A Soviet Odyssey In the Russian Arctic, November 1988 SOMEWHERE ABOVE THE KOLA PENINSULA -- Our Aeroflot helicopter flew over the snow and tundra at about 3,000 feet, headed back to the village of Levozero. The last of the day's winter sunlight faded behind a distant hill, painting bright bands of color against the ice-blue horizon. Denied conversation by the turbine whine of the Soviet helicopter, each of the five passengers was wrapped in a noisy cocoon of privacy, alone with his own thoughts. Mine drifted back powerfully to the camp of the reindeer herders we had flown away from only moments before. In tiny camps at the edge of civilization, the Saami herders seemed worlds removed from politics or ideology. Isolated from the world, they are tightly knit to one another. Alone in one of the earth's coldest environments, they are warm and secure in the experience and traditions of their people. Dashing away from the hospitality of their camp, I realized I wanted nothing more than to return. Instead of a brief afternoon visit and hurried lunch, I wanted to stay at the communal cabin, to share the communal bed stacked high with furs and blankets, to hear the stories I felt sure would have been shared as the arctic night deepened beyond the walls. Here in the far reaches of the Soviet arctic, I felt welcome and secure. The feeling contrasted sharply with the way I'd felt in Leningrad just a week before. Landing in the old Soviet capital aboard a creaky Aeroflot jet with a plywood floor, I discovered I'd arrived in mid-evening, in a low, gray fog, and in the full grip of all the anti-Soviet stereotypes I'd ever heard. Together they painted a grim picture that filled me most of all with an intense desire to escape. What am I doing here? What if something goes wrong? I must be crazy coming here. Everything conspired that evening to amplify those feelings. It started on the Aeroflot flight, the most marginal jetliner I had ever boarded. Landing in Leningrad, we waited five minutes before the plane doors opened, and then stepped out into the company of a half-dozen prototypical Soviet soldiers, complete with fur hats and automatic rifles. Later, the driver of the battered black taxi smoked strong, foreign smelling cigarettes and blew his smoke uncomfortably at me in the overheated cab. At our hotel, the vast, empty lobby was so dim I wondered if the light bulbs had been stolen. Caught in the grip of near total ignorance -- of the language, of the customs, even of what exactly we were supposed to do tomorrow -- our introduction to the USSR played perfectly into all my stereotypes of the grim and faceless Communist state. Fighting sleep at the end of our 20-hour journey from Anchorage, we take a short walk from the Sovetskaya Hotel along a dim city street. In less than two blocks, we are stopped for the first time by black marketeers: Blue jeans? Lacquer boxes? Change your money? By the time sleep came in the spartan, college-dorm style room that night, I couldn't separate fatigue from depression. What was I doing here? I was there by invitation, asked to join a group of editors from around the top of the world at the inaugural "Northern News Seminar" hosted by the Soviet's Novosti Press Association. Two journalists each from Alaska, Canada and Finland joined single representatives from Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland and the Faeroe Islands in meeting counterparts from newspapers in the Soviet Arctic. Taken together, our countries ringed the North Pole on every side. Our purpose was to establish a network for sharing stories about life in the north, and during two days of official conference at a long, polished wooden table, we did. We've agreed to send representative stories to the Novosti association in Moscow, where officials promise to translate them without alteration and forward them to all participants. Editors then may either run them or not. Each group of visiting editors was accompanied by a Novosti correspondent who served as colleague, translator and shepherd: Arkady Kudrya for the North Americans, Sergei Romanov for the Scandanavians, Valeri Mitenjov separately for the Finns. For a week they were our constant companions, invaluable assistants and, by week's end, new found friends. The three personalities were distinctly different: Sergei as voluble as Arkady is reserved; Valeri as lighthearted as Arkady is serious; Arkady as moderate as Sergei is suave. During the official conference in Friendship House in Leningrad, communication was easy: expert, simultaneous translation through earphones built into the conference table makes the proceedings immediately accessible. Later we would be almost entirely dependent on our shepherds; while almost all the visiting editors spoke English, almost none of the Soviets did. In the field at Murmansk and more remote locations, a smattering of shared German was the only other language bridge. It seemed a remarkably small problem -- partly thanks to the indefatigable translating of the shepherds, and partly in testimony to a universal reservoir of good will that knitted Soviets and visitors with surprising success throughout the trip. At the conference in Leningrad and ever more strongly as we toured the arctic countryside, the dominant impression was of the powerful desire to make contact. Our Soviet hosts and contacts obviously were not randomly selected, and clearly their intention was to make a good impression. But even with that understood, there was no denying the intensity with which visitors and hosts worked through the week to find shared reference points. We traded lapel pins and addresses, national anthems and mute smiles. Soviets and visitors alike acted as if our one-week visit was an opportunity for statecraft and diplomacy -- and who, in the end, could say it wasn't? In some places our small band was perhaps just the highlight of a slow month; in others, we were clearly the biggest show to hit town for some time. We were a big event in the tiny mining village of Revda, where local Communist Party officials in three-piece suits treated us to a five-course lunch topped with cream puffs baked in the shape of swans. It was my distinct impression that the waitress probably didn't usually wear her fancy ankle-strap shoes to serve the Thursday lunch crowd in Revda's six-table cafe. In the reindeer-herders village of Levozero, we were by actual count the first foreigners to visit since a National Geographic photographer passed through in 1979. That made us an interesting diversion for everybody -- and a whole new experience for the kids under 10. When we "dropped in" on students at an art class there, a half dozen little girls rose at some unseen signal and presented each of us with a bead-work momento obviously some days in the making. After an official tour of a freshly painted boarding school for herder's children and orphans, bright-eyed children chased our group through the dark streets to offer post cards or the ever-present lapel pins and ask for autographs. A 10-year old boy with a bad haircut ran up to me and thrust out his hand. Folded in it was a carefully torn square of notebook paper, carefully lettered with his name and address. There was no translator handy so we couldn't speak -- but I smiled and inwardly promised to find him a pen-pal from Alaska. In the lobby of the school, my wife and a translator had a collection of grade schoolers surrounding them. I overheard the end of her strange conversation: "Put it in the front of your mouth and kind of make a hole in it with your tongue and then blow ..." It is not easy to explain bubble gum to someone who's never seen it. It is not easy to explain perestroika and glasnost, either, but there was evidence aplenty for our group of observers. At least among the educated, upwardly mobile Soviets with whom we were in contact, those key ingredients of the Gorbachev revolution were very much in evidence. Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring of political and economic affairs) are the twin touchstones upon which the growing democratization of the USSR relies. Mikhail Gorbachev's broad structural announcements and surprising realignments are in our headlines nearly every week. They are a daily presence in the Soviet Union. You would expect discussion of these chief political topics by journalists and their chaperones. We discovered them in less likely venues, as well. In a room displaying minerals of the region at a museum in Murmansk, the director tells me that his collection has been greatly enlarged since glasnost. In the old days, he was not allowed to show the "strategic minerals" available in the area. The model of a pioneering icebreaker in the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in Leningrad is a small demonstration of the restructuring. Since the changes, its name has been repainted -- changed back from "Leonid Brezhnev" to the original "Artika." At a "scenic overlook" atop a Murmansk ridge, our bus stopped to display the view. As the western journalists piled out in the driving wind to photograph the waterfront below, I saw a nearby sign: a camera with slash through it, clearly prohibiting photography. I asked a shepherd, who said "Oh, that was before perestroika. You can take photos now." The most valued pose, of course, was to be standing beneath the sign, camera in hand. But while it was obvious that liberalization was much in evidence and even more on the public mind, it was equally clear that restructuring hadn't reached everywhere. The village of Levozero is home to 3,500 people, and I couldn't find one of them willing to admit to a western reporter that there were any problems there. In interviews with staff from the school, the local government body and an invited group described as "members of the local intelligensia," we explored issues ranging from teen drinking to the influence of television on rural attitudes. Again and again, the unanimous answer was "We don't have that problem here." The head doctor at a regional clinic earlier had finally acknowledged that accidents related to alcohol were "the main problem here," and he allowed there was some debate about the adequacy of their sex education. That was the extent of local willingness to tell visiting reporters about their problems. Our sophisticated shepherds and their colleagues could and did discuss failures of the Soviet economy in the Breznhev era ("the period of stagnation," they always call it) and talk about the high stakes gamble Gorbachev and his allies are taking on the road to such rapid restructuring. Publications like the multi-lingual Moscow News, Orgronyk and Literary Gazette now discuss problems with great candor. There are even open satires about government programs. No such discussion was available from Levozero officials asked about more specific, village problems. It is in just such pockets of resistance that Gorbachev's revolution faces its most formidable challenges, we have read. It seemed true enough in Levozero. A tall, patrician looking woman introduced as "the secretary of the executive of the local soviet" seemed to me to exemplify the resistance. I didn't speak with her enough to offer a fair judgment, but the impression she made was strong and clear. Her's was always a forceful voice of denial whenever troublesome questions were asked. She was always watching, sternly, as others answered our inquiries. And why not? I figured that she was winning under the old system. Why would she be a forceful advocate of change? Would we expect a person who'd won power under the old order to step forward with alacrity to propose a new, more liberal system? Glasnost has a ways to travel before it reaches from the polished wooden conference table in Leningrad to the tidy little library where we questioned officials in Levozero. That ideological distance did little to cool the warmth of our welcome even where it was most intense. Indeed, few moments were warmer than those at the nearby Tundra Collective Farm, where we were invited for "a picnic around the fire" on our way out of town. Light from the birch log bonfire danced strangely among the trees, lending a further air of unreality to what had already become a journey of profoundly unusual experiences. Barbara and I took to pinching one another from time to time simply to demonstrate how unbelievable we found the moment: in an Aeroflot helicopter above the tundra, surrounded by giggling Saami children on a darkened street, in the dancing light of a bonfire in a Russian forest. There were toasts of cognac and vodka for those who were drinking, with the last drops spilled on the snow to ensure a return visit. Three Alaskans linked arms for a ragged chorus of the Alaska Flag song, then the Finns sang, and then the Soviets. The words rebounded across darkness from our pool of firelight in the forest. We left the USSR a day later, traveling through another forest on a speedy, Finnish built train bound for Helsinki. There were no tears at our parting, but moments of pleasant memory rode with us in the cozy compartment. Outside the window the countryside was indistinguishable from Alaska. With no mountains in view, it reminded me more of Fairbanks than Anchorage -- rolling hills covered in birch and evergreen forest. Here and there a house that seemed left over from Doctor Zhivago -- grander than any in Alaska -- sat guarding an open field of snow. By the time daylight faded we were in Finland. Our compartment door was closed, the lights out. Barbara was asleep, and so was the pretty Russian woman and her baby, and the young Soviet man. It is dark and quiet, the rhythm of the train in full command. It is very peaceful. I think about the five of us in one small compartment on a Finnish train. A man in a white hat walks along a road beside the tracks as our train speeds by. ©1988 Anchorage Daily News