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in 1972, after Nixon broke the ice and visited Soviet Russia (first U.S. president ever to do so). For one thing, the Russians we met loved Nixon, felt honored by his visit, and looked upon it hopefully, as a door-opener. Although the Russians were very kind to us, and there are magnificent things to see in Leningrad (the Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace), what should have been on display was the success of the Russian Revolution for ordinary Russians. This was a very hard thing for me to gage, because of where they began--millions and millions of illiterate, dirt poor serfs and peasants, led by a few intellectuals, at the beginning, in 1905-1917--and Tsarist tyranny and centuries of tyranny before that. No experience of democracy whatsoever. Stalin took this country and performed a miracle of industrialization, prior to WW II and the war with Hitler. It was done at great cost in lives and often with forced labor. But it was done. Stalin was a dictator--and became a truly bloody and paranoid one--but, if it had not been for that amazing industrialization, which enabled Russia, at tremendous cost in lives, to resist Hitler's invasion of Russia, the Allies might well have lost WW II.
But I was young (a young 27) when I visited Leningrad, had not traveled much, and did not fully comprehend this history. Everybody having food on the table, everybody having excellent educational opportunities, everybody having a job, everybody with warmth and coats and boots to make it through the very severe winters, everybody with a roof over their heads--these were great accomplishments for Russia, especially under the conditions of the Cold War, and humongous expense in armaments to fend off a hostile U.S. And then imagine these folks putting Sputnik into space, ahead of us. What a great accomplishment! But what I saw was grim. Ugly, deteriorating public housing. Monuments falling into disrepair. Everybody in the same shapeless dress, all seemingly of the same dull patterned cloth. Meager supplies on the shelves of food stores. Truly dreadful food in the hotel. We were treated well, and got to meet other young people, whose avid hope was to have the material prosperity and glitz of America. They were floored to hear that workers in America could afford two cars (and also to hear that we hated Nixon, their hero). (--the Vietnam War was still raging).
I burst out of Russia with a great sigh of relief, and gloried in the many bright flowers--the gratuitous beauty!--and the awesome food, and color, and vitality, of Sweden--a socialist government, to be sure, but a mixed economy, in which everyone flourished, and people had time and resources for art and architecture and design furniture, and, above all seemed to be satisfied and prosperous and enjoying themselves.
I learned something about what the "American Dream" meant to others, and how much suffering the Russians had been through, and I learned to appreciate capitalism a little more, for all its faults, and also our tradition of democracy, for all ITS faults. We had armed guards with submachine guns escorting us in and out of Russia. The people we met were well-educated, but many of them were obviously not used to speaking their minds. (They were very shocked that we would badmouth our leader.) And they also suffered from a limited, confined view of the world. They were hemmed in, and not happy about it. The other countries we visited--Norway, Denmark, England, France--all with great beauty and no grimness (in that era), all mixed socialist/capitalist systems, were actually much more attractive to me than the U.S. (especially with that heinous war going on). We were just beginning to see homeless in the U.S. and the "war on poverty" and other progress was being curtailed. Many Vietnam vets were suffering. We'd just been through three traumatic assassinations of progressive political leaders only a few years before. And the Nixon repression--so similar to the Bushites (only the Bushites are much, much worse)--was well under way.
Even so, the contrast between "east" and "west" was stark. I would not have wanted to live in Russia.
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