U.S. Students in Russia

The calmest place for an American during a cold-war crisis may well be the universities in Moscow or Leningrad, where 22 U.S. graduate students and teachers this year are pursuing research projects from art to psychology. The atmosphere is one of disengaged scholarship, and the attitude of the Russian colleagues, says one American, is "marvelous, nothing but sweetness and light." Such cooperation is making a heartening success out of a U.S.Russian exchange program that since 1958 has been sending Americans to Russia for up to one year of graduate study.

The U.S. Government pays one-third of the bill; the rest comes from private groups. The Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants runs the program, selects the students and pays their fare. In return, Russia provides full tuition, plus stipends of $166 a month--five times the standard allowance for Russian university students.

Herring & Hot Plates. This year's crop of Americans in Russia comes from campuses as diverse as Berkeley and Emory. Most students are in their early 30s; all speak Russian. Topics of study tend to be esoteric: Russian comment on the French Encyclopedist Diderot, peasant self-government after the emancipation of the serfs, the attitude of the Czarist gentry to peasant reform. The predominant hoariness of the subjects is partly a result of Russian reluctance to open archives on recent events, for in Soviet practice, as one American put it, "What is history today may be non-history tomorrow." Yet by living intimately with Russians, the Americans are learning Soviet lore that should benefit their own colleagues and students back home. "Even buying a can of herring is an education," says one American scholar.

Moscow University's 15 Americans live in comfortable, two-room dormitory suites, which the ten married men share with their wives (children are not invited). The wives cook in community kitchens or on hot plates in their rooms, divide their time between shopping in the university gastronom and swapping language lessons with Russians. Bachelors live with Russians, Africans or students from Soviet satellites. All clean their own rooms and perform communal chores, such as K.P. and phone duty, assigned by the floor starosta, an elected "elder," or monitor, common to Russian group living.

Share & Share Alike. Closer to provincial university life are Leningrad's seven Americans, who live two or three to a room in a far seedier dormitory 15 minutes from the campus. They get a real taste of the Russian passion for sharing food, clothes, books--almost everything except toothbrushes. They also get a close look at the Russian mind. One observation is that Russian students almost never adorn their rooms with pictures of Marx, Lenin or Khrushchev; another is that they are far less interested in cold-war quarreling than in hot questioning about U.S. music, literature and living. "There isn't much gung-ho Communism here," says one American.

Nonetheless, the Americans are impressed by the Russians' willingness to serve the "social good," meaning the state. During the autumn harvests, the Russians happily whipped off to collective farms for unpaid work by day and parties by night, returning laden with fresh eggs and good cheer. The Russians despise some aspects of Soviet life, notably curbs on travel abroad. "But they have a basic faith in the Tightness of what the Soviet Union does," sums up one American. "It looks from here as though nobody's going to defect."

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