This excerpt is reprinted with permission from Citizen Summitry, edited by Don Carlson and Craig Comstock (J.P. Tarcher, Inc.).
For more information on Citizen Summitry, see “A Better Game Than War.”
All photographs are by Joel Schatz. The photographs from this selection are available as a PDF only.
Stepping onto Soviet soil for the first time, I was shocked by the diversity of everything. I somehow expected a monolithic visual impression. Color, especially, was fascinating. Not that I would have expected there to be fewer frequencies of the spectrum in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, but most of the pictures I had seen of that country were black and white photographs, especially from World War II. So I was surprised by things as obvious as blue sky, red and purple flowers, and colorful clothing, as well as by the beautiful pastel buildings.
I had heard from many people that Moscow was a dreary, oppressive place, where people walked slowly and wore large, dark garments as they moved ponderously through the totalitarian state. In fact, I found people who looked no different to me than those in any city I’d ever visited — folks holding hands; businessmen with briefcases, eating ice cream cones; kids in strollers, looking wide-eyed at their environment; a man and a dog walking through a park; little girls dancing in the street; people sitting on park benches in animated conversation — people.
Photographing these people was a particular joy for me because I had been warned by the U.S. State Department that there were serious restrictions on the use of cameras. It was in my nature to test those restrictions, but I was fully prepared to relinquish my film at any point. I took pictures of bridges, and of military personnel; I took pictures of everything I felt like. I was very conspicuous taking pictures. Carrying several cameras with telephoto lenses, tape recorders, and lots of Western gear, we were clearly not Russian citizens on vacation. No one ever asked me not to take pictures of anything and consequently, I took about 2500 photographs on several trips.
On my return to the States, I shared these slides with hundreds of people in lectures and found that nothing I said about the Soviet Union was as meaningful as the impressions people received from looking at these photographs.
I came to understand that over the years Americans have deprived themselves of direct access to reality in the Soviet Union; we have developed and reinforced impressions of that culture which are very limited. Somehow the Russian people have been portrayed as oppressed to the point of not smiling, not falling in love, not raising families, not enjoying themselves on picnics, not bicycling in the countryside, not pursuing careers that excite them. It’s a different culture, totally different from ours, but the spirit of the ordinary people, their warmth and love, is as great as anywhere on the planet.
Most of the stories written for Western audiences by Western journalists rarely dwell on the normal human side, the successful side of life in the Soviet Union. Journalists, by training or tradition, are interested in looking for problems. So we see a very lopsided view of life in the Soviet Union. Their stories are reinforced by pronouncements from high levels of our own government, so that only those of us who go there ourselves can truly see how far off the mark this limited view is.
Take, for example, something as simple as Red Square. Many of the photographs of people that appear with this article were taken in Red Square. Almost all of the images of Red Square seen by Americans show military parades and rockets and tanks rolling through. These events occur several times a year. All of the other days, Red Square is a meeting place, a tourist environment where people of every type congregate. Many of them are Russians on vacation, out with families looking at the museums and old churches, shopping. There’s plenty of color around and there’s no sign of military might.
Photographic documentation is, I think, critical for assembling a more complete understanding of what life is like in the Soviet Union. If you could have access to time-lapse photographs from the destruction that occurred during World War II, through the reconstruction years, and into the present, you would see steady change. You would see more plentiful automobiles, apartments becoming larger, an increased variety of consumer goods, much more Western clothing, more appreciation for Western music (particularly popular rock music), a variety of musical tours from the West, and a greater influx of business people looking for new ways to exchange goods and raw materials. It’s a changing culture which is, above all, as human as our own.
In fact, I have found Russians to be more like Americans than people from any other country I’ve ever visited. In both the U.S. and the Soviet Union the national psyche seems to have mostly to do with the scale and robustness of the human spirit. The vision there is as grand in scale as our own. We are the superpowers. The people seem so much like Americans in their psychology, their humor, their emotional climate, their dreams, their flair for experimentation, the depth of their theoretical abilities.
The most revolutionary tool for opening up East-West communication is the computer. Until very recently the Soviets have resisted computers; now they are making every effort to catch up. The computer represents a potential for decentralizing information and control. That’s exactly what it’s done in the West. Gorbachev has ordered 50,000 computers for high schools. There’s talk in Moscow of building a teleport for facilitating all forms of telecommunication between the Soviet Union and the rest of the planet.
This is good news for the world. It means inevitable applications of high technology communication for increased diversity and volume of information exchange. The Soviet Union appears to be opening up. This isn’t to say that miracles will occur and they will abandon the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It only means that tacit approval is coming for experimenting with and utilizing every new channel of communication to link people in both political camps. I think this is the beginning of a revolutionary period of development on the planet.
The way to normalize relations between the two cultures is not to send old men to Geneva or any other part of the world to sign pieces of paper claiming that they will trust each other into the future. The only way to normalize relations is for Americans and Russians to develop normal relations with each other.
Russians are better informed about Americans than Americans are about Russians. They study this country more systematically than we do theirs. There’s much more news on Soviet television about life in the U.S. than there is news in the U.S. about life in the Soviet Union. A lot of it comes through the propaganda filters of the Soviet bureaucracy, but that’s offset by the direct experience that Russians have when they meet Americans. They may be told in political cartoons that the American system is out to get them, but they make a distinction between the American government and the American people.
They are totally fascinated by Americans. When they meet an American they do not assume he or she is a CIA operative. They take people as they are. They welcome Americans into their homes. I have never been treated with such instant warmth and hospitality. The level of emotional commitment to strangers is incredible. One can say, “Well, what does this have to do with the government? The government is separate from the people.” I don’t buy that. All systems interact one way or another, and many people I work with at the official level in the Soviet Union have influence with their government. In the strangest ways, through the strangest connections, people influence each other.
I really believe it’s a numbers game at this point. The more people from both cultures who meet each other, the greater the influence there will be on governments that now seem detached from the human compassion that exists in both cultures. I believe that the only possibility for averting a catastrophe in a nuclear weapons race is for Americans and Russians by the tens of thousands to form normal working relationships with each other, in every sphere of human activity. It’s possible to do that. The Soviet government does not prohibit these kinds of people-to-people relationships. I’m talking about megapatterns of trade, of high technology, of new forms of exchange and collaboration — in fields such as cancer research and earthquake prediction — exchanges of top musicians, direct communication between school children via computer, and shortly by television satellite. All of these possibilities are now unfolding.
I found a real sense of community and warmth, even in the streets among strangers, that I do not see often enough in our own culture. You cannot dictate that kind of feeling and empathy. I think it’s a direct function of the severity of the calamity in the Russian experience. The only way they have survived is by taking care of each other. They are a very proud and determined people who are working through some horrible experiences in their past and trying somehow to deal with the ultimate question of how to survive in a world which has now come to the brink of catastrophe.
There’s a transcendence in spending time on each other’s soil. You look at each other and you almost don’t have to say anything. You know how absurd the situation is and you know that on a one-to-one basis everything is OK. At a distance Russians and Americans distrust and fear each other, but up close they tend to love each other. It’s no different from the human process everywhere, where strangers operate at a distance either with no knowledge or with misinformation.
“But there are missiles everywhere,” you say. “What do you do about that?” The missiles are a direct result of lack of contact, of distrust, of isolation. The only solution to this problem is a rapid increase in communication among the peoples of the planet. We’ve been stymied because the channel of communication linking the two populations are practically jammed with politicians, journalists and bureaucrats. And a few tourists. If we widen those channels to include more volume and diversity, then a whole new pattern of understanding will necessarily occur.
