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Street-Level Perestroika
| Article
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13580 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
3,008 Words |
| Author
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Larry Moffitt
Larry Moffitt, executive director of the World Media
Association, frequently travels throughout the Soviet Union,
meeting public officials and private citizens. Moffitt holds a
master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas. |
We were all sitting naked as jaybirds in a public sauna in Leningrad. Our new acquaintance smiled and said in thickly accented English, "So, vat you think of Red menace?"
The comrade is a mechanical engineer who had taken the day off to visit the sauna with a group of friends and a bucket of warm beer. The routine there, at least in the men's section, is to endure the torturous dry-heat sauna and then walk through an ice-water shower on the way to the steam bath. To further test their machismo, the men sit on the hottest level in the bath and flail each other's backs with birch branches.
The final ritual is to retire to semicomfortable wooden recliners and sip beer. Russian public saunas have none of the homosexual associations of American bathhouses and are a popular weekday gathering place for anyone one who can find an excuse to leave work for the afternoon.
Our engineer friend acted as an interpreter for the dozen or so others who joined in an animated conversation that touched on Afghanistan, Vietnam, wife-beating, Joan Baez, and the need for better Soviet ice cream, among other topics--including our eagerly awaited thoughts on the Red menace.
The tone was friendly and candid, ending with a toast as our friend said in Russian, then in English, "You're not afraid of us and we're not afraid of you. So here's to that."
Visitors to the USSR usually fall into one of two groups: tourists who visit the museums and czars' palaces of "guidebook Russia" and official delegations of professionals, government leaders, or clergy on political fact-finding tours. The latter groups' days are filled predictable sermons by official spokesmen.
A third group, composed of members of the first two, are those who opt out of their printed itineraries to ride the subways and streetcars, poke their noses in shops, and talk with the many people who, wanting to meet a foreigner, simply walk up and introduce themselves.
Out with Intourist
The objective for these street-level tourists is to get lost and, through the process of getting unlost, meet the average Ivan and learn as much as one can about daily life in the USSR. The process is unscientific and subject to
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