Russia: Other Points of View
by Rami Schandall
When I was fresh out of high school I had two opportunities to visit the Soviet Union. This was an incredible, eye-opening experience. I grew up in the anxious time of the Cold War between East and West. It was a period colored by a black fear of looming cataclysm. I knew that the world's leaders were playing a terribly dangerous game, and I was sick with anxiety with imagining the end of this beautiful world of ours. I realize now how my youthful nightmares were colored by after-images of the devastation of WWII in Europe, and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that resonated for decades afterward. How vividly my childhood was affected by fear of something even more catastrophic, and seemingly imminent.
As a teenager, I took hold of this fear and used it to propel an engagement in Peace activism. I knew certainly that the propaganda on both sides of the Iron Curtain served political schemes that were sharply at odds with the common good. I disbelieved most of what I heard about the USSR, but I had no genuine picture to replace the propaganda. My grandmother was involved at that time with a group who sought to connect real people on both sides of the divide, to develop a "citizen diplomacy" that would take the wind out of the rhetoric. The Center for US/USSR Initiatives began organizing visits of Americans to Russia, and as the period of Perestroika and Glasnost began, these tours facilitated hundreds if not thousands of personal connections: people who had friends either side of the divide knew that what they experienced and the propaganda they were fed were completely different.
