In Soviet Siberia August 1989 Hotel Rossia, Moscow Two scenes: Arrival, Nov. 13, 1988. We land in Leningrad, almost alone on a marginal old Tupelev jetliner, arriving on a cool foggy night. Soldiers with fur hats and machine guns meet the plane, confirming all our suspicions and stereotypes. There are no Americans anywhere. Arkady Kudrya meets the flight, a savior in the grim landscape we see. Arrival, 11 August 1989: The SAS flight from Stockholm arrives a little ahead of schedule, landing in summer sunlight at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. It is full, including many Americans: an old black couple with their 7 year old grandson, two teenagers from Juneau, a Mason and his large family. The airport is jammed. Arkady is waiting, and we reunite joyfully against all conceivable odds, for the third time in nine months. The jet lag is no better the second time around, but everything else is. There is almost none of the fear that we felt the first time; we've learned to accept the tiresome bureaucracy, long lines and bad service and also to discount almost entirely the fears of our stereotypes of grim repression. The contrast seems clear everywhere, and it seems clearly to be accounted for mostly by changes in our perception. Our hotel in Moscow is not a lot better than the Sovietskaya in Leningrad, but it doesn't oppress us at all. On a short walk to fight sleep on that first night in Leningrad, the young hustlers who approached us seemed almost dangerous; we are approached twice as we walk to Red Square tonight, and it means nothing. Our first sight of the domes of St. Basils and Red Square are predictable -- but none the less exciting for all that. After a thousand television portraits and newspaper photographs, the square itself a less Olympian than imagined, but the cathedral no less exotic or beautiful. Late on a Friday evening, after nine pm, sizeable crowds of respectful Soviets are still on hand to watch the changing of the guard at Lenin's Tomb and be lectured by tour guides. Women dressed in Slavic chic stroll arm-in-arm with one another; two old pensionaries wear chestsful of medals proudly on dark suit jackets, the pace of their promenade dictated by the slower one, with a cane. The light from the sunset facing St Basils paints the domes with subarctic summer yellow. It is still quite light at 10 pm when we pull the shades and surrender to the fatigue. There is one unanswered knock at the door. The phone rings twice, wrong numbers in Russian, so we leave it off the hook to avoid another awakening. Nobody but Arkady knows what hotel we are at or in which room. We are unlikely to miss any calls. 12 August 1989 Awake at 6 am after 8 or 9 hours sleep. It is sunny and clear. Barb sleeps so I go to the buffet alone for coffee something that would have seemed like quite an adventure in itself on the first trip. It is emblematic of how much more confident we feel and how much less intimidating things appear. I drink coffee alone at a table awash in the warm morning sunlight, sharing the uncrowded buffet with only a few couples. There are sweet cookies to go with the coffee and later, with Barb, bread and cheese. Arkady arrives like clockwork at 930 as promised and we are off with Nickolai in Novosti's white Volga. After picking up AJ at the Leningradskaya Hotel, we stop at the Kremlin to tag along with an English language tour for an hour. It is impressive, clean and kempt, and the old churches in particular are exotic and grand. (The Intourist guide we are following learns we are from Alaska. "Oh, Russian territory," he says. The Pushkin museum disappoints a bit after the Hermitage in Leningrad last winter but what wouldn't? There are the usual bad Dutch and old French masters and a small but surprisingly lively Impressionist collection. Arkady points out a favorite Renoir ("Portrait of Jeanne Samary, 1877") and it is indeed lovely. The subject seems beguiling, trying to make contact, engage'. There is a Paul Signac as well ("The Pine Tree St Tropez, 1909") that I enjoy very much. The dappled structure is very Van Gogh, the colors vibrant and bold. There is also an interesting Rembrandt, Christ driving moneychangers from the temple, that is notable for its average and middle-aged Christ, not at all heroic or ultra-pure. We lunch at a cooperative cafe in the exhibition hall near the Kremlin, a good meal that, at 13 roubles for three, is more than twice the price we would have paid in a hotel buffet. We had a small salad, cup of thick mushroom gravy and soup with heart or gizzard meat. It was tasty, served hot and promptly in the nearly deserted cafe at 1400. The exhibition meanwhile proves interesting if overwhelming. The huge hall is filled with arts and crafts representing all the regions and subdivisions of the RFSSR, a very big collection reaching from the Caucuses to the Arctic Ocean. There are some very fine clothes and craft work, but most of the painting is bad. Later we listen to a folk group from the Bashkiriya Autonomous Republic. I got pulled into the circle to dance and stumbled around a bit with a cute, chubby lady in a flowery ethnic costume. While the group was performing briefly on the sidewalk outside, two very drunk young men stumbled to the front of the spectators and somewhat crudely gestured and blocked views. Several of the officials at the scene and one woman bystander took charge of them. There was no big scene. Later we went to the first officially sanctioned exhibit of nude photos in the USSR, a show called "Flowers Among Flowers" by an apparently well-known Lithuanian shooter named Rimantas Dichavicius, b 1937. It's dull all the images cliches the images cliches of women in the surf or on grassy hills. They are printed in gauzy sepia brown. Upstairs, however, is a retrospective of Yuri Chernsheva, and the 194245 war photography from Stalingrad, Germany and the Ukraine is very good. It has a gritty documentary feel and some of the shots particularly several of death in winter are arresting. Later that night the Moscow Circus was fun, talented performers in a very well staged production. It was marred for us by the polar bear act, where drugged looking bears jumped through things are skated around. (The whole act was done on ice.) The high point, by any measure, was watching iceman Arkady break up over the clowns, laughing until tears ran down his cheeks and he was forced to reach for his handkerchief. 13 August 1989 Travel always seems to start early in the USSR, so we are up before 0600 to get ready for our trip to Vrukovo Airport for the flight to Norlisk. Arkady is worried that he has been able to book only one taxi for the four of us, but even with AJ's luggage that turns out to be no problem. Describing his woes in attempting the reservation,m he tells me "Howard, sometimes I think with service like this, we will never reach Communism." The airport is a 45-minute drive out of the city, past apartment and industrial complexes that line the thoroughfare. The architecture and general standard of buildings is higher than I expect. The air, however, is almost unbearably foul. Barb and I have been choking on it since arrival, and it is noticeable even on this early morning weekend. The weather is otherwise fine. Vrukovo is an aging airport, reminiscent of an old rail or bus station. We arrive early testament to Arkady's compulsive overplanning and so have time to wait for the others. The place is filled with bustling people, crowded and alive. I pass up with chance to have some great looking broiled meat and buy us popsicles instead. After the others arrive, we are shuffled off to the segregated foreigners departure lounge, just like before in Leningrad and Murmansk. It is mostly empty, quiet, not nearly so interesting. There is plenty of compensation, though, for we meet old friends from the Leningrad trip here: Boris Popov and Sergei Romanov from Novosti and Hamzat, the giant Chechian from Murmansk. He is as voluble and overdrawn as ever, telling Barb in a loud voice that he keeps her picture by his bed and awakens every day to tell it "Good morning Barbara." It is a genuine pleasure to see all of them again, a reunion much beyond the obvious. Soon we board a big Areoflot IL86, a large widebody that you board through big doors in the belly that lead upstairs to the seating areas, nine seats abreast in three sections. It's a good smooth flight with a chicken and tomato lunch and my first cup of coffee for the day. The countryside is vast and open, like the plains of the middle west or Canada. Once or twice we see unidentifiable cities below, laid out in perfect grids on the tundra below. We land after about 3 1/2 hours at an airport halfway between Norlisk and the much smaller regional capital at Dudinka. From the air, Dudinka is a pretty little city of about 10,000, with numerous boats at anchor in the river nearby. The airport is full of enthusiastic greetings, for Tamara, Albion and Boris. A great shock comes when Tamara speaks to us in English: nine months ago in Leningrad she spoke not a word, and now she is proudly able to carry on an adequate simple conversation. "Very good to see you again," she smiles. She is, as remembered, very elegant and beautiful even on the runway tarmac at the grim little airport in the middle of nowhere. We are also greeted by a fog of mosquitoes ("camarr" in Russian, we learn) as fierce as any I have seen in years. Immediately Canadians and Norwegians and Alaskans begin telling how this isn't really bad you ought to see the mosquitoes at home... We are quickly aboard the familiar red Intourist-type bus, but most of the passengers are left standing and swatting while the luggage is fetched and sorted. There is a brief flurry of consternation wholly justified, to my mind, while they stand outside as our luggage is unloaded first. The skeeters are the most benign fog we are to see. From the airport on into the heart of Norlisk, the industrial fog is an evil looking presence everywhere. Fat billowy plumes climbed up the horizons and small steamy pools dotted the roadside. Tamara haltingly claimed some credit for one smelter "second most big of Europe," but also told us "We have big problem of ecologia here." That is evident. All the way into the city the dirty smoke stained the sky and filtered the bright sun. A favorable wind carried it away from downtown, but it clung to the horizons like a threat. The town is grim, all industrial warehouse architecture, every building a big blank face turned to the perfectly gridded streets. It seems a little bigger than Palmer in size and holds more people than Anchorage. Arkady, who has already expressed his dislike of the town, arches a question at me: "I suppose you find this city ... interesting?" Yes. But not pleasant. We will be based here for five days. As in Murmansk, we discover that attempts have been made to compensate for the latitude and dreariness by increasing comforts indoors. As Arkady says "I find the view in Norlisk more interesting indoors than outdoors." The hotel restaurant and bar as nicely decorated as anything we have seen, including the big Leningrad Hotel. Our room is a small suite, undoubtedly the grandest in the city: a small entry dressing room, a sitting room with sofa, two armchairs and samovar, bedroom with two single beds dressed in satin spreads and a small bath. It is easily more than twice the size of any other room we have had in the USSR. 14 August 1989 80,000 people died to build this city. That is the estimate of Anatoly Lvov, the local historian who lectured us today on the role Norlisk played in the Gulag Archipelago. Even in his slightly defensive interpretation, it is a story of unimaginable pain and deprivation. A smaller percentage of the prisoners died here than at other camps, he says, simply because it was so difficult and expensive to get them here and their work was so important that they were treated better once they were here. They were not guarded closely, he says, and that is believable: Where could you run from Norlisk? It would be like being abandoned in Barrow with the authorities in charge of the airport and port. You couldn't walk away to freedom from here. "Without these slaves, Norilsk couldn't have given metal to the country," and so the "slaves" were taken somewhat better care of than in other camps, he says. In those times there was transportation to the city by barge only two months of the year, and four ships towing nine barges each characteristically would arrive filled with prisoners. Treatment at the camps was greatly influenced by the superintendent, and Norlisk was fortunate to have men who were not outright sadists in charge, he said. "In my estimation, about 400,000 people took part in the construction of this complex. Due to the cold and the bullets, about one-fifth of them died," Lvov says. "At the same time, tens of thousands of volunteers worked shoulder to shoulder with the prisoners, and they object to those who say Norilsk was built on people's bones. The prisoners who survived also are proud to have built this." I think we will get to visit the museum here that describes the camp conditions in greater detail. Anatoly was a rambling and somewhat distracted speaker, and it was difficult to get a lot of hard fact from his descriptions. Nonetheless, it made a great impression on us all especially the Finns, since there were among the prisoners POWs from the Finnish-Soviet war. We met with local journalists at a reception tonight at the "Technology House," apparently a social club owned by some of the technical crafts from the region. It was a large, well furnished building true to form, a shambles on the exterior, nicely done up inside. We met in a big blue room with gray curtains hanging against the walls. There were frescos of burnished silver metal with engravings of various "high tech" scenes. Twice tonight people pushed drinks at me despite my refusal, the first time that has happened on this trip. It wasn't a big problem either time I simply told them that it made me very sick, which is, in its way, completely true. The local television reporter was all over me for an interview, which I guess we will do Wednesday. I spent most of the evening talking with Larisa Kurilova, a young woman reporter at the local paper who speaks some English and very much wanted to practice. She had studied several years in high school and college and clearly knew a fair amount, but was badly flustered at first and spoke badly. She calmed down and warmed up as we spoke. Her buddy, also a reporter, wanted help making contact with a newspaper in a similar place in Alaska. I told him there really wasn't a place like this a big city far in the north with lots of heavy industry, but suggested Fairbanks. I promised to put him in touch. Another man came up and asked bluntly: "What are your impressions of Norlisk first, the negative?" I told him I found it unattractive, especially the lack of greenery and the flat paved spaces between buildings. Then I described a feeling I have genuinely had about this place about how it would force individuals to focus on their inner landscapes, to draw together. I do admire the spirit that says "We can take whatever the climate throws at us." There is a resiliency here, a can-do attitude. It feels to me like a moonbase might. 15 AUGUST 1989 If I had been thinking faster, what I would have told the man who asked my impressions of Norlisk was that the pollution appalled me. It does. In seminar today we got a statistical introduction to the fact that our eyes and noses already knew that the development of industry here has been an ecological nightmare.. It is easy to overuse that image to describe every ugly gash in the ground or unsightly clear-cut, but it is appropriate to use it here. This has been a steady, unrelenting, massive assault on the environment, destroying rivers, tundra, forests and lungs. My conference notes have lots of statistics and figures from the discussion today,, so I will just record impressions here. We are to visit some of the sites tomorrow, and that should add depth to these impressions. It sounds like these huge mines and smelters operated pretty much at full force and without consideration of ecological concerns until about 1984, the acknowledged height of the despoliation. The plant superintendent talked of hundreds of miles of river polluted and hundreds of thousands of square hectares of land ruined. And that is simply the official view. There was little discussion of the human effects, although he did acknowledge recent findings that copper and nickel by-products are carcinogenic. The amount of smoke and ash produced here seems certain to have thoroughly infiltrated every breathing cavity that ever passed through. The Soviet and Finnish press were fairly hard on the spokesman, who adopted an attitude of optimistic admissions. He would acknowledge past problems but stuck firmly to his projections of when the problems would be solved and descriptions of progress made to date. There seemed to be agreement that the local paper has done a good job of informing workers of problems and progress with the environmental program, although I suspect this means mostly serving as a conduit for official information. Later in the day, when we were discussing where to have the next NNS meeting, Boris from Krasnoyarsk mentioned that "It is an open secret that about five months after Tamara's invitation to Norlisk, highly placed officials expressed disapproval and felt we should chose some more attractive site. They thought our foreign colleagues would be appalled at the ecological conditions." But they persevered, he argued, partly to forge ahead with glastnost and partly because "Maybe if they know about this, it will help motivate us to clean it up." It seemed like a pretty sophisticated strategy, and a brave one. Even before knowing the extent of the environmental damage here, I had wondered why Norlisk was chosen. I thought, frankly, that it had been a plumb for Tamara, whom I envisioned as a rising journalistic star who was serving time at the outpost in Norlisk before moving on to bigger and better things. This turns out to have been wrong on nearly every count. First, Tamara is a Norlisk native; she was born here. She apparently made the invitation at her own initiative and shocked officials with it. Norlisk has been a closed city not only because of the environmental problems, but also it Gulag heritage and strategic importance. All these factors argued against us being allowed to meet here. But here we are. And yesterday Barb started talking fishing with Fyodor Khrustalev, editor of Sovetsky Sakhalin, and he invited us to visit him there for some fishing. Sergei romanov, the cynical Novosti correspondent, suggested that after Murmansk, Levozero and Norlisk, Sakhalin would make a good addition to our "tour of the closed cities of the USSR." 16 August 1989 Norlisk is a city where 100,000 ghosts of the Gulag rest uneasily beneath a cloud of poison fumes. It is a city where the bus driver tells you, "If a Norlisk man gets sick in Moscow, the way to cure him is to move him closer to the car's exhaust." It is also a city where cows give milk without grass, and where cucumbers grow without sunshine. Bright-eyed four year olds learn their lessons at Soviet built computers, and scientists probe the mysteries of reindeer glands for knowledge and Oriental profit. It is home to people of considerable inner resources who find a way, despite impressive obstacles, to win through. Asked on local television about my reactions to Norlisk, I wanted to mix negative with good and so concentrated a bit on that latter quality. If I had it to do over again, though, I would save spent more time criticizing the environmental ruin, because that is what they truly need to hear. The approach to the Nadezhda Metalurgical plant reminded me of the street scenes from "Blade Runner." Barbara says they looked like her vision of hell. The three tall smokestacks are at the center of the thicket that bristles on the Norlisk horizon. Its furnaces work around the clock smelting nickel and other metals from the ore and driving dense grey clouds of sulfurous smoke skyward as a result. Officials say the environmental depths of Norlisk pollution was reached in 1984, but the plants even by official admission still emit many times the allowable norms and acid rain is killing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and tundra nearby. Water pollution also is severe, with officials admitting to more than 100 polluted kilometers of river. Nadezhda plant manager Yuri Fillipov would be at home in any industrialist's boardroom. In Norlisk he stands at the head of a long, green felt conference table, in front of charts and graphs lining the walls. He is a tall man with a dark suit, white shirt and blue necktie, a heavy stainless steel watch at his wrist. His hair is cut short; his eyes are clear and cold. Nowhere in Fillipov's training can there have been preparation for answering to Western reporters, and he fumbles it badly. The questioning is not prolonged or particularly harsh, but on any question beyond production technique or work-force statistic, his clumsy answers are bad even by Soviet standards. Does he have statistics about worker health as compared to the population as a whole? He does not. For the workers only, then? No, but he knows a lot of people here, and none of them have respiratory problems. If no one is sick, then why is the plant announcing a billion-rouble program to clean up? Well, although he knows of no respiratory problems, nickel by-products have been found carcinogenic. In truth, we are told later, the complex does not track worker health at all and since most workers leave the areas after six or eight years, there is no way to test whether long-range health problems are surfacing. His answer, finally, backs him into the old retreat of polluters everywhere: "The administrators of course breath the same air as the workers. How can we oppose ecological programs?" The answer, of course, is that they can do so very easily. Industrialists around the world have proved themselves altogether willing to protect profits and production at the expense of health and environment. The lesson has been driven home in Detroit and Rio and the Rhine River valley. Yuri Fillipov is just the latest in a long line who've been willing to preside over the degradation. I am surprised nobody laughed when he defended Norlisk air by suggesting he knew nobody with a respiratory problem. In retrospect, I wish I had. Being laughed at might be the only thing that could get through to Yuri Fillipov. In the very midst of the industrial swamp, past pools of steaming liquid and abandoned piles of rusting mechanical flotsam, the world's most unlikely farm labors mightily, and brings forth. Yelena Kolyaniskaya's 830 farmers toil not on the soil, but on the concrete, raising 2,100 cattle, 14,000 pigs and 130,000 tons of produce each year to feed the workers who feed the industrial maw. At the world's northernmost farm, she tells us, "We have to make ends meet, or we will starve." It costs 80 kopecks to produce a kilo of milk that is sold to the complex for 52 kopecks, a planned loss that still benefits the region, she explains. A sturdy, smiling woman dressed in black, she seems the thorough professional as she answers questions from northern journalists eager to see how she does it. The cattle eat only imported fodder, but do get to walk outdoors until the temperature reaches 25 degrees C, she says. The greenhouses at 45 degrees and wind at 30 meters/second are icebergs on the outside, but productive fields in the middle of one of three yearly crops down below. The rich earthy smells of manure and milk are a pure pleasure after the wasteland outside, and I do not doubt Yelena's claim that the farm has plenty of volunteer workers. They earn a bit less, on average, than the plant workers. Their life seems infinitely better. Still, they must leave the make-believe world of the moonbase farm and walk home in the Norlisk gloom. How do they manage that? The smiling, laughing children at the daycare center will run and shout on the barren playground outside and run panting home, their faces aglow from the exercise. What combination of ignorance and denial can let the parents let them grow up in this stinking fog? What can possibly convince them that fumes so thick you can't see through them are acceptable for children to breath? 17 August 1989 About 20 miles outside Norlisk, the air gets better and the road gets worse. Where the pavement ends a potholed gravel roads leads west and a little northward toward Dudinka, capital of the Taimyr region. This is Albion country, and our host is the editor of Sovietsky Taimyr, the newspaper serving the 34,000 people in the regional center. He is a loud and gregarious man and his hospitality will keep us on the road for more than 20 hours as we trace the high points of his turf. The tall, Lenin-lookalike editor with black hair and beard was a medical student for three years until "Hemingway spoiled me" and he set out to become a writer. The search has taken him through book publishing, radio and television before landing him at the newspaper. With 21 years in the north and 18 on the Taimyr Peninsula, he is very much a veteran here and has learned to take advantage of opportunities offered here this far from the center. He arranged one of the earliest Soviet-American exchanges, swapping visits between Dixon, Ill. and the village of Dickson, Taimyr, and the words "Dixon Telegraph" still sprinkle his conversations. He also was an early advocate of the Northern News effort and is sparing no energy to make its unpredictable visit to the Taimyr a success. It is hard to attract and keep good journalists here, he acknowledges, but "the wolf should use his legs to survive, and we are journalistically like the wolf," he says. "In the middle of our region is a blank spot called Norlisk," he tells the busload of visiting journalists. "I agree that Norlisk is 'the Gem of the Taimyr," but some gems, like pearls, are a disease that should be in shells." Dudinka, although an old city, lives off Norlisk today. Its port feeds the industrial complex and handles its production, making the remote site an unlikely member of the 10 busiest ports in the USSR. 130 cranes stand along the Yetisee River shoreline, handling everything from foodstuff to processed nickel seven million tons, they say for more than 10 months a year. The port closes not in deepest winter, as you might expect here north of the Arctic Circle, but in May, when floods regularly raise the river by some eight meters and bring freight handling to a standstill. The rest of the year the impressive Soviet polar fleet breaks ice and moves through the Arctic Ocean unimpeded. The big busy port is run by a local man, an ethnic Korean named Longuin Kahn who was born in Dudnika 46 years ago. The Soviets cannot pronounce his first name, and call him Vladimir. Just downriver, still within sight of the forest of freight handling cranes, is the state farm called Levinsky Sands, where as many as 400 workers harvest fish and raise cattle to feed the region. As you walk the firm sandy beach with manager Fyodor Razuvayev, you feel at home despite being the first Americans ever at the farm. The rolling treeless tunda stretching out from either side of the Yentsee river looks identical to the shores of Bristol Bay at the Kvichak River fish site we occupied in July. A blindfolded Fyodor would know from looking which place he was fishing at least not until the nets were winched from the muddy water. At Levinski the fish produced are not the silverbright Bristol Bay sockeyes, but big round fish called Nalim and smaller herring known locally as Ryapushaka. The set they make for our benefit is not good. (A translator tells me later "This was all just PR for you; they usually don't fish when it's this slow.") but there are a few crates of herring and a dozen big fish in the nets all the same. These are ceremoniously presented to me in my role of Bull Goose foreigner, and there is smiling and fish fondling and picture taking all around. A couple of Soviet journalists bite into the raw herring and invite me to join in, but I paid my dues at lunch, eating a huge plate of raw salted Nalim pressed on me by smiling locals, and I demure. Barbara meanwhile has acquired a shadow named Shasha, a handsome blonde of six years who makes it his business to show this Americkanka around the one street village. He is clearly impressed, although he does let her know she "doesn't speak very good Russian." From the bow of our ferry at departure Barb gives Shasha her red scarf, a handful of pins and a pack of Juicyfruit for his friends. He stands waving, enraptured, as we pull away from the shore. In my imagination the handsome kid grows to become president of the USSR one day. I wonder at his memories of the first Americans he ever saw. I think he liked us. Dinner is more raw fish and a fishcake desert that I am told represents "the best thing they could make in this restaurant." There will be hurt feelings if, as intended, I leave mine uneaten. I plunge manfully into gastronomic diplomacy again. After too many speeches and too much dancing (Barb's turn in the diplomatic barrel) we are finally enroute back to Norlisk. We leave the Aldan restaurant (Nganasan language for "Northern Lights") and set out on the skullrattling ride back to town at 11 pm. As we ride I am haunted by the story we learned in the museum earlier of Tubyaku Kosterkin, 76, the last Nganasan shaman. Nganasan medicine men were priests and doctors and judges. Brilliant psychologists, they could hypnotize people and find lost of stolen goods. In the photo at the museum, Kosterkin looks every bit the part, his calm face, deep eyes and strong hands evident even on film. But there are only 830 Nganasan people left, and only old Tubyaku, assisted by his partially trained children, as their shaman. And now he has stopped practicing. When his wife died, the spirits left him. The last Nganasan will die without a shaman. As we bounce along the rough road toward Norlisk I flirt with exhausted sleep, haunted by the thought of Tubyaku Kosterkin, who lost his love. 18 August 1989 The Taimyr Green Front only has 10 members. It is not an officially recognized organization, cannot legally print a newspaper and has only begun to make contacts with environmentalists and allies in the outside world. But today it is holding a press conference, arranged by its political enemy, to speak to reporters from six nations. What's going on here? Pluralism. The Green Front seems VERY loosely organized but probably that is to be expected in a country which only in the last two or three years has begun to recognize the legitimacy of dissent. There is clear animosity between its members and Vladislav Liscovsky, the party man who supervises the local newspaper and has been a main organizer of our event. For all that, it is Liscovsky who has arranged the "press conference," and while it is a hasty 50-minute affair with little advance warning, it's still a chance for his enemies to denounce him before foreign journalists, and allowing THAT is a big step toward the pluralism you hear so many Communists discussing these days. The chief green was at our meeting in Dudinka, having introduced himself there as the local Greenpeace representative. A solid, 60-year old man with a Marx-and-Engles look of flowing white hair and generous beard, local authorities dismiss him as a crackpot. He has that Hank Ostrosky look about him, but it is difficult to get a feeling for his demeanor because his voice comes to us only as one of the now familiar translators. He acknowledges he has been unemployed for three years, "living from donations of the greens." At the conference with him are about a dozen colleagues, only some of whom speak. Of them Abram Kopalov, assistant professor of nonferrous metals at the Norlisk Vocational School; forester ?? Chakor and carpenter Gennady Broslov seem the most impressive. They speak with passion and some authority, contradicting the statement of plant officials and making a strong case for better monitoring and record keeping. They laws are mainly adequate, they tell us but information and enforcement are capricious and need attention. Barb and A.J. are dismayed at the reaction these eloquent dissenters generate from Soviet journalists present. They are mostly dismissed as a meaningless fringe at best, and slightly dangerous radicals at worst. Although our Canadian colleagues try to pose reasonable questions and seem to take it seriously ("Anyone who lives in Norlisk is living in a test tube," Roy declares), nobody else but me and Barb seeks to probe their case. There are a couple of proforma questions about size and strength and one from Hamzat asking the leader how he lived without employment, but nothing in the least to indicate interest or a sense of a real story here. I did not find the reaction either surprising or dismaying. I would hardly have expected more from the Soviet press, all drawn from party newspapers, and I was impressed that the Green Front had been given the opportunity to see us. I had a sense there of an organization with a clear sense of itself, and although it will almost certainly need to undergo a lit of growing pains, it felt to me like it would grow. It may be that the Soviets do not know what contact with outside organizations especially the worldwide environmental community can do for this group, but I have a feeling they are about to find out. This has all the ingredients of a compelling David and Goliath tale, with a clear good guy and clear villains, and unless I miss my guess, there will be a lot more attention focused on the TGF in the near future. In the meantime, I give Liscovsky credit for arranging and allowing the meeting. We discussed it on the bus on the way to the airport and he seemed to understand how it represented the pluralism we had discussed, and seemed ready for that. It was the healthiest sign I saw in all Norlisk. I could not help speculating about the prospects of the Greens against the giant industrial complex, represented in my mind by the chief engineer whose office I had visited earlier that day with Boris Popov and Hamzat. As they interviewed him in Russian I sat mute and examined his massive office, wondering about the role he played. A young man with a clear, sympathetic face, he presided over the interview from a seat at the 20-person conference table that included his phone on a shelf underneath. The room measured at least 30x30, smartly furnished with tall windows, lacy shades and cut-glass chandeliers. He seemed the epitome of power there, atop a multibillion rouble complex,a people's Deputy pin in his lapel. For all that, I sensed greater power in the motley collection of Greens at the table across from us later that day. Theirs is the power of ideas. "Our movement is directed by morals and ethics," one tells us. "We don't have a fixed ideology, but we do have principles to disseminate to the people." My clear sense is that their message will have power enough to tell. Postscript: We fly back to Moscow this evening, a four-hour flight across four time zones that deposits us at the Vukolna Airport in a muggy, early evening heat. It is a long hot walk from where the plane parks to the airport terminal, but as we are collecting gear for the hike, a big red Aeroflot double bus pulls up and passengers gratefully begin to board. Wrong. The bus is only for the foreigners only for us. Most of the passengers get off sullenly but quietly, but a few protest and one rough hewn working man stands toe-to-toe with the Aeroflot agent arguing for several minutes. We pull away with the big bus less than one fourth full and drive past our fellow travellers as they walk in. "Our people were offended," Arkady observes. "So was I," Barb replies. Arkady knows that we understand what happened and how he felt, and I sense that we have connected with him on this issue. "Peristroika has not yet reached Aeroflot," he says dryly. Novosti busses are at the parking lot to meet us and ferry us back into the city with all the windows down. We wait on the sidewalk outside Novosti headquarters (the press center at the 1980 Olympics) for assignment to a hotel. A brief, thrilling thunderstorm breaks over Moscow while we wait, fracturing the sky with bright, hot flashes and later rinsing the streets with a steady downpour. After five days in Norilsk, Moscow seems like party town the green trees, bright clothes and even busy traffic all a cause for celebration. Barb wishes aloud for a Pepsi and Sergei smiles and says "Follow me." I thought he was talking us to a coke machine in the hall, but he leads us instead into the bar of the Union of Soviet Journalists, housed in the same building. Rock videos play on a big screen TV. At the tables the crowd is young and well dressed. Our Pepsis come, as ordered, with big glasses of ice. They taste wonderful. Our hotel turns out to be the Sovetskaya, a pre-Revolutionary palace usually reserved for visiting dignitaries. We have a four-room suite, complete with chandeliers and dining room at the end of a 20-foot wide hall. We open the tall windows onto a leafy sidewalk and sleep with rainwashed air flowing into the room. We are a long way from Norilsk -- and from Anchorage. 19 August 1989 The new day dawns as brightly as it ended, a sunny morning with a few clouds in a deep blue northern sky. We are awake early, our time zones by now thoroughly scrambled by bouncing not only between continents but also within the vastness of the USSR. We head out for the Dynamo stadium, located just down Leningradskaya Prospeckt on our new Moscow map. The new map is famous because it actually shows ALL the streets another glastnostian innovation. In this case, it works fine, because we have hardly started our solo stroll through Moscow than we find a complex that is obviously a sports enterprise. The big building we first encounter is clearly a swimming venue. Even my Russian (demonstrably inferior to Barb's despite precisely the same training) has progressed far enough to accommodate asking directions, and I managed through a series of grunts and questioning uses of the word "hokeeee?" to get us to the ice rink. There is no obvious public entrance (this turns out to be a practice rink) so we simply walk boldly in through a side door. The idea of walking uninvited into an unfamiliar building in Moscow would have seemed ludicrous to me on our visit nine months ago, but this doesn't seem threatening at all. It is dim and a little worn inside, very much like a well-used gym anywhere. It reminds me instantly of the Ben Boeke Arena in Anchorage same smell, same brush of manufactured cold air in the face, same tough rubber matting on the floor to let skaters walk through. We walk down the dim hallway toward the rink; we win a few curious glances but no challenges. There are no hockey players on the ice as I had hoped. It is August, to be sure, but I knew Soviet teams practiced almost year round and hoped we might find them here. Instead, ice dancers fill the rink. About 20 couples are scattered around the surface, resolutely jumping and spinning through their drills. It is thrilling to be here, an audience of two Americans for an unscheduled Soviet ice skating performance at the Dynamo practice rink one August morning. We sit on a rudimentary wooden bench at iceside, trying to be unobtrusive. The skaters perform without coaching, but this is obviously a serious workout. There is little screwing around or grab-ass as the teams work through individual programs on the big ice surface. They are mostly teamed in mixed couples, young skaters from about 15 to 25 years old, I think. They skate very well and we watch in silent, isolated appreciation as they glide by with the restrained power and grace of their sport. Eventually some of the solo boy skaters seem to notice us (even silentl we know, our whole presence shouts "Foreigner!") and start showing off. They time their biggest leaps just in front of Barb, launching themselves into spins and splits just a few feet in front of us. The Moscow sun is shining in through high, small windows, and everywhere it hits the ice a patch of white steam starts to rise. There are little columns of the mist scattered around the ice. The skaters power through them unawares, the sound of their blades against the warming ice the only sound. The light and sound fill us with delight. Later we will tour again with Arkady, including a long expensive lunch at our decadent hotel. We learn that it was formerly a gypsy theater, notorious as a haunt of Imperialist idle nouveau riche. There is Pepsi, caviar and "sturgeon Moscow style," a tasty treatment. Natalia Davydova, the Moscow News correspondent who worked briefly at the Daily News and covered George Bush's arrival for us last February, has connected with us and brought hard-to-get tickets to the Kremlin arsenal. There we see the jewels, gowns and carriages of the Imperial Russian past. Natasha is attentive and tireless, and relates easily to us as a peer and friend, instantly warmer than Arkady is after weeks of exposure. Her shoulder bag says "Anchorage Daily News." We dine with at Arkady's apartment, where wife Alexandra and daughter Sonya have obviously worked all day on a supper of a dozen dishes. The food is unremarkable a stew, raw fish, cabbage rolls, salads and beets. We eat with extra gusto, of course. Alexandra is animated and at ease despite the language barrier that puts Arkady at the center of every exchange, willing or not. Barb works hard at communicating directly, and often gets through on her own. Alexandra tells of us of the first time she had Americans to dinner. "I did not sleep all night. What would they be like? What would I feed them?" she wondered. The apartment is small, four or five rooms (we get no tour) on the sixth floor of a project-style cluster along the river. It is nicely furnished and seems comfortable. Arkady has a bank of high tech stereo and video gear on the bookshelf, legacy of his employment at the Soviet pavilion in the Brisbane Expo. Looking for a specific video program (a special on life in Chukotka) he searches through extensive catalogs; he seems to have a lot of video on file. Before dinner he leads us on a brief walk across the street, through a forested park to the river bank, where we stand overlooking a water rescue station with speedboats parked in the slips. There we feed a small flock of ducks that swim cautiously over to us from the far bank, where boys play and swim. Back in the apartment, Arkady plays a tape he made of nightingales singing in the park last spring. Their bell-like calls and melodies fill the small apartment and I can imagine Arkady as he taped them, a quiet, patient man at ease with himself as he sat silently under the trees and stored up their songs for another day. 20 August 1989 Our last morning in Moscow is a sunny Sunday with heavy rain clouds racing quickly across an otherwise bright blue sky. We leave in the Novosti Volga with a sullen driver who clearly wishes he was elsewhere. He barrels through the streets as I tug futilely at the seat belt that won't come loose. Fortunately, the art exhibit Arkady has planned is closed. We drive instead to Ismaeloffsky Park, an open-air flea market crowded with buyers and sellers of all descriptions. There is artwork mostly bad, as you'd expect at such a gathering anywhere, but also some that is first rate. The pieces I like are not particularly Russian or Soviet, which might tempt me to buy one as a remembrance. There are also handicrafts and some antiques including icons that appear to my untutored eye to be authentic. Cautious about official warnings not to export them, we shy away reluctantly. Barb helped A.J. strike a bargain in dollars, our first significant blackmarket purchase on either trip. A collection of antique keys valued at R80 is sold for $10, but the seller is nervous so he and A.J. sneak very obviously into the woods. It's hardly a clandestine transaction: by the looks of things from where I stand, keeping an eye on A.J., either she is buying for dollars or she's a hooker. Still, she comes back and tells us it went smoothly. "But I felt like I was taking advantage of him, so I gave him $20," she said. We are giving capitalism a bad name. I found a lot of hockey pins for sale from small vendors with their wares arranged on blankets. I bought a dozen or more, but wished later I had purchased everything I saw. A set of 1986 World Championship Pins a big pin and individual ones for each contestant was R8, and most everything else only a few kopeks. Arkady mentions that our hotel room is paid until tomorrow despite the fact that we are leaving today. I suggest that he bring Alexandra down for a night of luxury in our suite. He seems offended: "I am more comfortable at home." On reflection, I realize that he has been on the road with us for more than a week and may be genuinely happier in his familiar bed at home. I also wonder if his pride has been wounded by my suggestion. With Arkady deep, intense, brooding I can never be sure. After another big, fancy lunch at the hotel, we left from Sheremetyevo Airport. As we stood in line at customs, a pitiful man approached and begged us, through Arkady, to carry a camera to his son in Copenhagen. His obsequious manner was painful to watch and more painful to turn down. We weren't about to carry anything through any customs checkpoint for anybody much less through a Soviet customs for a stranger. Still, it hurt to say no, to deny this pitiful middleaged man the thing that had reduced him to public begging at the airport. The image stayed with us, and questions surrounded the encounter. Why couldn't he have mailed the camera? Can it have been so valuable that it was worth the effort? Couldn't he have sold it and sent the money? Wouldn't a camera elsewhere have certainly been cheaper than in the USSR, where every technical product is so dear? It made no sense. I felt badly to have turned him down especially when we sailed through customs without inspection, not even a peek inside the bags or wallets. As the airplane corkscrewed out of the USSR a twisting, changing course that made me think we must be following a specific route to avoid certain locations I thought about that man, and despaired over the systems that have conspired to isolate and humiliate him so. In Copenhagen, early evening. We sail through luggage arrival and customs and hail a taxi. As in Helsinki last winter, we step from the USSR into capitalism in the form of a Mercedes taxi. The contrast is great. 21 August 1989 Do the boys in Copenhagen drift off to sleep at night dreaming of dusky Spanish girls with brown eyes and dark hair? They must, for they are surrounded every day by perfect blonds whose long tanned legs are amply displayed as they pedal their bikes through one of Europe's most livable cities. We are recuperating, tucked into the quiet luxury of the Hotel Opera as shopping for things we don't need along the busy pedestrian streets of downtown. We make a valiant effort at finding a Carl Larson book we have been unable to locate in Anchorage but do no better here in Scandanavia; not even the Svensk-Norsk bookstore has a copy. We are determined not to come here again without Joe and Ann. The city is a prototype of European culture fine old buildings, elegant people, fancy pastries in the windows, trim wooden sailboats anchored along city streets at Nuhavyn. Joe would luxuriate in this. I know. I grew up with him in Muldoon, and this is just what we always thought it would be like if we were ever rich and lucky enough to get to Europe. And now we have.