Capitol Ideas / Moon Over Moscow
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS MOON OVER MOSCOW We passed through customs at Moscow with scarcely an official glance at our luggage. It seems the Soviet authorities have given up trying to control what people...
...This was beginning to look uncannily like a UNESCO conference...
...Moon promptly pledged $100,000 in support...
...Moon won this round after all...
...Cathy's experience corresponded to mine...
...What clearly has changed is the political and intellectual climate...
...while understandably at times being restricted in what they may say or put into print...
...The shops were, as before, either pathetic or revolting...
...On my earlier visit to the Soviet Union we met the female "commandant from the Urals" who told us she was happy to be in Moscow because "Lenin is here...
...happy flags waving, floral bouquets exchanged, children hugging, international peace and harmony wherever you turned...
...At the same time, however, the old constraints on economic life are still in place, more or less...
...In fact, they seemed to have no notion of the meaning of contract...
...It seems the Soviet authorities have given up trying to control what people bring into the country...
...Everything looked run down, she said, but then it may have been that way ten years ago...
...Half the buildings are disguised ruins, never maintained because The Plan did not anticipate the need for maintenance...
...Almost certainly a waxworks, isn't it...
...If this were to continue without interruption, economic life would ofcourse improve, not decline...
...This time the corpse in Lenin's tomb had been removed, apparently for repair work, and there was no longer a line outside Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square...
...Inside our hotel, nothing could be bought with Russian money...
...In the Soviet Union today, expression is much less restricted, and it is probably only a matter of time before contract is likewise liberated...
...Is this turning into one more peace front...
...The vacuum created by the decline of police power has partly been filled by local mafias, their leather-jacketed representatives now conspicuous at hotel entrances...
...The McDonald's line was truly amazing, one of those long snaking affairs winding back and forth be10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 tween police barriers...
...A meat shop we entered was so revolting that I only just got out before being overcome by nausea...
...There was food of a sort in the shops (contrary to the direst predictions she had heard...
...the original idea of Communism was that neither should be...
...Our guide, employed by Novosti Press, told us in the bus not to drink the tap water in our hotel rooms...
...Doing what...
...It was a poignant sight: hundreds of people standing patiently in a fine drizzle on the muddy sidewalk, queuing up for hamburgers and french fries...
...Glasnost is a reality...
...Grit filled the air, old military lorries belched smoke, ancient transmission systems were grinding for lack of oil...
...The president of the Soviet Council of World Peace praised Gorbachev in terms that outdid even Rev...
...If you're thinking of putting on a conference here," Moffitt said by way of summary, "don't...
...I went with her, together with Dan Fefferman of the American Freedom Coalition...
...It's like a gigantic junkyard...
...It is not easy on these occasions to report honestly what one sees and to distinguish this from what one hears from others (who may well be repeating what they have heard from still others...
...You can now legally exchange one dollar for six rubles, but taxi drivers and risk-takers on the streets will give you twelve and according to an estimate by an economist I met (a student of Hayek and Von Mises), the market rate is now about twenty to one...
...Organizing a conference in Moscow had been far more difficult than anywhere else in the world (and this was the World Media Association's eleventh conference...
...I ncidentally, it is a little noticed 1 paradox of our time—showing how deeply embedded and socialistic are the premises of our age—that freedom of expression should be regarded as a more basic right, and granted a more urgent protection from state power, than the freedom of contract...
...this is the ACLU agenda in a nutshell...
...I'm just waiting for you to repudiate it," Arnold said to Arnaud, "to deny that you wrote it...
...Sun Myung Moon, 70, who was imprisoned by the Communists in North Korea at the time of the Korean War, and subsequently founded the Unification Church (of which the World Media Association is an offshoot), was long considered to be anti-Soviet, and certainly anti-Communist...
...Is this not a perfect symbol of the change that has taken place...
...Moon spoke earnestly about how he loved the Soviet people and how much he was praying for them...
...We were staying at the MezhdunaTom Bethell is The American Spectator 's Washington correspondent...
...Setting up popular fronts...
...The only difference was that sitting in the audience were some of the world's leading anti-Communists, such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media and Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution...
...Moon LP was in place at the center of the tremendous dais, surrounded by thirtyfive former heads of state, mostly Latin American, mostly wearing double-breasted suits (three former presidents of Costa Rica...
...It could be...
...When a fire damaged the offices of Moscow News on February 15, Rev...
...The problem is that he does not know that the Soviets in fact have a store of bullion...
...I had only once been to Moscow before, four years earlier, and everything looked terribly run down, dirty and hopeless then...
...She said that she could not honestly see that much was different...
...One could not but feel sorry for these poor people, subjected for over seventy years to this futile, evil experiment in the transformation of human nature...
...Outside the hall was a Novosti Press display, with pamphlets documenting Gorbachev's visits to Cuba and China, "Cultural Life in the Soviet Republics," and so on...
...The taxi driver would take nothing but dollars...
...There was much talk of global cooperation, the efforts of humanity being extolled, with a new day dawning for all mankind...
...a half-hour wait, I was told...
...But this may not have been recognized as such because (I am guessing) the real improvement of glasnost may have created a general expectation that life in general would be transformed...
...Piles of long-abandoned gravel were heaped on verges of muddy grass...
...Joachim Maitre walked out at that point...
...It was good to see the unflappable Larry Moffitt once more...
...When Beichman got back to the hotel, he spotted Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor of the Washington Times, sitting in the lobby...
...Inflation is obviously soaring and by the end of the year no doubt the figures I have just provided will seem quaint...
...The money they had paid to the conference center had not been passed on to subcontractors but had been treated as captured booty rather than a medium of exchange...
...Outside the office of Moscow News, which we visited that afternoon, there was a vocal debate about the merits of Communism (one man contending that it worked for him because he was paid without having to work...
...The original idea of (classical) liberalism was that both contract and expression should be free...
...The perseverance required by McDonald's executives to get the place open must have been extraordinary...
...By all accounts party officials are routinely bribed and the underground economy is growing rapidly...
...Some have to stay here to improve things...
...Rubles are rejected...
...Recently, however, he has been making very friendly gestures toward the Kremlin, taking out full-page ads praising President Gorbachev as a "man of great courage and conviction," and declaring himself "willing to support his program any way that I can...
...A couple of days later there was a Little Angels (Korean schoolchildren) concert in the Lenin Hills...
...Walk several blocks up Gorky Street, however, and you encounter an even longer line—outside McDonald's...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 11...
...Rev...
...El Back at the hotel, the Rev...
...He said the economy was declining, illustrating the collapse of socialist morale with the following story...
...But (like Richard Pipes, the Harvard University historian) he said the Russians wanted to publish all his books, including Victims of Yalta, Stalin's Secret War, and his recent book The Minister and the Massacres (about the forcible repatriation of Cossacks to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II...
...This seemed to be the common experience of everyone on the tour...
...Visible was a grimy counter where they seemed to be serving snacks...
...The man who goes around replacing the broken light bulbs notices that they aren't the ones he put in," Moffitt said, "but he doesn't mind because he sells the broken ones back to the man in Gorky Park...
...Stick to mineral water...
...Joachim Maitre of Boston University said to Beichman...
...Tolstoy, who was attending the conference, is a British writer and collateral descendant of the famous author...
...Along with several other Novosti people, the guide was working temporarily for the World Media Association, helping to organize their giant conference in Moscow, to which I and about 500 other people had been invited...
...It is possible that even today there really has been some improvement...
...The driver said he had relatives in the States...
...We were driving past the Riga train station, through by Tom Bethell the grime and smoke and decay of Moscow's northern streets...
...On the other side of the door, where the general public waits behind the barrier, the lighting was dim...
...Dollars (and presumably other hard currencies) or American cigarettes were routinely demanded by taxi drivers...
...De Borchgrave added that the reunification of Korea was a key objective of the reverend...
...C athy Young, who grew up in Moscow, left ten years ago (and changed her name), and lives now in New Jersey, was a member of the group and the next day she decided to visit her old neighborhood in the Sokolniki district of Moscow...
...The newspapers have become more interesting to read but unfortunately you can't eat newspapers," the cab driver told Cathy Young...
...Police power and the will to exercise it is breaking down, but it is still exercised with sufficient frequency to prevent the free exchange of goods between consenting adults...
...The newspapers are filled THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 9 with debate...
...She would have taken it for granted...
...In Gorky Park he saw a man selling, for five kopeks each, broken light bulbs'the kind that are black and rattle when you shake them...
...Then again, Beichman pointed out after a few minutes' thought, the mutual embrace of Gorbachev and Rev...
...This has not happened, and the subsequent disappointment may have been construed as economic decline...
...Not everyone can go to America," he said...
...For decades the American liberal-left sought to curtail freedom of contract (except where the freedom of exchange served the greater good of assaulting religious values, e.g., in the production of porn...
...In any event, the current "imbalance" between the two (the people free to express discontent but not free to seek contentment) surely cannot be sustained...
...All attempts to extract reliable information from the Soviets on this point (including an attempt by Wayne Angell of the Federal Reserve Board) have failed...
...In the last six or seven years, Moffitt has made numerous trips to the Soviet Union...
...The Soviets have been doing this for a very long time," Beichman said to his neighbor in the back of the auditorium...
...In fact, one of our conference attendees was picked up on the Arbat (a rudimentary flea market and pedestrian mall about a mile from the Kremlin) and imprisoned for three hours for exchanging currency at an illicit rate...
...Moon's eulogy...
...Moon "was a kick in the teeth for Kim II Sung," the North Korean dictator...
...Moscow looked the same to me...
...Inside the pages of Moscow News there has been a running debate about the merits of private property...
...rodnaya Hotel, built in the 1980s by Armand Hammer...
...said Nikolai Tolstoy, of Lenin's mummy...
...Not safe, apparently...
...They may already have sold it all (within days of mining it...
...Some years ago de Borchgrave wrote a popular novel about Soviet disinformation, called The Spike...
...So maybe Rev...
...Jude Wanniski of Polyconomics was in the hotel lobby, advising the Soviet government (he told me) to adopt his proposal to make the ruble convertible to gold...
...After all, people are almost always harmlessly engaged while making a living, but with soap boxes, printing presses, and pamphlets they can cause no end of trouble...
...The hotel had completely reneged on its contract with the World Media Association, he told me...
...Russians take them to work, unscrew the good light bulbs in the office and replacethem with the burnt-out ones...
...Behind them was a festive forest of national flags and a motto on the wall read: "The Summit Council for World Peace...
...Socialist property is shamelessly privatized whenever it can conveniently be carried away...
...I hope they are given permission to open several more, one ideally on the site of Lenin's Tomb, which should be demolished...
...One day I walked with him halfway across Moscow, from the beautiful Yelokhovskiy Cathedral (where we attended a service on Good Friday) to the Kremlin...
...Raisa Gorbachev in attendance...
...We walked around and went into a few of the shops that Cathy used to visit...
...Sad, isn't it...
...One or the other will have to go...
...he said of the city...
...Or Coca Cola...
...Arnaud laughed...
...One should have thought that society might well be organized with these priorities reversed: the people allowed to manufacture material goods and exchange them among themselves without requiring permission from the authorities...
...Now, at least in the universities, the left is striving to curtail expression as well...
...People are no longer afraid to express opinions to strangers...
...We were surrounded on all sides by mud and dirt and shabbiness...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
