Reagan's Russian broadcast

I hope I'm not stretching to find good news in a wicked world when I say that the happiest sentence I've read in the New Year comes from an anonymous – until now – office worker in his mid-thirties who has a wife and a 12-year-old son. His name is Gadanie. He lives in Moscow.

'Quite frankly', he told a British newspaperman, 'we were amazed when we turned on the nine o'clock news and saw this friendly face staring out at us, speaking what sounded like a genuine message of peace.' It's not too much to say that the man was in shock, in the pleasantest way. He went on, 'My family noticed, too, that despite what we've always been told, he looked friendly and quite normal.'

Now this may not be an earth-shaking confession to most of us, but consider who was saying it and about whom. The friendly fac, which appeared to be that of a normal human being was none other than that of Ronald Reagan. Mr Gadanie is an ordinary Russian, intelligent, educated, we are told, and yet he was amazed by this strange, this wholly unexpected face and manner. We know it well, but consider the weight of that phrase, 'despite what we have always been told.' Mr Gadanie and, surely, millions of other ordinary non-official Russians had never before been talked to by this President of the United States and, on New Year's Day, they discovered that he does not have horns and fangs.

Other correspondents in Moscow, both British and American, confirmed the general amazement at seeing the leader of the other superpower as nothing like what, since 1980, we have always been told. Namely, a leering, pouchy warmonger with a six-pack of missiles in his hand, a figure hardly less terrifying to the Russian people than Attila the Hun.

I'm not joking. I don't know where the suggestion came from that the two leaders should go on television and talk to each other's people, but whether it came from the American side or the Russian, the decision to let Reagan be Reagan in full view of the Russian people could not have been taken lightly in Moscow. Only the resident fly on the Kremlin wall could tell us whether it was the result of intense discussion and back-and-forth arguments by Mr Gorbachev's inner circle or whether it was a single, bold decision by Mr Gorbachev himself.

And what amazes me, as distinct from Mr Gadanie, is the subsequent decision to permit the whole text of Reagan's talk to go unedited. Most of all, to allow him to be seen and heard saying that both the United States and the Soviet Union are doing research on the possibilities of harnessing new technologies to the cause of defence. Now this means, meant, only one thing – that both superpowers have been busy working on a strategic defence initiative on what, in the teeth of Mr Reagan's pleas to drop the term, has been and will always be known as Star Wars. I suppose that the phrase 'harnessing new technologies' was thought sufficiently vague by the boys in the Kremlin to mask what it means to us.

Another passage in Mr Reagan's talk must have given them – I mean the Kremlin elite – thoughtful pause. It was this: 'Our democratic system is founded on the belief in the sanctity of life and the rights of the individual'. That's all right. From everything they've been taught, the Russian people could take this to mean that the Soviet state is most concerned for the right of its people to have free education, free health care and a home, however humble. But then the president went on, 'the rights of the individual such as freedom of speech, of assembly, of movement and of worship'. Perhaps 'freedom of speech and assembly' are untranslatable as new and daring freedoms to a people who, from birth, have never known them.

I'm sorry to say that neither Mr Gadanie nor any other man in the street appears to have been questioned on this vital difference. I certainly wish some correspondent on our side, on anybody's side, would go around Moscow or Leningrad or Yalta or wherever, and tap the people. What do freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, of movement, of worship, mean to you? There must be a confident, plausible answer that any Russian official could give because in most of his/her contacts with the West, they hear it from their point of view ad nauseam. Well, it's not ad nauseam to us and I dare to think that it can come as a revelation of a wholly new kind of life to a Soviet citizen who, for one reason or another, is allowed to leave his native land and take up life in another.

And this brings irresistibly to mind a cab driver I rode with about a couple of months ago. I've often thought back to him and felt, at one time, I must talk about him, but my problem was that to give the flavour of the encounter, I should have to be able to mimic his thick and floundering English as well as it could be done by, say, Peter Ustinov. I can't do this and if I could, I was afraid that he would inevitably come out as a comic vaudeville character.

However, this happened before Geneva and, therefore, of course before the New Year's exchange of greetings. I think I ought to have a shot at it mainly because it moved me, and it moved me to think again about this very topic that most of us take for granted.

Quite simply, I hailed a cab at my door, as I do every week at the same time, to drive down town to the BBC to do my talk. The cab drove up and I was not merely nodded in, but welcomed in by a driver who smiles and even managed to bow in his seat. This is not standard practice among New York cab drivers, however amiable they may be. I did notice the man's name on the registration card that is fixed above the dashboard. It was a Russian name. I've forgotten it, no matter.

In an accent like molasses trying to pour itself through a tea-strainer, he wanted to know, 'Where, please, pleasure to be taking you?' We didn't exchange many words for a few minutes until this sturdy, middle-aged man who was jolly and intense at the same time, half turned over his right shoulder and said, 'Please sir, to be telling me if you long in America!' 'A very long time,' I said, but like him, I was born and grew up abroad. 'Ah, England!' he said, and nodded approvingly. And, 'How about you?' I said. 'One year only,' he said and then he was off, or rather he struggled to give me his story.

I thought he was about fifty, a bad time I should guess for a national of any county to emigrate to another. He had two children, grown – not much to go on there. Then a traffic light changed and a cab in the adjacent lane squealed to a halt and just missed a carefree pedestrian. The driver, the other driver, snarled some obscenity and my man gave a shrug halfway between a chuckle and a sigh. 'Some,' he said, 'very rude, very sharp. Some very nice but no can tell, no sure what manners may be for all.' It was, you can guess, heavy going. I'd already sensed that this man was a sensitive, nice man, incapable of a cliché and anxious to express his difficult feelings in a language that stretched before him like a marsh of alternating bogs and hidden islands.

I made a quick mental resolve to reduce my own part in the conversation to words of one syllable and to the simplest English idioms, but the trouble here is the assumption that the English he'd learned had started with plain talk. A man who has landed here and never heard anything but having his wages inflation-indexed in the shortest possible time frame is not likely to know what you're talking about if you say, 'And do your wages go up as soon as there's more inflation?' Anyway, after several, hopeless, strangulated pauses, we managed to hit on an understandable common language.

He sensed I was on his side and his story came out in a wonderful thrashing, staggering procession of sentences. He was fifty. It was a hard decision to make to leave Russia, his own country, which loving very much, missing very much, the people, the friends. All people, ways, food, very different here, very troubling. He was not Jewish, he was not political, but his two children, a son, a daughter, were now getting to what, in America, call college age.

Both were very bright but he saw no future for them except in some branch of the civil service in Moscow. This would not have upset him, he said, but he caught stuff on the big radio of his brother, on the Voice of America. He, also, to my alarm, said he had listened, when it was not jammed, to an Englishman who did a talk from New York. It was called, I think, Letter, American Letter. Believe me, I wasn't going to take the blame for yet another soured, embittered immigrant. Truthfully, I said I'd heard of him but he was not heard in America. This amazed him. He went on.

So why had he left? Because he'd heard children, studious ones, could try in America many colleges, could travel to get in, could then choose what to do. He even heard from that man that it was a common thing for New York taxi drivers to take a week or two or a month off in winter and go to Florida. He had a distant cousin in New York. He and his wife took the risk. Now his daughter was at Hunter College, didn't have to say yet what she wanted to be. His son was in pre-medical, going to be a doctor. But life was hard. He so missed Russia, the country, the people, the ways I brought up. I asked him if he regretted the move and he swivelled round in something close to alarm, 'No, no, no, no, no!' he said, 'Miss much, but not regret!'

'Why? Why? How can I tell you. Listen please! I talk to cab drivers. I visit the store. I meet on the street, people talk all the time. They argue. On the TV, people fight in words. Like the government, don't like the government. Say good things, bad things, say anything. Nobody follows, nothing happens. My daughter no like Reagan, I like Reagan. I think great man. He say all the time why I here. What you call it?'

He was writhing in his seat reaching for some difficult, impossible word. 'Freedom?' I hinted. He positively shouted, 'Freedom!'

I saw that his face was streaming with tears. I sniffed myself. 'I do know what you mean', I said, though, as I say, we take it for granted. This naive, shaken man did not.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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