomol leader had no choice but to dissolve the meeting’s structure. Pent-up conversations broke out at full volume.
At last, we had experienced some infamous Soviet inflexibility. Many of us were angry and frustrated. Why had this Komsomol guy wanted to waste so much time in speechmaking?
The next day we took a bus to the Kiev Medical Institute’s sports camp on the edge of town, operated by the institute for students, staff, and alumni. At last, a day to be with students with no agenda! We played lively games of tag, soccer, frisbee; we floated on a tributary of the River Dneiper in rowboats; we planted a “peace garden” of lilies, ate a sumptuous feast of traditional Ukrainian food, and talked and talked. One student found religion fascinating, and he had studied the world’s great religions in his required “atheism course.” (After discussing each religion, the textbooks describe how it has been used by the elite to oppress the masses.) Rob spoke to him at length about Judaism and the concept of “inner peace.”
In a sunny meadow about forty of us—half Soviet, half from the West—sat down in a circle with three guitars and Rob’s saxophone and started trading Ukrainian folk songs for American jazz. After a few songs, the Komsomol leader joined us and started singing, too. Thinking about the meeting the day before, we wondered what he thought of us. We must have made it terribly difficult for him while he stood before his school’s administration, his big chance to make a good impression on them.
By this time we had heard that many students had prepared speeches for that meeting. One stayed up half the night translating the speech into English but never had a chance to give it. The Komsomol leader was trying to give his classmates a chance to give the speeches they had prepared.
What had happened? Two utterly different concepts of citizen diplomacy had collided in mid-course. We were completely convinced that the only meaningful way to structure a student meeting was to quickly segue from introductory speeches into individuals meeting individuals, a reflection of our Western society that stresses individual action and power. They, on the other hand, were equally sure that this “student meeting” was a chance to perform a courtship ritual between their student organization and our student organization, where representatives from each group trade speeches to emphasize the group’s commitment to better relations—a sensible approach in Soviet society, where individuals acting outside of organizations have little power.
In our dogged pursuit of small group discussions, we were being just as inflexible as they were. We had just as fixed an idea of how the meeting ought to go, and we were as unwilling to relinquish it. It is an ever-tempting trap in the USSR to fall into a competitive mindset where every deviation from the Soviets’ planned schedule is perceived as a “victory.” Ultimately both sides got what they wanted—they got a total of 13 speeches, and we got thirty minutes of small group discussions and an hour-and-a-half of walking and talking with the students on the way back to our hotel—but it took some compromising on both sides. Meanwhile, we lost a valuable opportunity to clearly state a Western point of view and ask questions with everyone’s attention and a professional translating every word.
Our interactions with the Kiev students were not all sunny meadows and happy songs. Jeff was grilled by two aggressive male students (“beer-drinking frat guys,” he later called them) with questions like, “So is it true that 70% of all of your elementary children are heroin addicts?” (We shuddered to think how Vladimir would be similarly interrogated were he to show up in certain quarters of any American campus.) At times promising relationships would seem to deteriorate as quickly as they had grown. Gerry, from Southern California, found that two Soviet students with whom he had spent an afternoon playing soccer refused to accept American T-shirts as gifts. This was especially puzzling since others in our group were at the same time presenting their new friends’ far more controversial gifts— such as contemporary American books—which were gratefully accepted.
In a particularly bizarre incident, Myrto asked three students with whom she had been conversing for some time on the beach why Soviet people were not allowed inside Intourist hotels. They looked disturbed, talked rapidly among themselves in Russian, and then simply turned their backs on her as if she and her question did not exist.
All in all, it wasn’t always easy to figure out what was going on. On one of our last nights in Kiev, we crammed our entire group into a hotel room and poured out our conflicting feelings, thoughts, and anecdotes. What message were we bringing home? Had we answered the questions we had hoped to answer?
We had succeeded in meeting informally with more than a hundred Soviet medical students. We had talked about politics, homosexuality, censorship, Ethiopia, women in medicine, ecology, and the role of the press. We had collected dozens of addresses and promises to write, had shared laughter, food, and dreams, and had felt, in some individual cases, that even in a very brief time we had become good friends.
We had talked about nuclear war and had found them conversant with its consequences and unanimous in their conviction it must be prevented at all costs. Although a few had eagerly asked us questions to increase their understanding about the arms race, most had repeated their government’s viewpoint, which is that the Soviets have made a number of arms control initiatives that the United States has ignored, and therefore the United States is to blame for the arms race.
We had listened to them say over and over that they wanted peace. Yet we weren’t satisfied. We were puzzled by their occasional hesitation about meeting with us later, their echoing of the adult position on arms, control, their sometimes astonishingly ingenious questions (“Why aren’t you a Communist?”). Their questions about America were often polite and somewhat restrained. Perhaps they avoided asking us about unemployment and crime for the same reasons we avoided asking them about neighborhood watchdogs. Even after long and sincere conversations, they were sometimes hesitant to give out their addresses. One student had hastily scribbled an address in Russian which turned out to be nothing more than the Main Post Office in Moscow.
All of these mysteries had made us uncertain and doubtful. How could they really mean their rhetoric about wanting “better relations and more communication” if they didn’t even feel comfortable about being with us outside of formal sessions?
We discovered a tendency in ourselves to jump on the slightest hint of “evil empire intentions” and interpret the worst. We were constantly on the lookout for being duped. For example, on the first night in Moscow, when a few people in our group left the apartment of that wonderful grandmother late at night, she bade them be very quiet in the hallway. Oh no, they thought, it was dangerous for her that we were here; she is trying to sneak us out without anyone noticing. Then she explained—she simply didn’t want to wake up the neighbors! When she said that, they suddenly realized how much “evil empire” baggage they carried around with them!
Yet this skepticism also was healthy. Frequently groups of people dedicated to ending the Cold War and creating peace who journey to the Soviet Union find it very difficult to see or accept any of the distressing aspects of that society. They find an odd comfort in the belief that the main transgressions in this area belong to the United States. They deny, they apologize, they compare the U.S.’s vices to the USSR’s virtues. This, too, can become a simplistic trap.
Many of these concepts flew back and forth during this meeting. We had widely divergent views of how ‘protected’ we felt. One of us later told a newspaper that she felt as if she was behind two-inch-thick glass the whole time in the USSR. Other people in the group had no trouble finding explanations for the Soviet students’ behavior that did not invoke the ‘evil empire’ theory. Just think of the reverse situation, they said. “How would you feel if a wild pack of Communist students descended on your school and immediately began pressing for your home address and telephone number?” One of us said gently that just because we had journeyed so many miles to meet them did not obligate the Soviet students to make us the center of their universe, even for a few days. It was quite possible that “I’d like to, but I have to be in surgery,” was not an excuse but the truth. It was not knowing that disturbed us. The building of real trust, we realized, was in its infancy.
We also talked about our desires to jolt their preconceptions, to truly advance mutual understanding. Many Soviet students had a very dim understanding of the role of individual action or public opinion in the United States. In a classic example of “mirror-imaging,” they seemed to feel that the American people were not the problem, but rather the American government. During the Kiev meeting Gale had asked four girls, through one named Olga who spoke English, what images they had of America. They paused for a moment. “It is the strongest and most powerful of the capitalist countries, it is a very beautiful country, and the American people are very beautiful people.” Are they taught to fear America? No, they said, they are not. Doug, from Montreal, then asked: “If you don’t fear America, then why do you have nuclear bombs?” They stared blankly. “We didn’t build the first one,” Olga replied a little defensively. “I know that,” Doug replied. “But if I’m a mother, and two of my children are fighting, does it matter which one of them started it when it comes to putting an end to it?”
If they presented paradoxes to us, what paradoxes we presented to them! We didn’t quite fit their images of “progressive young people” (a catch-phrase which means “on our side”). We were pro-peace, but not pro-Soviet or pro-communism; we freely disagreed with our president’s policies, yet seemed fairly content with the system that had produced him. Unexpectedly, one of our most important messages was communicating that we are not Communists, not likely to become so, and can, even in our work for peace, criticize and find fault with the Soviet system. Though we are here in order to learn more about your point of view, we often told them, you must make an effort to better understand how Westerners view the situation.
We invited Vladimir to this hotel room meeting. When he arrived and saw us having a very serious conversation, he looked pretty startled, turned on his heels and said perhaps we wouldn’t feel good about speaking freely if he was there. We assured him that his presence would not diminish our candor. It didn’t. For about two hours, he quietly listened to us bring up our experiences, both positive and negative, and analyze them. Perhaps few Soviet people have ever heard Westerners bare their true frustrations, uncertainties, and stubborn feelings of hope about being in the Soviet Union.
One thing we all agreed upon: the gaps of understanding uncovered by our experiences made the necessity of continuing dialogue in further exchanges all the more compelling.
Several of us spent our last day in the USSR at the huge, newly opened Kiev War Memorial. “The Baba,” Dr. K said, motioning toward an enormous stainless steel female warrior figure which now dominates the Kiev skyline. (“Baba” is an unflattering term used to describe an old peasant woman who is too stout to bend over and touch the ground.) “The people across the river are afraid to look out of their windows in the morning,” he continued. “You don’t like it?” “Yes, I do not like it,” he said with a chuckle. “It would be better if she were to fall over and become another bridge across the Dneiper.”
The memory of World War II is ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and it dominates Soviet attitudes about war and peace. Two themes are present in every memorial and in every poster commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war: heroism and pain. In the stirring nationalistic music, the glittering medals bedecking solemn veterans, the statues of muscled men brandishing weapons and protecting women, the militaristic peace slogans such as “Peace has been won and peace will be defended,” the war emerges as a time of heroism, the greatest hour of the Soviet Union. The war is used in propaganda to justify military might, to glorify the strong and fearless Soviet defense posture, and to rationalize the expenditure of huge amounts of the country’s resources on arms under the banner, “Never again will we be so unprepared.”
At the same time, the memory of the war also keeps alive a visceral and broad-based understanding of the horror of war and inflames a very real and widespread desire to avoid another one at all costs. The Soviets know what war means in ways which Americans cannot.
“Is that a nuclear missile?” Gale asked Dr. Kaidash, pointing to a gleaming white rocket among an outdoor display of World War II military equipment on the war memorial grounds. “Let’s go and see,” he responded. He, David, and Gale split off from the Intourist tour and wandered into the display. In front of the missile was a sign giving its range as 2000 kilometers. As we contemplated this vivid reminder of what had brought us to the Soviet Union, Dr. Kaidash told us about his experiences in World War II. When he was five years old, he spent two silent months in a Ukrainian cellar with his sister and mother, eating bits of food that a 12-year-old neighbor boy would gather at night, and listening to the bombs.
Dr. Kaidash was having trouble finding words to express his feelings standing beneath a Soviet nuclear missile with his two young American friends. He picked up his satchel and pretended, in slow motion, to hurl it at this missile. Then he said, “We could get rid of all these, and nothing would happen.” Countries would not suddenly start invading one another. The bombs serve no useful purpose other than to threaten the entire planet. We could simply get rid of them. As we left, he said with a sincerity that moved us deeply, “My dream is for my 15-year-old twin sons to not have to go into the army.”
Dr. Kaidash is a 23-year-member of the Communist Party in good standing. While many Soviets are firm believers in “peace through strength” doctrines and believe that the USSR should base its security on its military might alone, Dr. K is a member of that wing of the party which believes superpower relations can be based on communication, not force. Spending that day with him, feeling that sense of common purpose and common vision as we faced the missile, our common enemy, enabled David and Gale to leave the USSR with a profound feeling of hope.
During our trip, we received ample confirmation of the simple belief so many people travel to the Soviet Union to discover: that the Soviets are people, too, and no differences in ideologies or political systems can possibly justify the existence of 50,000 nuclear weapons on the planet and even the remotest chance that they might be used.
But we were looking for something more. All of us were disarmament activists in our own communities, and all of us had endured the frustrations and blockages that arise from the common rejoinder to such messages: “Well, of course, the Russians are people too, but the problem is not the people, it’s the government.” A common American belief is that while the Soviet people might be rather normal, their government is a separate and evil thing that must be challenged “in the only language it understands.”
With people like Academician Chazov and Dr. K, the distinction between the government and the people blurs. Our freewheeling trip represents encouraging evidence that a shift in Soviet attitudes toward foreigners may be slowly evolving. The Soviet desire for security, which historically has been exaggerated into paranoia and xenophobia, is being increasingly offset by a recognition on the part of many Soviets that avoiding war in the nuclear age depends more on good relations and greater communication than it does on having the latest sophisticated military gadget.
Soon after we returned to the United States, one of the East German medical students we had met in Moscow wrote us a letter describing a popular book written by an East German author about living in the USA for one year, called Living on Another Planet. “But in Moscow I felt that you are not from ‘another planet,'” wrote our friend. “It was a good feeling and I become hungry to know much more about you and U.S.A. I understood there is not only one ‘Voice of America,’ there are 200,000,000 voices of America. Now I will start to complete the USA puzzle. You said many people believe we are hopelessly naive to try to protect world peace with contacts over the ‘wall.’ But it is the only chance for us.”
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David Kreger and Gale Warner
November 1985