The Communist Monster Defanged
Trump has once more taken to calling his perceived enemies communists. This includes judges who stymied him. Evidently, he believes the word still stings. It still might sting for old folks.
Like all American kids, I grew up convinced that foreign communists threatened our existence. This message was brought home time and again in school. Films depicted global communism spreading like a dark tide.
I was a staunch anti-communist. My desire to combat this plague was partly why I was set to enlist in the army when I turned 18 in 1968. I knew I would be deployed to Vietnam. But we Americans had to stop them over there before the commies came to our shores.
In the end, I went to college instead. Later, to my unpleasant surprise, I was as close as possible to being drafted. I was summoned to the Los Angeles induction center.
Fast forward to October 22, 1987, and I’m on a Moscow-bound train. I was a Time correspondent who accompanied Secretary of State George Shultz. Moscow’s airport was fogged in. So, we traveled by train from Helsinki.
At dawn, I got a good look at the Russian countryside. My frame of reference was Latin America. What I saw, mile after mile, were shacks, some concrete block apartment buildings, and dirt roads. There were old-fashioned wooden carts for hauling. The region looked less developed than, say, the Honduran campo.
This was the Soviet Union, a superpower?
In Moscow, we checked into the Ukraina Hotel, among the worst dumps I had stayed in. The whole place was dank and barely lit. My room was cold. The towel—just one was provided—was so worn it resembled cheesecloth. And the shower produced little more than a trickle.
Red Square was a delight. It looked like every photo of the place I had seen. Locals encouraged me to visit Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin, “State Department Store,” or GUM, as it was famously known throughout the Soviet Union.
It was large and dreary and had this oddity: customers could not try on clothes. Clerks behind counters handed items to buyers. Dress samples were pinned to walls. The same look but don’t touch policy applied. GUM was poorly stocked.
As I wandered the streets, I saw a member of some branch of the security forces on every corner. All the blocks were identical: hulking concrete apartment buildings, some in disrepair.
I set out to find a restaurant, but they were closed. In one case, an angry waiter yelled at me and shut the door to the joint. A fellow journalist tipped off to a dollar store, where imported food items could be bought and eaten elsewhere.
The stores I came across were almost bare. There were only a few canned goods. I saw a long line of men holding empty bottles in front of a shop. They were expecting to have the bottles refilled with vodka.
By the time I left Moscow, I had concluded that a superpower with a shabby capital that lacked basic consumer goods was not a threat to the United States. I had been in a nation in advanced decay.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 