TO the ordinary Soviet citizen, the U.S. is a country that, as Novelist Konstantin Simonov recently wrote in Pravda, "willy-nilly occupies a vast amount of space in our consciousness." There are only a few ways, however, in which Russians can satisfy their hunger for information about American lifestyles firsthand: examining the few consumer products available in hard-currency shops, attending occasional educational fairs sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, and thumbing through the cultural exchange magazine Amerika, which is popular despite a limited circulation of 55,000. The vast majority of reports about the U.S. appear in the Soviet Union's state-run press, and whether they involve Pentagon plans or kitchen conveniences, they almost invariably carry at least a tacitly unfavorable comment on capitalism.
Though Soviet audiences see the U.S. mostly through the astigmatic lens of ideology, some of the picture does come through in reasonably clear focus. Despite dogma, a new sophistication prevails, most notably in the attitude that for all of America's failings, there is much to be learned from the American experience. In recent months, Soviet media have carried an unusual amount of material about the U.S.
In a wide-ranging portrait of the U.S. at the end of the 1960s, for example, Simonov finds that "Americans love their country," even though they show "indignation" against some of its policies. He contradicts the usual Soviet picture of the U.S. as a nation without ideals, discerning a "new spiritual force," and is particularly impressed by his difficulty in finding a toy water gun for a young friend. Simonov explains that a revulsion against violence prompted many U.S. stores to drop toy weapons.
The most personal of the recent portraits comes from two Pravda journalists, Washington-based Boris Strelnikov and his editorial colleague from Moscow. Igor Shatunovsky, who traveled coast to coast on a six-week automobile tour of the U.S. In an eleven-part series under the title "America on the Right and the Left," they applaud American hospitality, motels, suburbia, telephone orders at drive-in restaurants and skyscraper construction ("The building rises by the minute, not by the day or week"). There are touches of naivete: they believe, for example, that drive-in banks are conveniences only for businessmen. There's also plain misinformation (the series opens with Negro women sweeping a street in front of the White House, though the Washington Sanitation Department employs no female street cleaners, black or white). The most amusing tableau involves the Russians' visit to the reading room of a right-wing organization in Texas. The plump, gray-haired attendant happened to be napping when they arrived, and he woke with a jolt that turned to shock when he learned the identity of his visitors. The two Pravda men speculate jokingly that the librarian "was thinking that he had slept through some important event, maybe even an invasion."
