Missionaries of the Right

By David Remnick. June 19, 1989 at 8:00 p.m. EDT

MOSCOW, JUNE 19 — Some of the leading conservatives in American academia and political life are in Moscow this week giving lectures on capitalism and other “values of Western civilization.” They are intent on establishing a university in Moscow, and if they succeed, the school could have all the evangelical zeal of Oral Roberts U. In a “summer school session” that the organizers hope will be a kind of orientation week for a university that would open as early as 1990, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) spoke on the superiority of Adam Smith over Karl Marx and Sen. Bob Kasten (R-Wis.) gave instructions on the separation of powers in the U.S. government. “I was kind of giving my Civics 101 stuff,” Kasten said. He seemed not quite aware that his audience was mainly composed of leading Moscow intellectuals who long ago graduated from college. “As for the lectures, I think it’s best to stay off the record,” said one normally on-the-record Moscow writer.

During Gramm’s lecture, one of the Soviets in the audience rose from his seat and said, “Sir, you’ve been speaking to us as if you are talking to people who oppose your view.” Others gently informed their American guests that what they had to say was very interesting and all, thank you, but were it not for the senators’ prestige, Soviet journals would turn down their material as insufficiently radical. “Oh, it was all very, very fascinating,” Kasten said. “This is my first trip over here.” Edward Lozansky, a Soviet emigre who scandalized the U.S.S.R. when he married the daughter of a four-star Soviet general and helped her leave the country, is, as head of the Washington-based International Educational Network, hoping that he will be able to set up a university here similar in structure and scope to the American universities in Cairo, Paris and Beirut.

Thus, Lozansky joins McDonald’s and 1,001 other apple-cheeked American enterprises hoping to cut through the snarl of Soviet bureaucracy and establish a going venture. He said the courses would be academically rigorous, and students would have to pass entrance exams. Whether the independent university actually has a freshman class soon or merely fades, the assembled would-be faculty seemed fascinated, if guarded, about the country it has, for so long, excoriated. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and the archdeacon of the neoconservatives, seemed a bit uneasy about confronting the Great Beast, which he has seen through the windows of chauffeured limousines and the Oktober Hotel — home of visiting Central Committee members and other confirmed communistic-thinking peoples. Podhoretz said he was “concerned” that some fellow hard-liners, like Harvard University’s Richard Pipes, have visited Gorbachev’s Moscow and come away from the experience impressed, if not positively gushy.

Preparing for his debate Tuesday with Georgi Arbatov, a Central Committee member and an adviser to the leadership on American politics, Podhoretz said he was planning a “real tough” presentation on the Cold War. And as for Mikhail Gorbachev, Podhoretz said, “He’s achieving all the objectives of his predecessors. He’s splitting NATO, he’s pushing disarmament along in the West, and he’s forcing cuts that are likely to leave the Soviet Union with an edge, but at a lower economic cost. I think that if I’d been advising him, I’d have told him to do the same: It’s a brilliant strategy.” Of all the visitors, perhaps, the most hard-line of all may have been Ernst Neizvestny, a renowned emigre sculptor who, before his departure 13 years ago, designed the black-and-white tomb of his former antagonist, Nikita Khrushchev. Neizvestny went today with Khrushchev’s son Sergei to the grave in Novodevichy Cemetery. “It was strange how I felt,” he said. “If you have been let out of prison and then many years later you come back as a free man, you look at the prison with a sadness but also a sense of victory.”

More than 30 years ago, Neizvestny proposed that Moscow and other cities erect a monument to commemorate those killed during Stalin’s purges. “They thought I was crazy. The KGB wanted to kill me for that,” he said. Now the group Memorial has advanced that idea so far that it has even won Gorbachev’s endorsement. Neizvestny plans to design a monument that will be erected on the border of the European and Asian Soviet Union, in the Urals. Nevertheless, even on his first trip back to the country, he feels no great warmth, no inclination to stay more than a few days. “I look at all that has happened with great bitterness,” he said. “I look at communism in this country as an anthropological crime, not just a mistake. Anthropological because communism created a new kind of man. This is the worst sort of crime I can imagine. “I was never a communist, but when I was at Moscow University’s philosophy department I was classmates with Ivan Frolov and Anatoly Chernayev and other people who are now all close to Gorbachev. What I can see then is that the structures of society are not changing much, but the internal structures of the people themselves, well, they may be changing a bit.”