May I begin this final column on the Soviet Union by offering an apology to those few friends of mine who have taken the time each Sunday to not only read this column, but have gone one step further and told me what they thought of it. ("I had no idea it would take us as long to get out of Armenia as it did to get in!") It was never my intention to write such drawn-out accounts of everything I saw and heard. It just happened that way, and with subscription rates being what they are these days, I didn't want my pals to feel slighted in any way. After all, dear friends, are you not the ones who repeatedly tell me you never get your money's worth anymore?
I promise never to do it again, but I was grateful I saw what I did when I did because there are many changes afoot in the USSR. What has been happening in the Eastern European satellites may not be so dramatically played out in the 15 republics of the USSR, but those recent earthshaking events will have a significant impact on the already strained relationships between the central Soviet government in Moscow and such ethnically diverse republics as Lithuania, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Estonia and Latvia.These and other republics in Russia have waited over 40 years for the privilege to simply govern themselves. They have watched and waited patiently while the Soviet-appointed leaders of their republics lumbered incompetently with the outright lunacy of that bureaucratic nightmare called "centralized state economic planning."
They continued to survive in small apartments, wait in long food lines and work under hazardous conditions because they believed for years, as they were told, that sacrifice was necessary if they were to achieve world domination.
It was my impression that the Russians are no longer going to buy this story, any more than the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the East Germans, the Bulgarians and the Romanians did. Too much has happened in the last three months. It was not so much a triumph in the Eastern bloc of capitalism over socialism as it was an expression of the privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual.
It was the shipyard workers in Poland, the intellectuals in Hungary, the students in Romania and the common people who patiently stood in the snow and the rain in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and thus became the modern-day models for those self-evident truths of life, liberty and the sweet pursuit of happiness. God bless them all.
Another fatal flaw in the Soviet psyche is its inability to understand what consumerism is all about. The Soviets have, however, developed an amazing capacity at boring people to death. They have in the past 72 years discovered that boring people works better than killing them. Unfortunately, the Soviet state has gone on being boring for so long that it has ended up by boring even itself.
Along the major boulevards of both Leningrad and Moscow, there are no sidewalk cafes, no music, no flashing lights, no billboards. Graffiti cannot even be found.
In the windows of the large department stores of both cities, what little there is to be consumed is displayed on dull 60-bottle or tin-can pyramid arrangements. The very latest in Bulgarian ladies' shoes are piled in a large heap in the center of another window. Any producer doing a period film on "Women in the 1930s" could pick up a real bargain here. I maintain it is all part of a plan to bore the public witless, and they have succeeded.
But in the end it will backfire on the Soviets. Take the recent events in East Germany. When East Berliners crossed over the rubble of the Berlin Wall to visit West Berlin for the first time, they returned from their day of shopping with rather trivial items like notebook paper, pliers, scissors, ball point pens, cornflakes and, especially, bananas. Many of the young people pooled their money to purchase a Sony Walkman and a tape or two of Phil Collins.
But almost everyone wanted a banana. It strikes me as strange that for all the intervention the Communist-bloc countries have carried off in the banana republics of Central America, it never crossed their minds to ship any bananas to the folks back home.
Forty-four years of Eastern-bloc communism tripped up by a banana peel!