The Russians, One on One

THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT BEGAN IN A BEIGE banquet hall at the Sheraton Ritz Hotel in Minneapolis. There, amid a rectangle of conference tables surrounded by huge tinted mirrors on the walls, a collection of earnest, peace-minded Americans would talk with two dozen visitors from the Soviet Union. For five days in late May, they would begin the arduous journey toward mutual understanding.

It was a lovely vision, this U.S.-U.S.S.R. Bilateral Exchange Conference, one widely imagined by Americans dedicated to halting the arms race. While Ronald Reagan and his apparatchiks gorge on new weapons for the new cold war, the logic went, ordinary citizens could begin building private bridges toward peace by talking to the Russians themselves. If it were left up to their governments to resolve the rivalry, the nuclear madness might very well end in holocaust. Americans of good will, therefore, should try to open their own channels to the Russians and hope that citizen-to-citizen dialogues may eventually produce new approaches and renewed public pressure for change.

While the theory is laudable, it is exceedingly difficult to fulfill in practice. The conversations in Minneapolis, as amicable and serious as they were, simply underscored how hard it is for Americans to get on the same wavelength with the Russians — even sympathetic Americans who believe that the United States is at least as culpable in the arms race as the Soviet Union.

This communications gap wasn’t simply mechanical, either. Most of the Russians in attendance spoke excellent English, and on paper, certainly, the Soviet delegation was relatively broad: it included scholars, journalists, a factory manager from Kiev and even two clergymen — one a Baptist, the other, Russian Orthodox — who tried to demonstrate that their churches care about peace, too.

Despite this range of representation, the visitors, of course, were led and dominated by professional “Americanists” — men who study us for a living, who have visited the United States many times and seem to know everything about us. They anticipate all the questions we ask, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. And they know all the “correct” answers.

That was the first and most fundamental problem with the dialogue. The Soviets stuck to their official script, despite the Americans’ freewheeling and eclectic expression of their opinions. And, of course, the forty American delegates were atypical in their own way. A few mainstream figures attended, including former Minnesota governor Albert Quie and Minneapolis mayor Don Fraser, but the political spectrum was quite narrow. Because the delegation was assembled by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-liberal think tank based in Washington, the majority of them were speaking for various elements of the American peace movement. Most talked of change — radical change — in the status quo of arms-control negotiations.

Thus, the Minneapolis forum produced a bizarre role reversal, a pleading at cross-purposes. The Americans were now the dissidents, opposed to their own government. They urged the Soviets to consider bold approaches, to work toward a future of total disarmament. The Russians, meanwhile, spoke authoritatively for the established wisdom, for caution and small steps, for political pragmatism.

In fact, the “Minneapolis Dialogue,” as it was informally known, inadvertently revealed this melancholy reality: Americans devoted to peace are so frustrated with their own leaders and the bellicose direction of American politics that they feel they must direct their fragile hopes at Moscow, counting on the Russians to act responsibly in the face of America’s irrational drive to further escalate the arms race. The Russians shrug. It is a lot to ask.

Nodari Simoniya, a professor of Oriental studies at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, was amused by the irony. “The Americans are the radicals, the revolutionaries who want to change everything,” he observed. “And we are the conservatives, the realists.”