March 26, 1989

LATELY IT SEEMS like everybody has either been to the Soviet Union, has a trip planned or is writing about it. Since the onset of glasnost and perestroika, high-tech executives and computer professionals are crowding the friendly skies of Aeroflot, trying to get a foot in the door of the country that’s been our national nemesis since the end of World War II.

High-tech professionals seem particularly enthralled by the opening of Soviet society because it provides a mind-boggling opportunity to effect change — both social and the kind that jingles in the pocket. In Soviet society, where it is legal for an individual to own a typewriter but not a printing press, the possibility of desktop publishing, for example, opens the door on a vista so enormous that it must take their breath away.

But as I watch the inspiring process of arch-enemies reaching out tentative hands of friendship, I remember a conversation I had last September. Streaking down a Paris boulevard, I was talking with Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, founder and president of ACI, a French software firm. Since she is also a professor of philosophy, we were having a philosophical discussion about America’s distrust of the Soviet Union, especially concerning armament issues.

“To worry about these things, it is stupid,” Delbourg-Delphis said. “If I were American, I would be much more frightened about what will happen to the United States if Russia becomes a competitor in world markets. That could be much more devastating than nuclear war, which will never happen.”
I hadn’t thought about that, and the idea made me queasy then. It makes me even queasier now, watching how the United States has responded to the U.S.-sponsored economic recovery of post-war Japan.

America deeply resents Japan’s success. Any way you look at it, the Japanese are kicking our national rump from one end of the world to the other, in everything from chips to cars to VCRs.

So what will happen when the Soviets start practicing imitation, that most sincere form of flattery? If I were a Soviet bureaucrat, looking at how to feed my people and shore up a collapsing economy, I’d be thinking about reproducing one of America’s greatest remaining skills: Yankee ingenuity, or the genesis of big new ideas.

We might be in trouble then. Although Japanese and American mind-sets don’t seem to quite jibe, that’s not true about Soviets and Americans.

Joel Schatz, who with his wife, Diane, founded the pioneering San Francisco/Moscow Teleport, a data network that connects computer users in both countries, says that Soviets and Americans seem to “take” to each other, even more than they do to Western Europeans.

I thought it was because both can relate to the concept of bigness, coming from vast continents with wide open spaces.

“They (do) think big,” agreed Schatz, throwing his arms open wide outside Teleport’s office last week. “Their ideas, their science, their art and poetry, it’s all big.”

So instead of copying how we produce, which is what the Japanese did, the Soviets may find it easier to say, “What’s the big idea?”

Nothing is wrong with this. Anything that’s ever been thought of by one person can be thought of by another. To deny the Soviets our computer technology right now, when they are certain (and probably right) that an indigenous computer industry in the U.S.S.R. would never be able to catch up with the West, would be cruel and foolish. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that other countries, especially Japan and the Soviet Union, are known for priming the minds of their citizens through quality education, so when that big new thought occurs to them, they can do something with it. We don’t do that. Not anymore.

It seems obvious that many countries, and certainly the Soviet Union, have learned from that if they want to compete and participate in the world community and economy, they must support (with money) adequate technical and liberal arts education for their people.

At the rate we’re going, we just might wake up one day and find we’ve nickle-and-dimed our way to second-rate status. And how will we respond if we also wake up to find that the Soviet Union, long “only” a military threat, has become an economic threat as well? If we act as badly as we have with Japan, we will probably blame it all on them, say the Soviets never were trustworthy and plunge right back into the Cold War.