Black marketeers will try to sell you Hard Rock Café T-shirts when you step off your tour bus in Moscow. It matters not that there's no such café in the city. On the backs of the T-shirts are painted the words Glasnost, Perestroika, and Democraticia. Shirts will be sold but Soviet citizens will tell you that when it comes to practical results in society at large, words like perestroika, glasnost, and democraticia are much ado about little.
That was the message heard many times over by members of Sharing a New Song (SANS), a chorus from the Boston, Massachusetts, area that recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union. The fifty SANS members lived with host families from an engineering trade union in Tallinn, Estonia; made new friends with members of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute's chorus; and in Yaroslavl, on the Upper Volga, renewed friendships with a group that had come to the United States last fall. It was the sixth trip in as many years for the American singing group, created specifically to promote friendship between the two countries.
Some things have changed a lot in those six years and some have not. Soviet citizens can decorate Christmas trees, fly the flags of their own republics, listen to Count Base records, and invite foreigners home without fear to discuss politics - small, but liberties on an American scale, but much appreciated by people who would not have imagined them possible just a few years ago. Yet these freedoms are only flicker of light in an otherwise dreary routine of rationing, shortages and little choice about housing, living and jobs.
Life in the Soviet Union offers fodder aplenty for the rich collection of Soviet black humor. There is freedom of the press - and such a severe shortage of paper that the army of would-be publishers cannot print regularly. People have rubles to spend, but shelves in the state-run stores are bare and private-market food prices are too high. The fields yield a record grain crop, but the grain is in danger of rioting for lack of workers and heavy equipment to harvest it.
Things are getting worse, not better, the Estonian, Ukrainian, and Russian hosts told the American.
All Talk, No Results
"Gorbachev speaks a lot, but we don't see any differences," said a Leningrad artist selling her works at an outdoor market. "It's all just 'talk, talk," as far as Russian Alexandr (Sasha) Budrov is concerned. The two seemed to be speaking for many.
Singing For Freedom
While declarations of independence from the Baltic states, the Ukraine, and Russia have been in the headlines, only in Estonia, the smallest but most westernized of the Baltics, did the American visitors sense the intensity that could make a thrust toward separation real.
Proud to trace their national identity back at least six centuries, Estonians had asserted themselves years ago, before their recent first steps towards restoring national sovereignty last fall. Four years ago, crowds gathered in front of Tallinn's pink Toompea Palace to protest a proposed diversion of the river in the eastern part of the
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