The world of friendship

American participants in the youth and students recall Red Square, Soviet racism and banks

The bearded NEPI Van Derek, a former sailor, now the owner of a restaurant in the resort town of Provincetan in Massachusetts, had long been waiting for someone to finally asked him about an amazing event of forty years ago. “I don’t know whether it was finally understood or not, but I’m sure that this festival has changed everything irrevocably, he says. After him, it was already impossible to close Soviet society as tightly. ” Van Derek himself, however, has never returned to the Soviet Union or Russia since 1957, but, apparently, he feels that involvement in such a significant event gives him the right to reason on a global scale: he is just as willingly and decisively expressed regarding, for example, the situation in the Middle East.

However, during the festival, the twenty -five -year -old student Van Derek (who, however, then called Anton Haunstrap), felt not so much a citizen of the universe as one of the few representatives of his country. Today, Van Derek recalls that about 35 Americans came to the festival, although there were about 160 in their indigenity. The New York Times Magazine correspondent described the mood of Van Derek as follows: “One day, the tired Anton Haunster was retreated to his hotel room. “Be cursed, he said. Let Eisenhower and Dulles come here (US Secretary of State. - “Results”) and they themselves represent their country. And then I have to protect the fact that I would never protect in my homeland. They ask me if they will deprive me of work or passports for coming here, and how else they will pursue me! It struck me. I have never seriously and thought about such things. We are always told that this people are isolated from the rest of the world, but to understand how much, you can only face it personally. We had to send 3,000 people here. ”

As Nepi Van Derek now recalls, he realized that he had come not just to stroke, to represent his country on his very first day in Moscow. The young Maoist from New York named Jake Rosen gathered American delegates to notify everyone about how to behave the “American delegation” and what a banner would be a banner during the opening ceremony of the festival. In fact, there were no “American delegation”: there were two small groups - one organized by the Communists from New York, and the second, Chicago, for non -communist youth. But most American participants arrived "savages." Rosen's authoritarian manners have inflated this motley audience, and, according to Van Derek’s memoirs, the storm began with his cry: “Who chose you?” As a result, the Americans cut the already stitched banner with the slogan “The US delegation welcomes the VI World Festival” and created a new one: “Participants from the United States welcome the youth of the world.”

“At the same time, a few Russian Nepi Van Derek was present, and they simply could not believe their eyes and ears. They clearly never encountered such behavior. And then I realized that we are imagining something here - not so much even America as a free world is generally. We behaved like free people behave. The same thing happened with those who came from Western Europe, the French or the Danes, they all rode on behalf of their communist youth organizations, but behaved like free people. ”

All participants recall that the discussions between Muscovites and foreigners were tied constantly and everywhere: on the street, during some official events, at the entrance to the hotel. True, Daniel Shor, then the young correspondent of the Bi-Bi-ES television and radio company, and now the most famous American radio compartment, makes one adjustment: “Americans, French, Italians invariably attracted attention. And the Soviet press clearly tried to illuminate all the delegations evenly. But on the street, passers -by practically ignored participants from African countries and other blacks. I always worried about racism in my country, but the racism that I encountered in the Soviet Union was really something. ” (A similar impression was the Chicago by Leroy Wolins, who still remembers how, during a visit to the faculty of geography of Moscow State University, he mentioned that the lady of his heart is a black woman: “They simply refused to believe it.”) However, one of the main accusations that Soviet participants were not tired of bringing to their American guests, there was just a condemnation of racism. The authors of the articles in the New York Times Magazine and The New Republic noted that the Soviet audience was stunned when a nineteen -year -old American student, answering why they didn’t accept blacks, said slightly mixing: “But my hostel’s room is a hostel room at the New York University - Negro ".

Often the next point was the accusation of the American authorities who did not allow the singer Paul Robson to come to the Moscow festival: the State Department deprived him of his passport for a year or two before. (A few months later, partly in connection with the Moscow festival, the US Supreme Court has made a decision that prohibits the deprivation of passports for political reasons. Nepi van Derek is still proud of his answer to the question of Robson: “I say that in this case my country's authorities behave in an idiotic manner, and I can do this openly. And you can make such a statement when your authorities Do some kind of stupidity? ”However, the rest, according to NEPI Van Derek, he, a child of the New York artistic bohemia, was completely unlucky for political debate.

Agitprop

During the festival, the Soviet authorities released the population, and especially guests, an unprecedented portion of freedom. The rules for obtaining a Soviet visa were weakened: a visa was a cards of the festival, and it was possible to buy it at the Soviet consulate without presenting a passport (moreover, the Soviet Union was taken to take any participant from the “red border”, that is, the border of any of the social camp countries to Moscow for five dollars). Moscow entered the new York Times and International Herald Tribune newspapers (Nepi Van Derek, however, noticed that the Kiosks had people in the civilian, who watched the sale of the capitalist press, and that Soviet citizens did not dare to buy it.) Glavlit for the festival weakened the censorship. Daniel Shor took this “window” to broadcast reports on ideological disagreements between the USSR and China and about Soviet citizens who protested against the suppression of the Hungarian revolution; After a short time, Shor was expelled from the country. However, even with such concessions, it is difficult to imagine that someone could deliver 10 thousand copies of the UN report to the Soviet Union. In fact, the action had much more modest size.

Richard Medali and George Aybrams, now successful lawyers in Washington and Boston, respectively, and then graduate students of the Faculty of Harvard University, decided to come to Moscow “savages”. “In college, I studied Russia and Eastern Europe, spoke Russian freely and in Serbian, says medals. I knew that the US State Department did not approve of the participation of Americans in the festival, but I believed that those who knew what was happening should go. ” Medals captured a newspaper clipping about the UN report on Hungarian events.

Arriving a day or two before the official opening of the festival, medals and Aybrams, together with some American girl, decided to take a walk to Red Square and Gum. “We did not even have time to see something how Soviet citizens surrounded us,” recalls Richard Medali. We started talking to them, and the more we talked, the more people joined us. Three huge circles of people were formed: a separate crowd gathered around each of us. It lasted several hours. At seven o’clock, this American girl and I decided that it was time to return to the hotel. We called to George, but he replied: “No, guys, I’m just talking about what happened in Hungary, and I can’t interrupt in any way. You go, I'll catch you. ” We returned to the hotel. Several hours passed, but George was not there, and we were not seriously worried. Finally, for about o’clock in the evening, George burst with a huge crowd of people. It turned out that after our departure, “our” crowds joined his crowd and he began to broadcast for everyone. He was so excited by this that, having come to the hotel, he said: "We need to gather a group of people who are ready to go and talk with people." We gathered a person five and from the next day we began to go to Red Square. And in fact, we did not participate in the events of the festival. ”

“Of those who hold the“ seminars ”on Red Square, only George Ebrams and Richard Medals have upgrade their own audiences,” the New York Times Magazine correspondent reported. - Sometimes at the same time, four to five translators work with them. Students have a newspaper clipping about the UN report on Hungary. Often they give a friend from the Indian delegation, and he retells the words of Neru about Hungary. Usually, when they finish performing, silence reigns. Then listen to some

Lee transmit notes with a request to continue the conversation alone. ”

The Red Star newspaper in an article entitled “Green Man on Red Square” depicted performances by a medal and a company somewhat differently and claimed that it was these people who balaumed the Hungarian people a year earlier and pushed him into a counter -revolutionary rebellion. (Why he was called “green man”, he still did not understand the medals: whether it was a hint of the color of the money that the Americans paid for participation in the festival, or meant green synthetic costumes that were popular among American youth.) Got from the Soviet press and Daniel Schora. “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, among other accusations, called him “uncultural”: shooting the Americans for television, he climbed into a chair. True, among the American participants, the Soviet press found one real hero - Leroy of Wolins.

A person without a passport

Leroy Wolins, the twenty-year-old chairman of the Chicago Committee of the American-Soviet Friendship (such committees appeared in many American cities during the Second World War, and not all their leaders were communists), decided to get to the festival at all costs. The task was not easy, since a year earlier the State Department deprived Walins of a passport. However, when Wolins heard that the festival participant’s card was replacing a Soviet visa, he had a plan: having enlisted a card, to go to Canada, on the border from which American citizens are not obliged to show a passport, and there to sit on a ship that went to Leningrad. Wolinsa was not particularly worried about how to return: according to the American law, a passport must be issued to any citizen who wants to return to his homeland.

Wolins in his own car reached Montreal, but then he was a failure: the only ship in the port heading for Leningrad was supposed to first moor in New York. One sailor advised Walins to contact a familiar employee of the travel agency. He really undertook to arrange Wolins, despite the lack of a passport, on a flight to Prague. It was only necessary to get a Czech transit visa. “Here for the first time I realized how trouble -free this order was: anyone who wants to come to the festival must get, recalls Wolins. - Take a similar request to the Czech consul a year earlier, it would be a deadly number. But this time the whole procedure took 10 minutes. "

With the next obstacle, Leroy Wolinsille collided in Chop: of course, he was removed from the train for lack of his passport. “I was placed in such a huge hut,” recalls Wolins. “There was 40 people, or maybe all 100. All difficult cases: Spaniards, Algerians and me.” After a couple of days, a representative of the Soviet side of Walins came to this drive that he was dressed only in a railway uniform. “He looked at all our documents and ordered everyone to let everyone. Nobody was denied. The Soviet Union was ready to do everything to get the maximum number of participants. "

Freely spoke in Russian, Wolins spent the next two and a half weeks very much: he got to know a bunch of celebrities (he was unpleasantly surprised that the whole family of Peter Kapitsa, including the housekeeper, huddled in the same room), visited the E Ordzhonikidze factory (the technological level of the plant struck its imagination) and in the Soviet hospital, which remained in the memory of many GRIPS of the American. Participants to one of the most striking memories. And 40 years later, the former participant is surprised: “In the late 50s, these primitive people put us banks - I read about this only in books belonging to my parents.” When Wolulinza was time to return, it turned out that everything was not so simple. Only thanks to the intervention of someone influential, Walins managed to get to the plane to Prague, and there he already received his passport.

When Lero Wolins reached Montreal, where he left his Ford from the tourist, he told why he was so readily helped Liru in his adventure. It turned out that the Hungarian agent, who fell in love with the Canadian girl during the festival of youth and students in Budapest in 1949. The Hungarian authorities refused him to exit to him, but somehow he managed to flee and get to Canada, where he married his girlfriend. “So, although this person really did not like the Communists,” explains Wolins, “he loved the festivals of youth and students.” Provincer - Boston - Washington Photo by ITAR -TASS and from the archive of "Currents"