|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Time to Dream Yet?
| Article
# : |
18151 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
2,177 Words |
| Author
: |
Donna L. McDaniel
Donna L. McDaniel, a freelance writer from Southborough,
Massachusetts, has traveled with Sharing a New Song to Russia,
China, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and South Africa. |
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
... (1993 of 12334 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
