Warnings for Gorbachev

For the first time in my life, I've been frisked on entering a theatre. The shock of this indignity was, I have to say, cushioned by the fact that several thousand other theatregoers were suffering at the same time.

It was on one of our last nights in San Francisco. The theatre lobby was packed with a crowd, barely able to move except as a lurching mass, but thanks to the patience of three or four of the theatre staff – who judging from their skill at interception and interference must have been ex-footballers – we were broken up into a weaving, single line and passed in turn through the archway of a metal detector.

From time to time, it would go off like an old-time fire bell in the night and this would cause a momentary look of fright on the face of the one who'd just passed through. Almost always, it was some man with loose change in an outer pocket which he would gravely shower on to a little plate and then go back again and come through the archway clean.

This mystery is easily explained, though since I'm not much of a theatregoer it was a surprise to me. Anyway, once you saw everybody having to go through it, it became a routine as acceptable as the one we all go through when taking a plane. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps this is normal procedure wherever a Russian troupe is performing. We were going to see the Ukrainian State Dance Company. My wife is a dance freak, whereas I have been unable, down the years, to overcome the prejudice against people with voices not using them, but instead putting the tips of two fingers to the forehead to indicate repentance, perhaps, or teetering on the two big toes to signify approaching ecstasy. It's a language I've never learned and I admit that in everything to do with ballet, anyway, I am a slob.

But the advance notices from New York and the two I'd seen in the San Francisco papers were so dazzling that it seemed worth making one more try. I was not too thrilled at the prospect, even though the Ukrainians aren't ballet dancers. Worse, they specialise in the folk dances of their country and the programme threatened the most lugubrious kind, things like the Needlework Dance, indigenous to a province famous for its weaving. Worse still, the Cobblers' Dance, a quartet of three young cobblers and an old one, the funny one.

Well, they were nothing less than marvellous. There were, including the orchestra, 120 of them. Must have been at least 70, 80 dancers. All the women were young, exactly, I should guess, five feet five inches tall, all very pretty, each of them possessing the identical, splendid figure. They made the Rockettes seem, in retrospect, like a horde of girls assembled in night court. The men were also uniform in size, shape and athletic speed and adroitness. I don't ever remember seeing a troop of soldiers, sailors, marines, let alone dancers who moved so perfectly in formation that when, at one point, they broke quickly into a circle, with lines of men and women alternating as the spokes of a wheel, not a finger, not an ankle was out of line.

You'd expect the costumes to be, well, colourful and that, too, can be awful when folk dancers are got up like their grandmothers in patchwork quilts, but not the Ukrainians. Brilliant, trim, enchanting costumes, changing from act to act with the speed of a kaleidoscope. The highly charged atmosphere of the theatre crackled with shouts of, 'Fabulous! Fantastic!' – two favourite American adjectives, more normally used about a new restaurant. The question that's essential to ask when an American tells you that a new restaurant is either fabulous or fantastic or both, is, yes, but is it good?

Well, you'll gather. I thought that the Ukrainian State Dancers were good, very good. Fabulous for the athleticism of the men, fantastic for the grace of the women. Now what makes this a proper subject for a Letter From America?

For, I think, an emotion that surged up from the audience and engulfed the stage. The moment the curtain went up and we saw these 70, 80, whatever it was, men and women in a compact semi-circle, saluting and singing, 'We are from the Ukraine', a wave of applause broke through the audience and roared for a full minute. We'd not yet seen them dance. Admittedly, they formed a magnificent ensemble not as a dance team, but as a body of human beings radiating happy good humour.

Why this tremendous, spontaneous response? Was the audience all Russian? Of course not, though in San Francisco, as in New York or Chicago or Pittsburgh or one or two other Midwestern cities, there are many thousands of Americans of Russian origin and I guessed, from the tears streaming down the faces of three or four old women near me, I guessed their forebears most likely came here from the Ukraine.

But from the chatter of the audience in the lobbies during the interval plainly the great majority was English-speaking. Well, I can only say that the explosion of cheering could not have been greater if the curtain had gone up and we'd seen all alone on the stage the unannounced figure of Laurence Olivier. Why, then?

I don't believe it's too fanciful to say that it was an expression, of course of welcome, but I sensed something else, something touching to the point of pathos. A release of goodwill, of applause for glasnost after the pent-up anxieties of years of suspicion and distrust. In one moment, the distrustful glare with which the two superpowers watch each other across all the borders between East and West was banished in an equal shout of, 'We wish you well'. Just for one evening the superpowers did not exist.

However badly I've expressed this, I'm quite sure that the cheering went beyond acknowledging the expertness of the performance, just for an hour or two. On the way out, we were back to reality of the metal detectors. And next morning, the first piece I read in the paper was about an article in the leading literary monthly of the Soviet Union.

Written by a man I – and perhaps you – had never heard of. One Andrei Nuikin. A piece you would not expect to read in an official Moscow monthly. It suggests that, at this moment, the Soviet Union is in a situation similar to the one which was dramatically changed by the sudden takeover or coup of Joseph Stalin. For the second time in the twentieth century, it says, we are witnessing a kind of dual conflict of power in Russia, in which neither side is prepared to launch a decisive offensive and awaits its hour to strike, in the meantime, limiting its activities to particular operations for reconnaissance purposes.

The publication of this article in Moscow, not in an underground paper, but in the most respectable, official monthly is, to say the least, extraordinary. The same disturbing prediction is taken up also by a famous French journalist, Michel Tatu, during the Sixties a correspondent in Moscow, who does not go so far as Mr Nuikin in saying that the Soviet Union is in the sort of situation that could provoke a sudden reversal of power, but he speculates on the assumption that the pre-Gorbachev bureaucracy is not only entrenched, but is solidly opposed to the new leader and could do to him what it did to Khrushchev – what the Frenchman calls 'a brutal eviction from power'.

Mr Tatu says, I think quite rightly, given all that Gorbachev has done to get Western opinion to appreciate his efforts, the reaction abroad to such a development or coup would be disastrous. He even anticipates – and this is no gossip-monger, but a serious, brilliant Kremlinologist – he anticipates what he calls 'another solution not to be ruled out, namely, an unfortunate accident that would permit the burial of the former with full honours and a proclamation loud and clear by his successor of the key words glasnost and perestroika, while giving to them very different meanings'. In other words, no open denunciation. They'd come to praise Caesar and bury him at the same time.

This is chilling stuff and it wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on if it were published by a right-wing American group or a Southern senator opposed to the INF Treaty. Another sign that these misgivings about the future of Mr Gorbachev and his reforms extend far beyond Moscow comes from a Ukrainian commentator, again writing in an official literary publication. He'd evidently been composing a speech supporting the policy of glasnost and encouraging more reforms along the same line.

He then wrote, and the literary gazette published, this remarkable passage, 'All of us feel hot breath on our necks of those who do not want perestroika. They gather every evening and sit late into the nights. They watch all of us who speak out today who favour a renewal of our society and they make lists of our names against the day when their turn comes round again'.

Could this have been published, do you suppose, to alert people to the seriousness of the opposition from the old regime? Hard to say and easy to dismiss as a melodramatic cry for help, but Gorbachev himself could not have been more melodramatic in his New Year's talk over Soviet television.

Promising more reforms, he said, 'If we stop now, we will not rise a second time. If we stop now, it will mean our death'. It all brought a new poignancy to the recent memory of the Ukrainian dancers and the tidal wave of goodwill that greeted them.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.