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17 THE SEARCH FOR A NORMAL SOCIETY When a person is out for a long time, a new person arises. — . , Russian sociologist “Why do we live as we do?” was a question asked by many Soviets, all of them presumably cleared by the KGB and who visited the United States on exchanges, reports a veteran State Department interpreter who escorted many of them around the country: Their minds were blown by being here. They could not believe there could be such abundance and comfort. Many of them would even disparage things here. “Excess, who needs it,” they would say. However, you could see that they did not believe what they were saying. When they returned home, in their own minds and in the privacy of their own trusted little circle of family and friends, they would tell the truth to themselves or to others. Over time, enough of them got out—to here and elsewhere—to make them realize how abysmal things were in the Soviet Union. However, their personal experiences abroad, their disgust with the way things were at home, and the emergence of leaders who were not so doctrinaire and did truly want to improve life there, all came together in perestroika and what happened subsequently. Those exchanges did a lot in giving people an opportunity to see how a normal life could be.1 One result of U.S.-Soviet exchanges often overlooked was the exposure to everyday American life that was a part of the visits of most Soviets who came to the United States. Their tours of American cities; visits to homes, schools, and farms; a university or small-town experience; and many other “extracurricular” activities were often arranged by local chapters of the National Council for International Visitors, a private organization that mobilizes the services of volunteers who give freely of their time to ensure that foreign visitors to the United States have a productive and pleasant stay in their communities and see the real America. One such volunteer has described a visit to a typical Wisconsin dairy farm by a delegation of high-level Soviet scientists who were in Racine to attend a scientific  . William H. Hopkins, e-mail to author, July , . conference. On a day off from their scientific sessions, the Russians were given a tour of a dairy farm operated by a farmer and his two daughters. The visitors were astonished by the range of the farm’s modern equipment, the fact that it grew its own fodder, the extent to which the dairy operation itself had been mechanized, the cleanliness of the animals and their stalls, the very high milk production as compared with Soviet dairy farms, and the profit made by the family. For Russians , most of whom have a heritage in agriculture, such visits confirmed the shortcomings of Soviet agriculture. Visitors to Washington, D.C., were astonished by the free access to the halls of Congress and the easy accessibility of constituents to their elected representatives and senators. And some Soviet visitors, awed by the high level of goods and services produced, were convinced that there had to be some secret center that directed the American economy; how else could it function so well, they figured. Travel broadens, it is said, but for Soviet travelers to the United States it was a broadening of major proportions, and it changed the way they saw their own country, as well as the United States. Accounts of Soviet astonishment on visiting their first American supermarket are legion, from the first Russian students who came to the United States in the late s and early s, to Boris Yeltsin’s visit in . The early students, when shown their first American supermarket, thought they were being shown a “Potemkin village,” a store set up especially to impress foreign visitors. When a Russian delegation came to San Francisco in the early s and got caught in a traffic jam, one of its members commented, “I’ll bet they collected all these cars here to impress us.” Russians saw Potemkin villages on their foreign travels because that is how they prepared to receive important visitors in their own country. Clean up everything, put “undesirable” elements out of sight, show the best, and persuade the visitors that what they are being shown is typical. Many Soviet visitors to the United States were indeed haunted by the“Potemkinvillage ” theme—the idea that they were being shown things created especially to impress them. The term comes from one...

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