Hollywood Bowl. Back in the USSR.

 

3rd June, 1985

One of the perks of journalism, particularly in overseas Bureaus, was the opportunity to pick your stories and rub shoulders with history and the past. I was on assignment with Ray Martin and David Brill for Australian Broadcasting and we were on the road with Eugene McCarthy on the way to the Hollywood  Bowl in LA. As well as a skilled and idealistic politician, McCarthy was a published poet and we’d already filmed him in his Washington DC office as part of a profile. Eugene McCarthy ran for president as  peace candidate in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. Many years later I wrote in my diary:

“CBS reports on the CIA and army disinformation campaign during Vietnam War. Seems General Westmoreland continuously underestimated allied troop casualties by as much as one-half to give President Johnson the feeling that America was winning the war. How many thousands were killed because of this?”.

I remember that hot afternoon at the Hollywood Bowl in southern California ten years after the Vietnam War. It’s packed; an amphitheater, tiered seats that expand outward and upward from the central stage surrounded by dry vegetation and the fragrance of sweet orange blossom wafting from the nearby orchards. I was recording sound and the perspiration trickled down behind my ears around my head phones as I monitored the recording levels. 

It was called Survival Sunday: A Festival for the Future and the line up included Peter, Paul and Mary, Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, Tom Paxton, Sweet Honey and the Rock. Among the speakers were Cesar Chavez, Dan Ellsberg, Daniel Berrigan, George Calin, Robin Willams, Eugene McCarthy and Dr. Helen Caldicott. 

When I heard Helen Caldicott through my headphones  I was shocked by her broad Australian accent here in the heart of Hollywood. She was a pediatrician from South Australia who worked at Boston University Hospital and some years earlier had dedicated herself to warning about the medical dangers of nuclear energy and nuclear war. 

I adjusted the recording levels as her voice rose in indignation and passion and I felt the hairs on my neck bristling and I was exhilarated and I knew I had a calling; from that moment on, I too would dedicate myself to the cause of a non-nuclear world and use my media skills and journalism to learn and help spread the message. 

That evening, following the concert, we joined the after party. I found myself standing beside Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary and I couldn’t help myself, I felt compelled and leaned in and kissed Mary’s cheek and told her I loved her and that I’d heard the trio sing at Festival Hall in Melbourne in Australia. She smiled and whisked her hair back the way she did and I felt sixteen years old again.

__________

Seven years later I sat alone reading The Soviet Today: An Interpretive Guide, a series of essays published in the Bulletin Of the Atomic Scientists. I was seated beside a law professor from Vermont College traveling with a group of students. We were flying to Finland and the Soviet Union with American physicians, members of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War.  

I’d read in the New York Times  about a proposed meeting between American and Soviet doctors concerned about nuclear war. It was to take place in Moscow. I inquired further and approached my Australian Broadcasting colleagues Jeff McMullen and David Brill, suggesting we travel alongside the America physicians and do a documentary for Four Corners, Australia’s top public affairs program. 

The Cold War was still freezing cold but a door was cracked and a sliver of light shone through. A couple of months earlier Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary of the Communist Party, a much younger man than the stern elderly titulates  who preceded  him. He was a reformer, energetic and smiled and joked with Western journalists but he was still a dedicated Communist. He didn’t intend to change the whole damn thing. 

When we arrived in the Soviet Union in June, 1985, we were between worlds, at a hinge in history but we didn’t know it.  Reagan and Gorbachev had not yet met. The machinery of confrontation was still fully operational; spies, missiles, the Warsaw Pact, and a Soviet war in Afghanistan that looked like Vietnam. It was a time of the Strategic Defense initiative and “Star Wars” and thousands of thermo-nuclear weapons pointed at each other and President Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire”. 

Within six years the Soviet Union would essentially disappear and somewhere deep in the corridors of the KGB in a Stasi office in East Germany, Vladimir Putin would soon be diligently sowing the seeds of his rise to power 

The professor was traveling with a colleague  on his way to Leningrad. They’d traveled together to the Soviet Union many times. He told me he was a conservative Republican and that Ronald Reagan would go down as a great U.S. president. Just as Truman was recognized over time. 

“My friend here is a Liberal”, he said laughing “, and he’s an expert in Soviet history and he speaks fluent Russian”. 

The Soviet Union was an exotic place. It was a comparatively young country if you acknowledge that it really started over in 1917 and later defeated the Fascists .  There is good reason for it to be proud and patriotic because it has only been sixty years since the Russian Revolution. The American Revolution was back in 1776. We’ve had two centuries to get it right. The professor tells me  he has a love-hate relationship with the Soviet Union and wonders why he is returning after so many trips. 

“But the Cold War maybe thawing”, he says, “ because Mikhail Gorbachev has replaced Leonard Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko  and the Soviet people will be friendly and helpful when they can”. 

When they can! It is still a police state.

We fly into the northern morning, over Norway approaching Sweden and there is late snow on the mountains of Lapland north of Finland. As we descend I see the ordered green landscape surrounding Helsinki. The airport reception is small and provincial, parquetry floors, natural wood and large, thick glass windows, the furnishings are classy and comfortable. We ride to our hotel in a Mercedes diesel cab.

The Dipolo Hotel  is low rise and more glass and natural wood among the pines; convention rooms, tennis courts, a full size athletic track beside a lake and I can see people walking under the pine trees on the other side. There are wooden clinker row boats pulled up on the shore, yachts on blocks readied for summer and today I saw at least three small sail boats. A broadcaster from Finnish Radio told us this has been the warmest Spring for one hundred years. 

Next morning I ran around the lake: 

“I ran around the lake just about a mile or so on this warm early morning. A lot of bird life, ducks and white gulls, then Scandinavian breakfast; pickled cucumber, salad, sausage, porridge and coffee. 

“The doctors we’ve met so far have been helpful. Sidney Alexander is particularly pleasant. He is President of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Caldicott is a cofounder though not on this trip.  He is traveling with his daughter, Sarah. She is about twenty I guess, bright and attentive to her father.

The doctors are sitting in the next booth over with a view of the lake drinking coffee. Sidney Alexander, Bernard Lown and Eugené Chazov, founders of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War meeting together for the first time before the flight into Moscow.”

They are like brothers as they reach across a vast ideological chasm; they reach through a window for understanding, they crack the ice of a cold war that freezes the rest of us in fear and they talk like human beings and they’ve inspired a doctor’s movement of one-hundred thousand around the world.

Some months earlier I’d heard about the plan to meet. The whole world was on edge and the Berlin Wall still stood cutting West from East and East from West. The anti war movement was International and I was a willing comrade and put my shoulder to the wheel. This was spring of 1985 and this meeting was an ice pick in the side of the Cold War.

The Soviet Doctor Chazov looked younger than I thought. After breakfast, he and his American counterpart, Doctor Bernard Lown, stand together being photographed, brothers in arms, eminent cardiologists, brothers of the heart. That afternoon in Helsinki was the official opening at the Great Hall of the University of Helsinki. 

We drove from the hotel, about eight miles over bridges and lots of water, silver birch trees along the avenues. Less than half a million people live in Helsinki, the cab driver said and most cars are Volvos and Mercedes. 

Helsinki is the last European city designed as an entity and a work of art.

Helsinki University Great Hall is in the neoclassical style, at one end of Senate Square and is said to be the countries finest architectural achievement.

The conference leaders sat at the main table before a polished wood dais with tall ionic pillars behind them. Flowers were laid in front and the table was covered in green serge. Microphones were set in front of each participant in a formal manner.

The audience sat in a semicircle in tiers around the table in the tall hall and the press gathered around the edges. I noticed there were no American networks. A Greek crew bundled in with ENG, Electronic News Gathering gear as well as a thirty-five millimeter camera. The Soviet crews shot everything that moved with sixteen millimeter and thirty five. 

Happy birthday dear Bernard Lown. Afterwards they gave him flowers in the garden. He was embarrassed and like a child. The German television crew wanted an interview right now but Dr. Lown has had enough.

The champagne is crisp and dry. The sun is soft through the tall Silver Birch trees and the spirits of the doctors surge and it is a contagion. They really think they can stop a war.”

After the main event we packed our gear and stopped for a beer at an open air cafe with red umbrellas and white tables in the heart of the city near a park with trolley cars passing. By now it was evening but the sun still shone bright and warm. A soft gray, blue, sky hovered  gently behind the gracious skyline.

Later we walk through the city, tired and a little drunk, carrying our camera gear looking for a cab and the food weighs heavy in our bellies; the yellow cheddar cheese soup with parsley and the oysters and raw fish and garlic lamb and wine and beer and stories of love and death and life and children and indiscriminate sex and mateship. A clear half moon rises above the cityscape and bright stars shine in the northern dusk. It is two AM and soon the sun will rise again.

There’s a woman alone, lurching, wearing a white dress and red shoes and  when we get closer we see her dress stained and wet with mud from a fall and she staggers on the cobblestones outside Finlandia Concert Hall. There are more people in the shadows. We are not the only ones drunk in the streets of Helsinki that night. 

Much later the breeze wafts through the hotel room and the curtains move softly closed against the piercing northern morning sunlight when I wake with a throbbing head. Today we leave for the Soviet Union, the brooding giant is close now.  

__________

Back in the USSR.

The clouds break as we descend and now we see the coast of Russia. This is the enemy they tell us about and there is excitement. The hostess is still serving vodka shots. I see blocks of apartments, block after block and no suburban housing. Just green fields and brutalist apartment buildings in rows.

The soldiers stand two together, not many, in drab green uniforms and jack boots. Everything is slowing down and there is a weight in the air. We begin passing our camera gear through customs and a woman is walking briskly towards us. She will be our guide from Gossen TV, the state media central office. We have landed in Leningrad which will soon become St. Petersburg again. 

Helena is wearing Levis and sneakers, plaid cotton shirt and a gray woolen sweater. She’s got a bright demeanor. It's colder here than Helsinki. Our other guide, Irene also wears American jeans and sneakers. I notice Finnish passengers collecting large sacks of luggage and Helena says:

“They come to Leningrad to drink and sell their clothes”. 

When the customers officer sees I’ve been reading John Le Carré’s, The Spy who Came in From the Cold he asks if I like it and I say I do and Helena eagerly interposes asking if she can read it while we are here. She will devour the book in the next two days. Our guides direct us to the InTourist bus and we drive about forty minutes into Leningrad.

The boulevards and canals are marvelous and the buildings are pastel blue and gray and green and yellow and the monuments are in huge scale, post revolution, art-deco stylish and severe set against the architecture of the Tsars and the curving bridges over the Neva River that flows to the Baltic Sea and the canals reflect the streetscape. Everything is in cinemascope. 

And then it seems to be snowing but winter is past and now, as the northern summer begins, the Poplar trees in Leningrad are shedding their seeds and they float like snow and gather on the water and along the streets and steps, every nook and cranny, as if the city is a snow dome and the forces of history shake it and snow flutters down all around. And I write in my diary:

“The broad streets are not crowded. A few soldiers in drab green and sailors in blue and white stripes and black and red pompoms caps. And the air is alive with clouds of floating white flowers like soft mist. 

“The buildings are so grand, the canals so wide curving through Leningrad. This city takes my breath away yet it is hard to really see the scope of it and history broods amid the gargoyles.”

We arrive at our hotel, another  brutalist concrete monster, overlooking the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic. It has rooms for  two-thousand-four-hundred guests. The Hotel Pribaltiyskaya was designed by the Soviets and built by the Swedes and it was the newest hotel in town. But it smelt musty and it looked like a Holiday Inn inside. A waiter in a white waistcoat offers us vodka. 

The dawn was soft and pink around the hard concrete edges. We are visiting the Paskarevskoye Cemetery today. One million Russians died in 1942 in the nine hundred day Nazi siege of Leningrad. 

A line of tall silver Birch trees bend and sway  and I hear snatches of Chopin in the sharp wind as it whips across the granite paths; long stemmed carnations and lilies, wilted resting on the marble headstones and the low green mounds of the dead, ten thousand citizens deep. 

And the citizens of Leningrad come reverent and solemn and bend in listening to their guides and they move on. A sailor and his bride with flowers strides past and lays a wreath. A black crow arcs across the granite and the graves.

And as you bump through the streets  of Leningrad you listen to the stories; Nazis and starvation, nine-hundred days and no food and they ate rats and dogs and shoe leather. The dead rolled past on open carts, deep and stinking through the streets, these streets, nine hundred days, the Great Patriotic War. Defeat the fascists. Helena, our guide, tells us they found shoe flour next door, “the flour they used to clean shoes”. She said and the family ate well that night. 

Helena is small. Her short red hair curls tightly around her face. Her eyes are the color of the mild blue summer skies of Leningrad, her city, her country, they shine with inquisitiveness about the West. Three small ersatz diamonds mounted in a triangle setting on each ear hanging, a warm mouth, precise and careful with each perfectly enunciated English word. Polo necked woolen sweater, blue blazer and red tartan skirt today. She looks hard at you , she wants to know. And she talks about her country in long rehearsed descriptions.

Today we are at the Astoria Hotel where Hitler planed his victory party. He sent gilded invitations. He thought Leningrad would fall; the dining room chandeliers hanging as they did in 1942 and tall paned, wood framed windows overlooking St. Isaacs Square and the cathedral  and outside, the marble colonnades, you see the steps are chipped from shrapnel. 

The drunken waiter brings more champagne and finally we eat good food; sturgeon, cucumber and tomato salad and the drunken waiter brings the bill. The music never stops and the patrons dance with zest throwing themselves around the floor and some move with folk dance steps, woman with woman, men with women dancing and its well into the night now. There are no tourists here until suddenly I hear strains of Waltzing Matilda in the distance.

There is a persona created by the Australian caricaturist and actor Barry Humphries called Barry Mackenzie. Barry is  a naive, good hearted, sly and cartoonish Aussie stereotype armed with slogans, prejudices and outback notions. 

Suddenly around midnight in the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad a choir of Australians arrives from the South Australian, Port Pirie Rotary Club. They take over the room. The dancing stops and more vodka and beer are served and the boys in matching blue blazers and Rotary ties loose around the neck  stand around leaning on  the bar like in any Aussie pub. 

After midnight the Rotary Club invites us onto their bus and we pack our camera gear in the back and drive back to the hotel through the empty streets and boulevards, the canals reflecting the yellow lights, singing Advance Australia Fair.

10th June. On our way to Moscow.

The tall Russian with craggy complexion and sharp teeth sounds slightly drunk. He’s flushed and speaking loudly: 

“Why?”, he asks. “Why do you Americans treat us like this?”

We are at the airport in Leningrad and the Aeroflot flight to Moscow is late and the doctors move closer around the table.

“Why do you not trust us, don’t you understand what we have been through? You have seen the cemetery, each grave filled with the bones of ten-thousand. Can you imagine that we want war again. We lost twenty million in the war?”

The doctors listen hard. They reach looking for the common ground, desperate and brave, naive and sad too. 

The Russians have welcomed the Americans. They are warm hosts. The squeezed hand-holding moment lingering longer than just hello, the shared glance and eyes watching, reaching deep, wet and hopeful by the graves. The self-conscious vodka toast and tea in china cups and the halting English and goodwill. 

They are huddled closer now in the lounge at Leningrad Airport listening to the tall 

Russian who speaks loudly at the Americans, prods them.

Epic Leningrad. Drenched in history. Soaked in the past. Bruised and still standing thick and heavy, wide and strong, ornate and soaring. A city of siege still today, the 

Americans, strangers who want to trust, to understand, who reach and stretch and listen and say come to America and you will see. 

“What will I see? I will not see the Tzar’s summer palace crowded with families on Sunday, the one-hundred fountains spouting from  natural springs, nor the soldiers and the sailors walking as if part of some grand opera.”

I hear a tenor singing full and proud with the choir on  the steps of the fountain splashing water in the canal that leads to the Baltic Sea. I see St Isaacs Cathedral chipped by shrapnel, built by serfs and the huge gold domed  church near the Hermitage. And the grand concourse.”

I saw and I moved onto the grass, a quarter mile from the Hermitage; the vast imperial palace complex which includes the Winter Palace, green and white, Baroque, stretching along the River Neva, the imperial residence of the Tsars. 

I stand back on the grass for the vista is so wide, the marble colonnades soaring so high and marvelous. 

And then an old woman walks towards me and from the edge raises her hands in a gesture of reprimand for I am standing on the new grass of spring that has survived the bitter Leningrad winter and returned after so long.  

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