The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2023 41 themselves involved in production knew somebody who was—we got lots of questions about agriculture. A couple that stick in my memory were about herd yields, the average volume of milk produced per cow in the United States, and whiskey. When I told Soviets that the U.S. herd average was 5 metric tons of milk per cow per year, they accused me of lying. I would then reply that the United States had only the second-highest average herd yield in the world, that Japan was number one, which was true. Soviet herd yields were less than half that. In Kishinev, a rather ragged fellow dressed in a typical cotton batting coat asked me: “Just what is American whis- key?” The crowd laughed and hooted at him, but he turned to face them and said, “I rode a bus fromOdessa all night to come here to ask this question, and now this young man will answer me.” He was very dignified in his ragged clothing. I did my best to describe corn sour mash Bourbon whiskey to him. If questions got too technical for a guide, the guide could give the visitor a library pass—in each city we had three special- ists, usually university professors from the United States, who could answer technical questions. We kept a weird question list. One of the women guides was asked where she got her teeth. I was once asked why I speak Russian “almost well” (I started studying Russian too late in life to be a native speaker, so have an accent and make stylistic errors). We established rapport with our audiences by conceding that America is not number one in every category. They were shocked that we would admit that. Japan had higher herd yields in dairying. Other countries had higher yields in crops. You could always find categories where we could point out that we’re good, but some other countries are better. That stunned visitors. The first days were rough, but in time we got better at knowing what statistics we needed to memorize to get our points across—Soviets loved numbers. I had an easier time establishing credibility than most other guides because I had grown up on a dairy farm and had been in 4-H, so I actually knew a fair amount about dairying and could talk knowl- edgeably about it. One agitator put his foot in his mouth when he loudly declared to the crowd, “He doesn’t know anything about agriculture,” then ended up being laughed at by the audience when I showed that I did. That said, you couldn’t reach everybody, and some people went away hav- ing swallowed Soviet propaganda whole. The deeply intense interest in America on the part of Soviets was the most striking aspect of my experience. Most of them knew they were not getting the whole story or the real story from Soviet state-controlled media, but they didn’t know what the story was. The exhibit was an extremely rare opportunity to converse with a real, live American who spoke Russian, even if KGB minders were observing the entire time. The Soviet information space was dominated by state-generated propaganda, not unlike Putin’s Russia today, with real information coming mostly from shortwave radio broadcasts by VOA, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle, and BBC World Service, which were jammed. So the curiosity was intense. We were there to give our version of what America is. You knew you had won an argument when the Soviet inter- locutor said, “ U nas luchshe [We have it better here]!” That was grasping for the last straw. In really heated moments, if a visitor was being nasty or obnoxious, I might ask, “Where do people immigrate? How many immigrants come to the Soviet Union, and howmany to the USA?” That was a hard question for the agitators to deal with, because everybody knew that Soviet Jews were immigrating by the hundreds at that point, some to Israel, but many to the United States, and virtually nobody in those days immigrated to the USSR. In one case, a visitor asked if I could read Russian, not only speak it. I assured him I could read Russian. He asked what Russian authors I liked to read, and I replied, “Nobel Prize laure- ates.” He smiled, “Ahh, Sholokhov!” to which I replied, “Also Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn.” Even though Dr. Zhivago and The Gulag Archipelago had been banned, everybody had at least heard of them if not had a chance to read a samizdat (clandestine) copy of them, and the crowd around me burst out laughing. In general, people were simply curious, and most were friendly. There were, of course, hard-core communists who were anti-American, but you simply had to take them in stride. At one point I was arguing with a fellow who claimed the USSR was much freer than the United States, so I asked him howmany communist parties the Soviet Union had. “One, of course,” he answered. “We have it better,” I said. “We have three: the CPUSA headed by Gus Hall, the Revolu- tionary Communist Party headed by Bob Avakian, and the Our instructions going in were to be ourselves, and to express our opinions freely.