three days, I spoke to people in cafes, in the barren farmers’ market, in the restaurant of our hotel, and in the lush, mosquito-ridden city gardens. The overwhelming impression I took away was that there was little realism in the idea of President Jimmy Carter that an Olympic boycott would inform the Soviet people about Western anger over Afghanistan, In remote cities like Shadrinsk which are cut off from outside information, the conditions for informing people do not exist. Soviet propaganda is the reality.
One night in the hotel restaurant, we sat down at a table with some amateur musicians who worked at the Shadrinsk Auto Parts factory, and began talking with them about world events. They said they were disgusted by the Olympic boycott and, echoing the phrase constantly repeated in the Soviet newspapers, said it was wrong to mix, politics with sport. “We all know about Afghanistan,” said Volodya, one of the men, “but I put a fence around this question. Sport is one thing, politics is something else.”
At a table cluttered with empty vodka bottles and half-eaten meat and potato salad, Igor, another of the men, explained the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as an example of “typical Russian generosity.”
The lack of access to uncontrolled information about the world situation in Shadrinsk was complemented by a shortage of decent books. The only bookshop was full of technical books and bound volumes of Lenin’s works. There were only two counters where genuine literature was being offered, a counter where the works of Chekhov were displayed as a prize in a lottery and an exchange desk where a few works of modern literature were being offered in return for specific other books listed in a file of index cards.
One night at Shadrinsk’s floodlit dancing ring in the city gardens we chatted with a pretty 19-year-old shop girl. My colleague asked her if the fact that she wore Western jeans and liked Western music meant she didn’t like the Soviet Union. “No,” she said emphatically, “I love the Soviet Union.”
During our stay, we had several meetings with local officials but the result of the meetings was to give the impression that political discussion is frowned on in Shadrinsk when it departs from the verbatim repetition of official propaganda. With political issues and anything that bears on them eliminated from the conversation, our talks with local officials were taken up with their odd recitals of meaningless facts.
In a 90-minute meeting with leaders of the Komsomol, the Young Communists’ Organisation, we learned that Shadrinsk has four cinemas, 18 secondary schools, six hospitals, 75 retail establishments, 4,000 private cars, 8,000 motorcycles and every year, no fewer than 800 weddings. This information was not apparently prepared in order to waste our time but simply defined the area of independent intellectual competence permitted to local officials.
The impression of faith in the picture of the outside world given by Soviet propaganda and the Soviet Press would have been all but total in Shadrinsk, had it not been for one fleeting, discordant incident which took place while I was out for a quiet stroll.
I turned off on a side street and came upon the site of an old church which was surrounded by broken, weathered scaffolding except for the red bell tower and the golden cupola and cross. In a yard beside the church, an old man was filling pails with sand and I asked him if restoration work was continuing. He laughed disinterestedly without looking at me and said, “the State has more important objectives than restoring churches.”
The man continued his work, apparently unperturbed by being approached by a foreigner. “First they destroyed the churches now they’re restoring them,” he said. “I remember how they destroyed this one. They blew holes to the walls and burned the icons. Then they took out all the silver and gold. They said they needed the metal for industry.”
On our last day to town, we walked through the city gardens where mothers were pushing baby strollers and old men played chess on large outdoor boards. The intense sunlight filtering through the trees threw deep shadows on the sidewalks and the branches and leaves formed thick canopies over the winding dirt paths. We met a worker named Oleg from the telephone equipment factory and sat with him on a bench in an old, unpainted gazebo.
He said that Shadrinsk was a patriotic city which had supported the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia out of affection for the Czechs and the 1956 invasion of Hungary out of a desire to help the Hungarians. “Tell Carter that the Russians don’t want to fight,” he said. “We know how to fight but we don’t want to fight.”
Listening to Oleg, who was obvious in his interest in the outside world and his sincerity, it was easy to imagine the frightening potential of a dedicated army, with recruits drawn from places like Shadrinsk, marching into war full of confidence in the rightness of their cause but without the faintest actual idea what they were fighting for.
“I know we went into Afghanistan for purely humanitarian reasons, in order to help,” he said. “We’re Russians. If I had my last loaf of bread and you needed it, I’d cut it in half. I don’t care who you are, whether you’re English, American, Vietnamese, Israeli, we’re all people. We helped Cambodia, where how many million people died. It made your hair stand on end. We helped Vietnam. We are ready to help any country.”
I walked down some potholed side streets the following afternoon past a derelict church and emerged on the river bank to a scene of worldlessness and peace. Under feathered clouds in a blue sky, wizened old women watched from the steps of wooden houses as two policemen warned a young boy not to cut the branch off a tree.
There seemed little reason for life in Shadrinsk to be affected by events in a place as remote as Afghanistan and in the local newspapers, which were on sale in kiosks on the main street, it was easy to see how the conflict could have escaped people’s notice. In the twice-weekly Shadrinsk Rabochy and Zauralskaya Pravda, the daily regional paper, most of the news concerned the grain harvest or truancy among workers in the local factories.
In the evenings, we could pick up the Russian language service of the BBC and the Voice of America from my hotel room but on an issue like Afghanistan, the information broadcast by the BBC directly contradicts the information conveyed by the central Soviet television and Press. It may therefore indirectly reinforce official propaganda because to trust Western broadcasts, the resident of a provincial Russian city must make the unsettling assumption that much of what he is told about Afghanistan in the Soviet Press is a lie.
One afternoon we were joined at our table in a cafe near the central square by a muscular construction Worker who spoke to us about the world situation and became increasingly vehement as the conversation proceeded.
“The Americans are cunning people,” he said. “In how many countries do they have their bases? How many bases surround the whole Soviet Union.” The Russians were a peace-loving people. The Olympic boycott was an action against peace. He said that everyone supported the policy in Afghanistan and he added that no one had sent him over to talk to us, a possibility which crossed my mind while he was talking.
That night we met Oleg and a friend of his at the hotel restaurant. Oleg insisted on buying us several rounds of drinks and reminiscing about instances of East-West friendship, including the meeting of Allied and Russian forces on the Elbe. He recited a poem by Yevtushenko, “Do the Russians want War.” After delivering the full poem, he raised his voice to recite the last lines: “Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war, Russians don’t want war.”
Oleg’s friend, Vitya, offered a few final thoughts at our table on the situation in Afghanistan. I had asked him whether, he was troubled by Soviet Press claims that the Government of Afghanistan invited Soviet forces to help and the head of that government, Hafizullah Amin was immediately killed.
“There could have been two governments, one popular and the other anti-popular,” Vitya said reflectively.
