THE MEDIA

The most encouraging field I found was that of the media, especially TV. Pluralistic newspapers, many of them intelligent, in-teresting, and responsible. On TV, a comedian marches in the slow ceremonial Russian goose step toward the camera and salutes. Then the camera zooms out revealing a huge choir which breaks out in a song that I remember well from the 50s: "Stalin, our fighting glory, Stalin, the soaring of our youth . . ." Then the faces of the singers disappear as each hides behind a large photograph of the Great Leader of Nations, only one girl holds it upside down. It is immediately righted by all her neighbors to reinforce the im-pression of a dehumanized, homogenized human mass. The camera then moves to the top of the choir, and there he is himself, the most beloved Iosif Vissarionovich, drooling with happiness. In my hotel room I did not know how the viewers reacted, but I take it they rolled with laughter; and I feel a people that can laugh at its own past will have a great future.

TV documentary: The vast funeral procession following the cas-kets of the three young men who died defending the Russian par-liament in the August putsch. Then the burial of one of them by a Rabbi, for he was Jewish. The story goes on to the Jews, the holocaust, antisemitism in contemporary Russia, Russian Jews in Israel, interview with the Israeli consul (with Western-type hardball questions). The documentary lasts for an hour; there is no lesson to be learned, no conclusion to be drawn, no instructions on what you ought to think; it is all bare facts. That may seem trivial to Americans, but a Russian documentary without a political end les-son is like the Sahara without sand, and my jaw dropped some more.

Next day I ask a Russian from Siberia whether there is anti-semitism in Russia. He answers "Today in Russia there is every-thing." He is not kidding. At one corner of a busy avenue a large crowd surrounds a rock-and-roll band with two girls undergoing the usual body contortions. Do they collect money from the crowd after they are done, I ask my companion. "No," he answers with the old Russian mysticism: "They do it for their souls." On a fur-ther corner another large crowd surrounds a group of Russian Hara Krishna ringing bells and displaying their shorn heads. In-be-tween there are news vendors selling special literature from small, movable stands. Much of it is published by new religious cults. Special schools teach Yoga. I talk to several weirdos surrounding the conference, one of whom assures me that Jesus Christ was a Russian and that everybody talked Russian until 40,000 years ago when the ice age split mankind into many groups of which you and I ended up in the less fortunate ones. Another buttonholes anyone in sight to explain his hair-raising pseudoscience about the universe; then he asks him for a contribution to the Russian Union of Homosexuals.

Only one man among these kooks frightened me, because he is running two corporations in the US, apparently for the Russian government. He explains to me that America is too young to be a real nation, but Russia and America were made for each other, and in unison they can put down Japan. Why put anybody down? I ask, the Japanese have done a good job in producing excellent products and lowering prices in the rest of the world. No, he says, the world must develop harmoniously, without upstarts upsetting the balance. And who decides what is harmonious? Not the Japanese, evidently. There are two kinds of nationalism, that of the oppressed and that of the rulers. The tradition of the German, Serb and Russian varieties belong to the latter, and they are dangerous.

He came to interview me about Einstein, but he does not know much physics, and talk about the journal I publish, Galilean Electrodynamics, turns to Access to Energy, which fascinates him. I explain about defending science against the Luddites, about the Greens and their real agenda.

"But what's wrong with clean air and fresh water?" he objects.

"Nothing," I answer. "And what is wrong with world peace, brotherhood among the nations, and ending exploitation of man by his fellow man?"

He looks at me and now his jaw drops. Then I feel something click in this 17-year old brain.

Ha! If I have perverted one young man, and a budding journalist to boot, my visit to Russia has not been in vain.