Capitol Ideas/Das Kapital Ideas
Bethell, Tom
cidentally, considering the literacy of those rich heirs whom I know, the Census Bureau's 14 percent must include plenty of gilded idlers. My guess is that in terms of longevity, comparative...
...Even university professors often speak in the argot of the slob...
...The authorities labor under a great and permanent dread that Russians will meet foreigners and thereby (presumably) learn forbidden things...
...And having done so, what did he expect from those who live in Mississippi...
...And many merchants -- fearful of attack by Chinese warlords or bandits -- buried their Silver coins in secret caches...
...As I see it, this is in part an acknowledgment of Communism's failure to produce anything new...
...We stepped out for a lunch that was not so great, although the bread was fine...
...On the other hand it is quite possible that this trend has been observable for decades and has always led nowhere...
...ON CUOMO'S ABORTION STAND: "He had found, in consensus and prudence, a way of having religion when he wanted it and not having it when he didn't" ON U.S...
...It was something to keep in mind, certainly...
...No factories, no collective farms or Museums of Economic Achievement...
...Everything looks shabby in socialist countries because in the absence of property rights only top priority things get done (e.g., maintaining the military...
...dollars spent in the Soviet Union...
...Customs was an ordeal...
...That evening we heard a Donizetti opera at the Kirov Theatre...
...Neither the writ-ten word nor the printed word is ac-corded much admiration here nowadays...
...This in itself is an amazing thing since all Soviet science and technology, architecture and (especially) ideas seem to have been imported, and for centuries this has been true...
...The rest were just shadows...
...Harkness wanted civility and temperate discourse, why did he come in swinging...
...No muggings underway either...
...As someone remarked, much of what our Intourist guides told us would have been considered "unconstitutional" in the U.S., violating the separation of church and state...
...Meanwhile, though it may be (not that it need be) true we'll all be pushing up daisies—or magnolias possibly—before history hands down any verdict on the case at hand, I hope the counsel for the defense will forgive my detection in him, as in other apologists of gradualism North and South alike, a grim, barely clandestine relief that he, at least, won't be around to hear the sentence . . . much less do the time...
...NW Washington, DC 20009 © 1986 The Washington Mint 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 than when he lived in Leningrad for a few months in 1977...
...Cases of single-malt Scotch...
...Beichman asked the young man if he was worried about being followed...
...I've spent all this time criticizing the Soviet Union, and now I'm beginning to worry that nothing iniquitous is happening," he added...
...The fact is that no one should besurprised by the high rate of illiteracy in the Republic...
...Overall, our tour was almost completely nonideological...
...Arnold Beichman, former newspaperman and professor, now a columnist affiliated with the Hoover Institution...
...I think Gorbachev knew what he was doing when he let us in," Beichman said...
...So why can't we live together in peace...
...The real Soviet GNP (sometimes said to be about 60 percent of the U.S...
...Different sources give different figures, but perhaps 60,000 U.S...
...Credit card customers are advised to place their orders by calling: Toll Free 1-800-228-2323 (24 Hours a Day) No lottery mechanisms will be utilized for this sale...
...Beichman (continued on page 53) there Asa better book on the 1984 presidential campaign, I haven't heard about it...
...The Soviet Union is probably even more "infiltrated" by the market than the U.S...
...A youth did a double take as we breezed along Yankee Doodle-style and I saw him out of the corner of my eye break away from his companions: another hopeful money changer...
...I knew what he meant...
...tourists would swoon over Tolstoyan peasants strumming balalaikas (a Moscow version of New Orleans's Preservation Hall...
...I didn't say that the shanties had disappeared from sight...
...Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and the rest of the vacuous Minimalists would probably score about as well as Prince, which brings to mind the herds of morons who inhabit the world of celebrity and pop entertainment...
...Keeping us up to the historical mark as usual, Beichman reported that S. M. Kirov had been assassinated by Stalin in 1934, thus kicking off the Great Terror...
...Imagine my relief...
...We looked about us with renewed curiosity...
...They also took from my briefcase a Mid-Atlantic Research Associates report on Yurchenko (the re-defector), but let through (with a second glance) a book by Tom Bethel...
...Each coin was minted between 1873-1878 at United States Mint facilities in Philadelphia, San Francisco, or Carson City, Nevada...
...Olga may have wondered whether this was meant as a compliment to Russia or an insult to the "floor show" we had watched...
...I shall be as brief as I can, after which I shall spike my cannon and move on...
...A few of us had already been to the Soviet Union...
...The coin's mint date is located at the bottom center...
...Perhaps there is change here, perhaps a growing fearlessness on the part of the young, who seemed on the surface to be more "capitalistic" and more independent-minded than their elders...
...The reverse bears a heraldic American Eagle, the weight and purity of the Silver content, and the legend: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TRADE DOLLAR...
...If we assume that these tourists spend on average $1,000 per head, U.S...
...Richard and Cynthia Grenier...
...tourists might bringinto the country with them...
...In the course of my literary duties I must read many new books, and I can testify that many of the Republic's illiterates are proof-readers and more are authors...
...Larry Moffitt said he had never seen an Intourist guide hassle an immigration official...
...The specifications for the special public sale of these historic coins is as follows: HISTORICAL DATAz In 1873, the United States was fighting for a share of the newly-opened China trade...
...Ernie Lefever of the Ethics and Public Policy Center asked me if it was my first trip...
...Now I find that kind of touching...
...The absence of pornography was one suggestion...
...So why make trouble...
...No hymn books, prayer books, church bulletins...
...I looked out of the window, to see what they would have seen, and there was the Alexander Column, put up in 1832, topped still by the angel holding the cross of Christ...
...But I don't...
...White ice floes slipped through black water...
...The customs inspection of our group was wholly ideological...
...Laura was writing a response to my article, he said, and he would like to verify one or two things for her...
...I thought this rather a good answer to a getting-to-know-you question...
...BETHELL (continued from page 13) said...
...It would all have happened any-way even if Lenin had been strangled in his crib, let alone shot by Kerensky...
...We had heard that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was about to be signed...
...going home to wives and children...
...Box 10448+Arlington, VA 22210 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 53 So many old structures have survived because the Communist state scarcely has the surplus energy to tear down old buildings, let alone restore them or put up new ones...
...Nothing had been swept or painted in years...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Hence the Communist devotion to literacy campaigns (as Lenin himself admitted...
...Silver Trade Dollars Minted between 1873-1878...
...He retorted that that would be enough Red-baiting...
...Harkness's was so good as to defeat its own purpose...
...When I arrived the pact had just been signed...
...As a newcomer, nonetheless, my first impression was of the tremendous disparity between the general level of economic development in the Soviet Union and in the U.S...
...Unthinkable in this country...
...It was the consensus of those in our group who had been to the Soviet Union before that the material condition of the Soviet proletariat has noticeably improved in the last decade or so...
...We argued about that, just as we argued later about the Richard Pipes (blame it on the Russians) vs...
...I kept thinking how extraordinary it is that for almost seventy years now the regime has managed to preserve, semi intact, a materialistic ideology that has so conspicuously failed at the material level...
...Afghanistan...
...Let's say you've got a wife and a couple of kids...
...Among those also making the trip with us were: Martin Nolan, the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe...
...Mind you, T did misspell Erik Ness's name...
...Harkness enumerates various silly opinions he imagines me to hold, and sundry odious moral traits of which I am supposedly the perfect exemplar...
...Arnold Beichman, a short, stout man with a white thatch of hair, was talking about one of his favorite subjects, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose icon was everywhere...
...The gory annals of controversy furnish no precedent for a man being reduced to arguments from his antagonist's middle initials...
...As usual at the opera I couldn't follow the action at all and began to doze off, thinking dim thoughts about the ornate dress circle, ornate building, ornate opera, color and pageantry of the old order, in fact very non-Communistic...
...Someone suggested making a list of the outward and visible signs of a Communist society—queues, slogans, and so on...
...Only an ethical quadriplegic would believe that racism and "petty behavior" are moral problems of comparable dimensions...
...Put up shanties on the Dart-mouth green...
...The Russian Revolution was too big an event to attribute to the genius, evil or otherwise, of one man...
...Dixy Lee Ray, former governor of Washing-ton State and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission...
...Here we have Laura the bold, defending the honor of the Dartmouth Review against attacks both real and imaginary, spouting Nietzsche, stomping all over my article in jackbooted fury, and she still has her boyfriend do the really hard things, like calling me on the telephone and mailing letters to the editor...
...Doug, as we took to calling him, acted as our unofficial chief of protocol, toastmaster, and speechmaker...
...James Harkness certainly got one thing right: he didn't change my mind, nor is it likely that I could ever change his...
...I would say something about Miss Ingraham's comments on SAT scores and my own college if I understood them...
...Someone slipped him a few dollars and he was gone in a second...
...He was openly scornful of Communism and implied that none of his friends believed a word of it...
...I hardly recall seeing one picture of Gorbachev...
...from the Ukraine, he told me...
...A recently rediscovered private cache of 100 year-old Silver Trade Dollars -- one of our nation's most beautiful, yet little known, coins -- has now been authenticated and certified by The Washington Mint...
...May your next journey south leave us both in a better humor...
...This is a small fraction of hard currency that the Soviets now stand to lose as a result of the oil price drop...
...Haphazard mounds of earth dotted the roadside, along with splintered timbers, rusted pipe, and occasional evidence of half-hearted spadework, long since abandoned...
...The Greniers kept asking Olga to translate the hortatory slogans on top of many buildings...
...My guess is that in terms of longevity, comparative health, marital condition, criminal records, and all the other indices of well-being our illiterate 14 percent are doing quite well, freed as they are from the terrors of modern American sophistication...
...Whether he's a moral quadriplegic or just a resilient Dixiecrat, who's to say...
...He mentioned Lenin's 1902 pamphlet, "What Is To Be Done...
...Ambassador to Iran and Japan, now retired from the foreign service...
...Isaac's Cathedral (man cannot live by bread alone...
...No suburban development as we understand that phrase...
...It is a lovely irony that as higher education spreads so does disdain for the educated mind...
...to PLO hijackers...
...I had visited the (Polish) Roman Catholic Church that morning and felt much the same way...
...Second: In his volcanic summation, Mr...
...Which he does...
...Isaac's, a Russian Orthodox church not now functioning as such, had been elaborately restored, at considerable expense to the state...
...No," he said, "I went to Moscow in August, 1939, with -a letter from Roosevelt to Stalin...
...I believe there are about fifteen functioning churches in Leningrad, and (we were told) forty in Moscow...
...Stay on Top of current trends in politics and culture...
...Sun Yung Moon's Unification As we circled above Leningrad I Tom Bethel...
...If Mr...
...Can reformation be far behind...
...What do the 35,000 students at the University of Toronto have to do to get Laura Ingraham's attention...
...To fight Communism in New York City during World War II took heroism, he thought...
...Keep your nose clean," Beichman said by way of summary, "don't apply to emigrate, don't agitate for Israel, and they'll let you alone...
...First: All of this prim tut-tutting about the "trajectory" of my language comes with an ill grace from a man who had, inter alia, compared the white population of the South...
...Where are the collected works of Brezhnev today...
...Not on that occasion...
...Final Shots In his rejoinder to my recent letter (Correspondence, TAS, April 1985), Mr...
...METAL CONTENT: Each one of these Silver Dollars contains 420 grains (27.22 grams) of .900 Fine Silver -- the most Silver of any U.S...
...Both Richard Grenier and Ernie Lefever had been in Moscow at the time of the Khrushchev' thaw...
...She referred to them for the same reason Baudelaire wrote about sin, or Thomas Wolfe about Asheville: it was all they knew...
...They would need help from the true revolutionaries—intellectuals of the propertied class...
...coin...
...I just realized," Beichman said on the train, "all these people are Communists...
...Yet Mr...
...I called him Eric Ness...
...Where's the monster...
...But they were obviously confident that their apparent intimacy wouldn't be misconstrued...
...I looked up with alarm, expecting to be thrown out for breaking the rules...
...Arnold grew up in an orthodox Jewish household in New York City...
...is The American Spec- looked below for signs of life but could tator's Washington correspondent...
...a lonely road with a lonely truck...
...landed us all in trouble) The young man spoke good English...
...The `coins in this special release have been hidden in China for 100 years...
...The state protects socialist property and provides condi-tions for its growth," says Article 10 of the Soviet Constitution...
...I had not thought my prowess so great...
...I said that they were gone from the green...
...The air quality (aviation fumes, grit, and smoke) in the depressing gray terminal building would not have satisfied EPA...
...Still, in one particular he disappointed me...
...Their faith in the written word—the hortatory slogan!—is boundless...
...Still, the decision of the Party not to eradicate all public traces of Christianity is surprising, considering that Communism is itself an inverted religion, rooted in antagonism to all other religions (but especially Christianity...
...I demurred, taking my cue from War and Peace (in which Tolstoy argues that Napoleon is insufficient to explain the Napoleonic Wars...
...Occasionally a young man would dart up to us and offer to exchange roubles for dollars at an ex-change rate closer to the illegal market rate.' Wlady said that in his 1977 stay in the Soviet Union he was never so approached...
...In the normal course of events Soviet citizens were not allowed inside...
...a winding river...
...Did you meet Stalin...
...COIN DESCRIPTION: The obverse of each coin features the seated figure of Miss Liberty extending an olive branch...
...It would be helpful to know how many of them graduated with honors or went on to pursue advanced degrees...
...One might think of this as the Communist equivalent of the sale of indulgences...
...Harkness imputes that opinion to me, apparently on the strength of my having accused him of "cast[ing} about for instances of petty behavior and for evidence that white racists still exist in Mississippi...
...Does everyone have to be Shcharansky...
...Leningrad Airport's cracked and rutted runway would scarcely have passed FAA inspection...
...The high Silver content made the Trade Dollar popular with the chinese...
...I had no idea lady-like behavior was on the ideological agenda of the Dartmouth Review...
...We decided on the spur of the moment to go to the center of Leningrad on the Metro (opened in 1955...
...RESTRICTIONS: This special release of United States Silver Trade Dollars is restricted to private citizens only -- NO dealer orders will be accepted...
...Before we left Leningrad, Arnold Beichman visited the only synagogue and returned with the gloomy report that the regime had made probably stabilizing concessions in the realm of religious practice...
...A member of Rev...
...Nevsky Prospekt was packed with people trudging along in the dim twilight...
...Had I written that he was looking for a claw hammer and a ham sandwich, no doubt he would have me claiming that both were edible...
...Opposite was a memorial to the Great Patriotic War...
...Beichman said he had never before been allowed into the Soviet Union, although he must have spent half his life reading, thinking, and arguing about it...
...I refer interested readers to his first letter and invite them to decide for themselves the pertinence of my reply, including my comment on his parallelism between racism and "petty behavior...
...is by power-hungry intellectuals dreaming of a new socialist society...
...We refused all such offers because of course they are illegal and could have 'The official exchange rate is 7.2 roubles for $10...
...Party authorities are under relentless "capitalist" pressure to turn a blind eye to such exchanges...
...That is a pure guess, but there can be no doubt that the official Soviet GNP is greatly overestimated...
...An interview with Jeane Kirkpatrick, reproduced from Encounter, was solemnly transported away to some higher authority, along with my passport, and returned half an hour later with grudging approval...
...She seemed not to enjoy furnishing us with these Communist commercial breaks...
...Oh boy...
...They took away Janet Cooke's Pulitzer for less...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S...
...No doubt Gorbachevwould like to restore his domain to the pristine Communist state (assuming it ever existed), but there is no way that he can do so...
...But I wander...
...This is so comically at odds with the old idea that Communism represents the future, the "new society," that I found myself wondering anew at the strange persistence of socialist ideology among intellectuals all over the West...
...putting some food on the table...
...Clothes are brighter and bet-ter made...
...The Communists evidently believe that an aurally transmitted doctrine poses a minimal risk...
...It raises the question of what you would do in a totalitarian society...
...They took no notice of me as they walked through the gallery, arm in arm...
...Sprucing up buildings can never be high on the list...
...Richard Brookhiser writes with the kind of deconstructionist zeal that penetrates the woozy surface of stump rhetoric to isolate the hard nubs of fact within...
...Having launched his attack at the level of "Nyaah, nyaah," Mr...
...I didn't have the heart to tell him that Beichman was one of the most notorious in the United States...
...Solzhenitsyn (blame it on Communism) dispute...
...which he seemed to regard as a kind of "underground" blueprint of the twentieth century...
...There are historians here who devote their time to studying a week in the life of Lenin...
...In short he didn't believe that Jewish rebellion in the Soviet Union would grow, given the regime's present tolerance of Jewish religious practice...
...Of course you could not do this if you were a member of the Communist party or wanted to join it...
...Olga, our Intourist guide, a member of the Communist party, watched noncommittally...
...Foreigners...
...TOTAL: $180.00) SPECIAL DISCOUNTS: The following discount prices apply for customers placing quantity orders: THREE Silver Dollars for $490.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $495.00) FIVE Silver Dollars for $770.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $775.00) TEN Silver Dollars for $1420.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $1425.00) ORDER INSTRUCTIONS: All mail orders must be accompanied by a check or money order for the full amount...
...And in no country that I have visited is there more conspicuously a proletariat...
...In a way Leningrad is a preservationist's dream...
...He had read Hedrick Smith's book The Russians and thought it accurate, but he found it hard to lay his hands on books in English, other than innocuous Eng...
...Bottled mineral water was safe, he said, but its drawback was that "it tastes as though it has been run through a carp...
...Because it is part of our past," she said, "and without the past there will be no future...
...Beichman asked...
...There were no museum guards in sight...
...Like a courting couple...
...Many undoubtedly are college graduates...
...works...
...Wlady said how much dirtier the subway looked 100 Year Old United States Government Silver Trade Dollars In Accordance with its Established Policy, The Washington Mint Hereby Announces the Limited Release of 1,200 U.S...
...Church, he was a veteran of two earlier Soviet tours...
...Then I called the Spectator...
...Not much streetlighting...
...The Washington Mint, one of America's foremost private mints, fully guarantees satisfaction with a 30-day, money-back policy...
...And so farewell, brave foeman...
...The Helsinki Commission thinks this figure is too high, claiming that only 35,000 Americans visited the USSR in 1984...
...Jensen, our Camel-smoking Marlboro Man, had been the Associated Press's correspondent in 1969 but was thrown out for "activities hostile to socialist construction...
...There are many fine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings in the center of the city (the twentieth-century outskirts are unspeakable) but they badly need fixing up...
...732, 1718 Connecticut Ave...
...Orders will be filled on a strict FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED basis according to the POSTMARK date of mail orders and the TIME AND DATE of telephone orders...
...The material condition of the Russian people has slowly improved, after all...
...We clambered back into the bus, to be taken to St...
...We saw so many churches, monasteries, and icons that one might at times have thought it a tour of Holy Mother Russia...
...The mosaics of Christ and the apostles had clearly been worked on with loving care...
...FOREIGN POLICY: "Americans believe in the brotherhood of man or in the war of the worlds, not in balance of power!' THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 13 to be an attack on the teenaged staff of the Dartmouth Review...
...The Boston Globe paid for Marty Nolan...
...It was the same in so many other churches that we visited...
...Footsteps...
...The observant Jew's requirements had been catered to...
...Further research will doubtless show that these illiterates live longer, have better digestion, and see shrinks less frequently than many other reputedly better-educated groups in our society...
...The coins in this special release remain in extraordinary condition, and our experts have graded them Choice Very Fine/Extremely Fine...
...Terry Teachout, The American Spectator "Brookhiser has pumped new life into what, with Theodore White's retirement from the scene, had become a dull if not dormant literary genre" —Victor Gold, National Review "Based on his own `outside' reporting —a careful analysis of what candidates said and did—this is a fresh and thoughtful account...
...Voltaire and his friends might have come in at any moment...
...She wore a maroon pork pie hat, high boots to match, and belted raincoat with collar turned up...
...In fact, at the recent Party Congress, no GNP statistics were published—the first time this has happened...
...We walked the short distance to the Neva River...
...The final part of this article, describing Tbilisi and Moscow, will appear next month...
...Each coin measures 38.1mm in diameter, the same as the famed Morgan Silver Dollar that it predates...
...I'm sorry, but it does have an effectto see this," Beichman said...
...No, the authorities would only be keeping an eye on us if we were White House big shots or, let's say, notorious antiCommunists, he said...
...Still, it did make an impression to see the Russians who daily had no choice but to submit to the Communist system of command from above...
...Which they are...
...A quite extraordinary performance...
...My feet aching, I sat down in a gilt and velvet chair next to a marble table...
...Olga seemed to belong in a spy movie...
...Not many cars...
...Perhaps the children of Czar Nicholas II played in this very room...
...Not bad...
...Beichman said that "tourism, like diplomacy, is easy on the head but hard on the feet...
...Without their succor, their aid and comfort, above all their faith, this society wouldn't last five minutes, I found myself thinking several times while in the Soviet Union...
...Thus Soviet officialdom intercepts perhaps 85 percent of all US...
...Harkness has despaired too quickly...
...see little more than a desolate terrain...
...He walked along with us for a few blocks...
...I asked Olga why a Communist state would spend so much money restoring the symbols of Christianity...
...About two weeks after "Fast Times at Dartmouth High" appeared, I got a call from her boyfriend...
...This from In-tourist guides who have defected...
...There is less waiting in line for essentials, and items such as fresh fruit and vegetables are more readily available...
...Poor Olga was forever filling out duplicate forms with little bits of carbon paper, and I believe at night she filled out more that we never saw—about us...
...At one point I found myself completely alone in a smallish eighteenth-century room, and to a degree that is unusual in museums was encapsulated in the past: a museum in a historic building in the midst of a city mummified by Communism...
...Nonetheless, we were exhorted to visit the Beriozka at every opportunity—so that we would leave our dollars behind...
...For that reason Communist countries look like animated, dilapidated museums—something that has also been observed of Havana...
...tourists visited the Soviet Union in 1985...
...Carelessness and vulgarity characterize most American writing whether it be journalism or fiction...
...Our hotel rooms were okay, but Larry had warned us not to drink the water in Leningrad...
...coins: Our Silver Dollar weighed a little less than the Mexican Piece of Eight, so thrifty Chinese merchants were giving their business to countries that used the Mexican coin...
...There are many such luxury stores in the Soviet Union today, some for tourists, some for Party officials, and so on...
...Another sign today—and one that would have scandalized Lenin—is the Beriozka: the special shop where only hard currency is accepted and from which everyday Russians are excluded...
...and your managing editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski (see p. 56...
...A lot more people would be alive today...
...Ross now wants to upgrade to the plastic "elegance" of little Francophile weenie-stabbers...
...Six of us stood outside the hotel in the long twilight...
...Still, you weren't going to be sent away for twenty years...
...Without the things of the past that Communism has chosen not to destroy there would indeed be nothing...
...This too is subversive...
...I have the gravest doubts that novelists such as John Irving and Robert Coover would pass the Census Bureau's test...
...Kosher arrangements could be made...
...I didn't say that Les Grant is the "first black ever to write for the Review...
...Some have been repaired and painted, but in general the problem of maintenance far outruns the capacity of a Communist society to cope with it...
...Arnold, you've given in already," Richard Grenier said...
...MacArthur had the doleful eyes of a basset hound and the high balding dome of his famous uncle...
...across the way blocks of scruffy-looking flats disappearing into the distance...
...One bullet could have changed history...
...Was it true that Laura had sent them her letter...
...Richard Brookhiser of National Review...
...Here Lenin said that the proletariat would never bring about a revolution because they could be bought off with crumbs from the capitalist table...
...He is a beau sabreur, and no mistake...
...But we were too late...
...While one building is restored, ten more deteriorate...
...Still, the point is that this is only conspicuous to those with direct experience of a capitalist country...
...I said yes and asked the same question of Douglas MacArthur, former U.S...
...That my article was "riddled with errors...
...Josemaria Escriva...
...No one has the right to use socialist property for personal gain or other selfish ends...
...Subscribe to The American Spectator, a monthly magazine of global import...
...Officials made off with Nolan's copy of David Shipler's in-nocuous book Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams and promised to return it in Moscow (but did not...
...Washington Times foreign editor Holger Jensen...
...Later, in Moscow, we told Olga that U.S...
...I told him we were about to watch a commie opera...
...I said that he "calls himself the first black ever to write for the Review...
...Kerensky, that jerk...
...Across the river was the Peter-and-Paul Fortress where Dostoevsky was imprisoned and, some-one said, Bakunin convinced his jailers to become anarchists...
...There's the Seine, there's the barges," Brookhiser said...
...Iivo soldiers of the Red Army came into the room, squat and bulky both...
...As long as they are kept in the dark about conditions in other parts of the world they might reasonably suppose their condition to be normal...
...This of course should characterize a Christian society...
...The Winter Palace loomed up in front of us...
...Really...
...The heavy tread of guards...
...Nonetheless, certain of his remarks call for some comment...
...All was quiet within, the large square in front of it deserted...
...I think we had just wearied of imitation...
...They're just like us...
...Cecil S. H. Ross Jackson, Mississippi James Harkness replies: Ahh, air biscuits...
...Check and money order customers should send their orders directly to: The Washington Mint Dept...
...The Party elite will insist on retaining its legal privileges...
...The next day we went sightseeing on the Intourist bus...
...I wondered if they would be off soon to Afghanistan, and recalled the cloud of anxiety that crossed the face of the youth on Nevsky Prospekt...
...She spoke good English and kept a comradely eye on us throughout our tour...
...But one thing I did notice about the (functioning) churches I visited: There was no written literature available in any of them...
...From the fact that I had him seeking two things at once, he somehow inferred that I thought them in all respects similar...
...What's in it for you...
...Certification of Authenticity will accompany each Silver Dollar in this release...
...Everything must be recited from memory...
...Our hotel, Swedish-built for the 1980 Olympics, was on the outskirts of Leningrad...
...They represent a flagrant breakdown of the Communist ideal: luxuries for the privileged...
...But there is hope for Laura In-graham...
...Are you going to be a character witness for someone who has been arrested...
...Needless to say, none of these actually describe me, but one of them requires a specific protest...
...11.95 for 8 issues ^ New ^ Renewal ^ Payment enclosed ^ Bill me later Name Address (please print) City State Zip X510 The American Spectator+P.O...
...The subway was deep and the riders coming up the escalator looked curiously across at us...
...Everything looked run down and dilapidated...
...Stalin always did in his Leningrad bosses," he added as the curtain went up...
...Third: I have a certain appreciation for elegant invective, and some of Mr...
...For one he published an interview with Vladimir Bukovsky...
...The people were law-abiding...
...Sometimes in the course of our tour it seemed that the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church alone were indigenous...
...Establishing the hierarchies of command, the recognition of who is subordinate to whom, must be one of the most difficult tasks in establishing a Communist state...
...Anyone who watches the television talk shows realizes that most of these patheticos are subverbal and, what is more, incapable of tasteful dress...
...If they do so, then prosperity will increase and the people's dependence on Party control will diminish...
...A few days later, Laura's boyfriend sent me a note: "Here's the letter Laura Ingraham mailed the Spectator...
...So Congress authorized the minting of an extraordinary Silver Coin - the United States Trade Dollar, a magnificent coin with more Silver than either our standard dollar or the famed Piece of Eight...
...The regime's attitude seemed to be: "Let them eat matzos...
...They took no interest at all in our material possessions, a lot of interest in the printed matter we brought with us...
...All the more reason, then, for their rulers both to undermine capitalism wherever possible, and to limit the proletariat's con-tact with capitalists...
...Uniformed guards leafed slowly through two news-magazines I had brought along, pausing to scrutinize photos of the USS Saratoga in the Gulf of Sidra...
...Roosevelt wanted to dissuade Stalin because he knew it meant war...
...tourism yielded the Soviet government approximately $50 million in clear "profit" last year...
...A limit of ten coins per order will be strictly enforced, and all orders are subject to acceptance by The Washington Mint...
...level) is undoubtedly a small fraction of ours—perhaps no more than a tenth...
...SALE PRICES: Each Silver Trade Dollar in this release is priced at $175.00 plus $5.00 for postage, handling and insurance...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 11 On the way to our hotel we caught our first glimpse of socialist construction: not so much empty lots ("lots" implies property) as muddy wasteland beside the lightly traveled road...
...and beneath them there is the substratum of "corruption": the illegal, under-ground economy, recently estimated by Vladimir Bukovsky at 30 percent of the total production of goods and services...
...At first I thought it might be a put-on, but he was quite serious...
...And consider the curious tale of the fate of my article at the New Republic, which seems to serve no purpose above the purely malicious, and to draw attention to the fact that I have written for the New Republic and Miss Ingraham has not...
...Where's the beast in the belly...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...
...Unleavened bread was available for Passover...
...The Intourist goal seemed to be to minimize the idea of a revolutionary state...
...I was not prepared for the dense crowds of people swarming on the sidewalks...
...no guns to their heads...
...of homilies by Msgr...
...The tour was arranged and paid for by News World Communications, the organization that founded the Washington Times and the New York Tribune...
...The study reveals that of the native English-speakers 70 percent did not finish high school...
...I thought you'd like to see it...
...I made my own way to the Hermitage Museum, which is inside the Winter Palace...
...It pleased as much as it wounded...
...Which is not to assume that the Census Bureau's 14 percent did not include a few soi disant sophisticates...
...In the background was the unwelcome sound of a fast-paced beat Leningrad rock, as I came to think of it, and it was hard to avoid...
...A Dual Main Selection of The Conservative Book Club DOUBLEDAY RICHARD BROOKE-11SE R R FOREWORD BY MURRAY KEMPTON A BROOKHISER SAMPLER: ON MONDALE'S ORATORY: "He recited his speech solemnly, like someone explaining the facts of life" ON FERRARO'S SOPHISTICATION: "She pegged her discussion of Lebanon and Central America to trips she had taken there as a Congress-woman...
...A witty and compelling argument for the good sense of the American people...
...His father had emigrated to the U.S...
...The ordinary Russian must have noticed by now that specialty shops are patronized by two groups of people: Party officials and foreigners, leading to the reasonable inference that both are equally privileged...
...he asked...
...By the time that verdict is rendered, the three of us will likely be past caring...
...Graceful expression is infrequent in our public forums, and when it does appear it is often scorned as pretentious or insufficiently democratic...
...Don't proselytize, don't make a fuss, and you can probably go to Mass without getting into trouble...
...And as to the question of whether the South can provide the model for a racially harmonious society, history will judge whether Willie Morris and I are wishful thinkers or whether Mr...
...Beichman was saying that Lenin was the only "historical figure" in the Soviet Union...
...Not much in the shops, if you could even call them that...
...What on earth is Laura Ingraham's point...
...He was worried about that because he knew he would be drafted and quite likely sent there: recruits from regions bordering Afghanistan (whom he referred to as "Arabs," meaning Muslims) couldn't be relied on, he said...
...My "little-known alma mater...
...No, no, they said, but Laura's boyfriend had...
...But our traders were severely handicapped by the Silver content of U.S...
...Freelance money changers regularly offer 3 roubles per dollar, and one heard that the real "market" rate is about 5 roubles per dollar...
...We were free at any time to leave the tour, and many of us did so...
...He was supposed to become a rabbi but some-where along the way he read H. L. Mencken and today he says he is an agnostic...
...The leader of the group was Larry Moffitt, a 36-year-old Texan with a ready repertoire of laconic phrases...
...far more unsettling to Communism than anything U.S...
...journalist emeritus Clark Mollenhoff...
...These churches and their interiors, to say nothing of what takes place inside them, are so much more impressive and beautiful than anything that Communism has produced that one would have thought the contrast subversive...
...The Goals of the 27th Party Congress Must Be Fulfilled...
...That turned out to be true and one was reduced to Pepski...
...Publishers Weekly J `Brilliantly written ....Although it goes over contests with which we are all familiar, it brings them to life by casting a penetrating eye and intelligence on things done and said...
...But I never could find Olga and the gang in that vast, baroque maze, so I strolled about on my own...
...What of the remaining 30 percent...
...The Beriozka tells the perceptive Russian that the Communized masses have nothing to lose but their chains...
...DAS KAPITAL IDEAS There were twenty of us in the Finnair lounge (JFK), beginning our ten-day, three-city tour of the Soviet Union: Leningrad, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Moscow, in that order...
...Beichman added that this of course explained the reaction of so many travelers to the Soviet Union: the human continuity disguises the political discontinuity...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
