1 Personal Involvement

The amount of time, money and energy I devoted to the transformation of Communist systems increased tremendously when I decided to set up a foundation in the Soviet Union. I took my cue from Gorbachev telephoning Sakharov in Gorky in December 1986 and asking him `to resume his patriotic activities in Moscow.' (Sakharov told me later that the telephone line had to be installed especially for the purpose the night before.) The fact that he was not sent abroad told me that there had been a significant change.

I was hoping to base my foundation on Sakharov as my personal representative. I went to Moscow in early March 1987 as a tourist. I had two introductions from Alerdinck, a Dutchman who had a foundation that sponsored media contacts between East and West. One was to a high official in Novosty Press and another to Michael Bruck, who was Armand Hammer's contact in the Soviet Union. I also had the names of a number of dissidents and independent-minded people who were willing to talk to foreigners. Conditions were not very different then from what they had been ten years previously when I went to the Soviet Union for the first time. The phone rang practically the moment I entered my hotel room. Michael Bruck was on the line. I wondered how he knew I had arrived. He spoke perfect English and acted as my interpreter at Novosty. The man at Novosty mentioned the Cultural Foundation of the USSR, a newly formed organization which had Raisa Gorbachev as its patron. It sounded good and I asked for an appointment. He had a number of telephones on his desk; he picked up one of them and arranged it right away. I was received by the deputy chairman, Georg Miasnikov, an older man with a large, craggy, handsome face and very smooth manners. I explained to him how the foundation in Hungary operated and I showed him the documents. He was very receptive and, within an hour, we were discussing details.

I also had some interesting unofficial meetings. Former Politburo member Mikoyan's grandson took me to meet his best friend, who had been a brilliant academic and dropped out. He called himself a spekulant and lived on the fringes of society. I contacted a young scientist, who asked me to meet him at a busy subway station. I met with the leading dissidents Sakharov, Grigorianz and Lev Timofeyev, but they were rather doubtful about my project. Sakharov said that my money would only go to line the coffers of the KGB. He refused to participate in the foundation personally, but promised to come up with some suggestions for possible members of the committee. I told Miasnikov at the Cultural Foundation that if they wanted me to proceed he should send me an official invitation.

On my next trip, I was met at the airport by the newly appointed vice chairman of the Cultural Foundation, Vladimir Aksyonov. He was a younger man with whom I established good rapport almost immediately. He was a fan of Mihajlo D. Mesarovic, a leading figure in complex systems theory and a friend of mine. This put us on the same wavelength. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the foundation. `If you had not come along, we would have had to invent you,' he said. I made the rounds of prospective committee members, but I felt uneasy because I did not feel I had made proper contact with civil society. Indeed, I came to doubt whether civil society existed at all.

The breakthrough came in August when a large delegation from the Soviet Union was passing through New York on the way to the Chautauqua Conference of Soviet-American friendship. Among them was Tatyana Zaslavskaya, whom I was anxious to meet. I invited the entire delegation and my wife, Susan, arranged a sit-down dinner for 150 people at short notice. It was quite a scene. There was hardly any room to move, but everyone had a great time. Only the head of the delegation, a lady astronaut, was annoyed that I had Tatyana Zaslavskaya on my right. We arranged to meet again in Chautauqua, where we had a long conversation and a wonderful meeting of the minds. We discussed the composition of the committee and I felt I was getting somewhere. I also met at my own party the future executive director of the New York office, Nina Bouis, a well-known translator of Russian literature.

The committee, when it was finally constituted on September 22, 1987, consisted of Yuri Afanasyev, the historian; Grigory Baklanov, the editor of Znamya; Daniil Granin and Valentin Rasputin, writers; Tenghiz Buachidze, a philologist from Georgia; Boris Raushenbakh, a space scientist and religious philosopher; and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, sociologist. Miasnikov and I were co-chairmen, both with the right of veto, and Aksyonov and Nina Bouis were our respective deputies.

The people on the committee are wonderful. They have become leading figures in Soviet society, always in the limelight, always overworked, some of them not in good health. Nevertheless, they come to the meetings regularly and spend long hours. Our latest meeting was on a Sunday because that was the only time they could make themselves free. They hold very different views. Baklanov and Rasputin are on opposite sides of the fence: our committee meetings are the only occasion when they are willing to sit at the same table.

But Miasnikov was a problem. He was the quintessential bureaucrat. He turned hostile early on when I told him that I wanted to rely on the advice of dissidents in selecting the members of the committee. `Grigoriants is not a man of culture,' he told me. We had quite a scene, with some harsh words, but he was more friendly than ever at lunch afterwards. Unfailingly polite, he used every opportunity to create obstacles, yet he always yielded in the end because he did not want to take the responsibility for our failure.

I tried to find someone more in tune with my ideas. I went to Leningrad to meet with the Chairman of the Cultural Foundation, Academician Likhachev, a wonderfully cultured old man of eighty-two who had been through the labor camps under Stalin. He would have made a much better co-chairman than Miasnikov. When I asked him, he called somebody in the Central Committee and, when the man called back, I asked Nina to translate. But Likhachev never said anything, only assented. Obviously, I was listening to one of those famous Kremlin telephone calls in which the recipient can only use the earpiece. When he hung up, he said, `Nothing doing. Miasnikov must be the Co-Chairman.'

We got started anyhow. We created our own rubles by donating some computers. This is how it happened. I was visiting the head of the Institute for Personal Computers and he was telling me about his grandiose plans to produce millions of computers for the schools. Almost in the same breath, he told me that he had permission to import 100 IBM ATs and the license was about to expire but he did not have the dollars to pay for them. I volunteered to give him the dollars if he would give me rubles. `How many?' he asked. I took a chance. `Five rubles to the dollar' - since the black market rate for tourists was about three rubles at the time. `Agreed.' And indeed, we had a written agreement within twenty-four hours. I then flew to Paris and called IBM but IBM refused to deal with me, saying that they had a company policy against dealing with intermediaries. So I bought 200 IBM clones from Taiwan in Vienna for the same amount of money, but I ran into difficulties with the license. We, as an American foundation, were subject to COCOM licensing requirements, even if the Taiwanese manufacturer and the Viennese intermediary were not. I could not get a ruling in Washington, even though ATs were supposed to be coming off license. Eventually I called John Whitehead, Deputy Secretary of State. Then I got both the license and a letter stating that no license was required. Not to give the impression that American bureaucracy is worse than the Soviet, I must mention that my Soviet counterpart had great difficulty in paying me the rubles. The exchange rate of five rubles to the dollar was unacceptable to the authorities and a government institute is not allowed to make donations to a foundation. But finally, after some high-level interventions, we got our money.

Finding office space was another saga. We ended up in an eighteenth-century merchant's palace which is an architectural monument in need of renovation. It belonged to the Cultural Foundation and Miasnikov did his best to restrict our use of the building. My friends in the Soviet Union devised an ingenious scheme for getting rid of Miasnikov. Fortunately, he was quite lazy and did not realize what we were up to until it was too late. We established an independent foundation under Soviet law, called the Soviet-American Foundation Cultural Initiative, and both Miasnikov and I were promoted to the Board of Trustees without any right to interfere with the decisions of the committee, now renamed the Board of Directors. Aksyonov and Nina Bouis took our places as co-chairs of the Board.

Miasnikov is no longer directly involved in the foundation but he continues to make trouble from a distance. The Peace Foundation came in as the money partner from the Soviet side, offering to put up five rubles for each of my dollars. This also led to untold complications: we made our agreement in May 1988 but we got our first contribution from them only in the very last days of 1989.

Undaunted, we started to operate. We invited applications and, out of 2,000 received, we announced our first 40 awards. They included two oral history projects dealing with the Stalinist period; an archive of non-governmental organizations; an alternative town planning group; an association of legal advocates; a consumer group; a cooperative for manufacturing wheelchairs; and a number of research projects dealing with disappearing Siberian languages, gypsy folksongs, the ecology of Lake Baikal, and so on.

Getting an official charter for the foundation was not easy, either. There was another foundation with prestigious backing, the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, which refused to operate without a charter and, after a year's struggle, it obtained one. We then asked for a similar charter but, even so, it took the approval of thirty-six ministries and several months' work to get it done. But it was worth the wait. It gives us so many powers that I compare it to the charter of the East India Company. By the time we received it, in February 1989, we were ready to publish our first annual report.

Our progress has been laborious. Every little thing presented a big problem. But it has also been fun. I have met a lot of wonderful people. I don't know why, but I feel a great empathy for Russian intellectuals. My father had lived through the Russian Revolution, mostly in Siberia as an escaped prisoner of war, and through him I must have imbibed some of the Russian spirit. I could communicate very well despite the fact that I do not speak Russian. I have a wonderful guide and interpreter in Nina Bouis: she has great good humor and makes my businesslike American approach more acceptable. In a way, I find better human contact in the Soviet Union than in the United States. We seem to share the same values. My article on Gorbachev's vision, published in Znamya, made me the eighteenth best liked non-fiction writer in the Soviet Union at last count, and I am proud of that position.

It took a lot of time and effort, but the foundation is beginning to take shape. Our eighteenth-century run-down palace is humming even at nine o'clock at night. The executive director, Sergei Chernyshov, regularly puts in sixteen-hour days. Some very capable new people recently joined the staff. Nina spent three months in Moscow and on my last visit I felt that the Hungarian foundation will not be the only one that works.

We have started to branch out to the republics. I visited Kiev and made very good contact. The leaders of intellectual life were assembled at a meeting and they put forward their ideas. I had to discourage most of them and felt quite bad about being so negative. But afterwards they told me they loved it. `A Soviet official will never say no. You said no ten times in ten minutes; it was so refreshing.' In the evening they took me to the sixtieth birthday celebration of the Ukrainian poet, Dmitro Pavlychko. Several hundred people gathered in a big hall, listening to poetry and songs, and then Pavlychko began to answer questions. It reminded me of 1848.

On my next trip I visited Estonia and Lithuania. It was more like a state visit: I arrived by private plane and the crew of 60 Minutes was trailing me. Nevertheless, much was accomplished. We are now in the process of establishing autonomous branches in the three republics. I intend to set up offices in Sverdlovsk, Leningrad and Irkutsk next, so that the Russian republic should not be neglected, either.

My involvement with the foundation has given me a unique vantage point to observe the evolution of civil society in the Soviet Union. When I went there in March 1987, I could not locate civil society at all. This was not only due to my inexperience; Soviet intellectuals themselves did not know what other people thought outside their own intimate circle. Independent thinking was carried on underground. All this has changed. Everybody knows where everybody else stands. Positions have been drawn and differences clarified by public debate. The transformation has the quality of a dream.

As I shall try to show in the Appendix, there is always a gap between thought and reality. It occurs whenever participants seek to understand the situation in which they participate. The gap, in turn, shapes the situation in a reflexive fashion, because participants base their decisions not on facts but on beliefs and expectations. Thus the divergence between thought and fact is both an essential feature of the human condition and a driving force of history.

The Soviet system was based on the systematic denial of such a divergence. Dogma was supposed to dominate both thought and reality, and thought was not allowed to be adjusted to reality directly but only through a modification of the prevailing dogma. That made adjustments difficult and rendered both thought and reality extremely rigid. It gave rise to a different kind of gap: there was a formal system where both thought and reality were governed by dogma and there was a private world where the divergence between dogma and reality could be acknowledged. There were two kinds of people: those who accepted the dogma as it was presented to them, and those who had a private world. There was a fairly sharp dividing line between the two kinds and I could generally sense almost immediately whether I was dealing with a real person or an automaton.

When Gorbachev introduced glasnost, he shattered the formal system of thought. Thinking was suddenly liberated from dogma and people were allowed to express their real views. The result was the reappearance of a gap between thinking and reality. Indeed, the gap has become wider than ever because, while intellectual life blossomed, material conditions have deteriorated. There is a discrepancy between the two levels which endows events with a dreamlike quality. On the level of thought, there is excitement and joy; on the level of reality, the dominant experience is disappointment: supplies are deteriorating and one disaster strikes after another. The only characteristic that is common to both levels is confusion. Nobody is quite sure what part of the system is in overhaul and what is still in operation; the bureaucrats dare not say either yes or no; therefore almost anything is possible and almost nothing happens. That is another way to describe a dream.

The Cultural Initiative Foundation has the same dream-like quality. Almost everything is permitted, but almost nothing can be accomplished. Having learned to operate within definite limits in Hungary, I was shocked to find that there seemed to be no external constraints on what the foundation in the Soviet Union may do. A representative of the Central Committee attended some of our meetings, but he was a great admirer of Afanasyev, the most radical member of our Committee, and never raised any objections. It was too good to be believed but, of course, I had not been to Hungary lately.