Peter was 23 and an architecture student in Leningrad. He was eager to talk, and so we spent several evenings together in youth cafes or walking along the hundreds of canals that crisscross the city. Words spilled out of him in an excited, headlong flow:
"We've done great things in industry here. We've really found something about how a nation can grow. But the other things--art, writing--are still infantile. I learned Polish five years ago so I could read their writers and journalists, their translations of your writers. Today it's better. We can get your novels, and even some Western newspapers and magazines if we really want to. But we still have a long way to go. We want most what is forbidden--like abstract art. Our music is the freest. The politicians can't understand it, so they don't try to control it. But our architecture--terrible. You've seen the University in Moscow? The Church of Socialism, we call it. And these new apartment buildings? Paper boxes. It's good that people are getting houses for the first time. But we haven't learned how to make them look human.
"The trouble with our newspapers, our schools, is that good things are cheapened, become cliches. Take Marx. Now we have all our Marxism in formulas like chemistry or math. All answers to all problems. But if you have a book by Salinger and a book by Marx you'll read Salinger. People forget that Marx really said things. About man, about contact between people, about a better society."
Once we were walking through an old part of the city and Peter stopped in front of a statue. He asked me if I'd read much Russian history and I said no. "No? That's too bad. If you knew more about our history before the Revolution, you might forgive us for some of the things that have happened since then. The Stalin time--that's what we all ask about now: Why did it happen? How could it happen? Stalin himself was not the only cause. The people believed him; they did what he told them to because they were used to it. They always had someone tell them 'do this,' 'do that.' Someday they will believe in themselves, and not wait for somebody to tell them what to do, what to think. That's what we need: people who believe in themselves. But the time of Stalin was not all bad. Our industry grew then. And intellectually, too, something grew. It was a lesson. Today everybody asks why? why? why did it happen? The question is the center of our intellectual life. Because of that it will not happen again."
Peter was surprised when I told him that many American students are becoming interested in Africa and Latin America. He said that there was no similar interest among Russian students. If this is true, it is easy to see why: The Soviet Union is in many ways an underdeveloped country itself. Young people can find all the excitement and challenge they want at home, without joining a Peace Corps and going to Africa. Peter had worked for two summers in the "Virgin Lands" in Siberia. "The first time I went because I was a Komsomol member and they told me it was my duty," he said. "But the second time I went because I wanted to. I had seen something I liked there: a better side of life, a cleaner side of people that comes out when you work together out of doors, when you get up at six in the morning to plant crops and biuld houses. Here in Leningrad things are old. There is much culture, much talk. Like Western Europe. But in Siberia we had something exciting, something new.
"You Americans should be able to understand this. You were a pioneer country once too ... Sometimes I think there are no two peoples in the world as alike as we are. We have big countries. Much land. No horizons. A sense of power. We care about big ideas. And we both think we have all the answers for the rest of the world ..."
Business-like, Narrow, Hard
Being a Russian college student is hard work. Soviet students study more than their American counterparts, and spend less time on girls, sports, and talk. I wasn't there in the spring, but I imagine they do less sunbathing on riverbanks.
The curriculum in a university or other higher educational institution is tough and practical. They study their specialty for five years, with no time for exploring other fields or getting what we call a "liberal education." Even a student of English in one of the many Foreign Language Institutes studies English and practically nothing else.
This businesslike and narrow style of education is slightly out of date. In its early years the U.S.S.R. needed scientists, teachers, and technicians desperately. But today Soviet technology has sent men into space, education is universal, and the consumer is beginning to reap the benefits of industrialization.
Today's Soviet youth are the first to grow up free of Stalinism. They are also the first generation to grow up with famine, poverty, and war. Impatient at the restrictions that remain to hamper life, they are nevertheless glad to be Soviet citizens in an age of promise. They can drain a glass of vodka with a single swallow. They read every new Russian novel from cover to cover, and they know (in translation) Hemingway and Salinger better than I do.
The Slogans of Journalism
In Kiev a university student invited me to visit his dormitory. I spent an afternoon talking to him and his three roommates, all journalism students and about 25 years old.
In their 5-year program they studied nothing but "journalism," except for a little Soviet history and one foreign language. And they studied every angle of it: writing about industry and agriculture, writing book reviews, writing for radio and TV, setting type and operating printing presses. This technical instruction is probably good for a subservient and uncritical Soviet journalist, but it seemed to me a poor substitute for courses in politics and history that might really produce good writers.
There is a strong effort made to keep the journalist from becoming isolated from other classes and professions. Only young people who have worked for two years after leaving high school are admitted to the university's journalism school. And each journalism student must work full-time at a factory or collective farm for for several months editing its news-paper.
The students I met had very different ambitions. One said that journalism was just a beginning: "My real ambition is to write like Hemingway." He showed me a folder full of stories and poems he had written. Another wanted to be an art critic. The third wanted to write "against bureaucracy."
Although they were annoyed by the restrictions on them (not being able to travel to the West, not being able to get Western newspapers and magazines), these students were still very idealistic. They felt an excitement at simply being alive at that particular place and time which I have hardly ever seen in American students. They spoke as if they were entering a new profession. "In our country we have industry now, so the time has come to concentrate on other things: improving cultural life and political organization, developing a critical sense among the people."
They have a refreshing aversion to the slogans of Soviet journalism, and enjoyed making fun of them. At one point a girl friend of one of the students, wearing high heels and a lot of make-up, came into the room. When I asked her what she did she said she she worked in a factory. "Now you are meeting a real member of the Russian working class," said one of the boys, and they all roared with laughter. "You see," said another, "here in the Soviet Union all classes coexist happily--workers, students, and everybody." They laughed again.
The students could not have been more friendly, and when I left they firmly sent their greetings to the journalists and students of America." But I had the feeling that they were really not very interested in America. They wanted American things--both material wealth and more freedom of expression--but they never asked how their American counterparts believed or thought. They did most of the talking and only asked a few hesitant questions: "Why do you treat your Negroes so badly?" "How big a stipend does an American university student get?" Whenever there was a pause in the conversation they would always ask me, eagerly, what further questions I had about Soviet student life.
And the Assassination
I was in Kiev when Kennedy was shot. I heard the news on the radio two hours after he died. The next day's morning and evening news-papers sold out in a few minutes. Everything was fully reported in the Soviet press (even that Oswald had lived in Russia) and the funeral was on television, relayed by Telstar satellite.
When Oswald was killed, the news-papers began hinting that the whole business was a right-wing conspiracy. Kennedy became a hero in the Soviet press who had bravely protected the American people from the fanatics who finally did him in.
A few days after the assassination I was at a reception at Kiev University. Noticing I was an American, several students came over to offer their condolences. "You shouldn't let these extremists get away with such things," one of them said. "When the an-archists tried to kill Lenin here we had the Red Terror against them. That stopped them. You people should try that too."
I think the Russian citizens liked Kennedy much as their parents had liked Roosevelt: He was a President who wanted better Soviet-American relations and whose administration semed to promise peace and better times. They especially appreciated the test-ban. And young people particularly felt Kennedy's glamor and charm quite independent of his political role. "I know how most Americans must feel about this," one Russian boy told me, "but I think that people here were sadder than people in some states in the U.S."
Adam Hochschild '63 spent two months this fall traveling through the Soviet Union.
