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"It
was the winter of 1982, and the Cold War was raging. Sophia
Stoller and I were introduced in a church basement, and struck
up a conversation about the frightening prospect of war with the
Soviet Union.
We both actively opposed the arms race, but
wasn't there something positive we could do? We found
ourselves amazed at how little we actually knew about the United
States' mortal enemy, and wondered if perhaps others would also
like to know more. We wondered how we could ever manage to meet a
real live Soviet citizen.
In February 1983, just one month
before President Reagan would call the Soviet Union the "focus
of evil in the world," about a dozen like-minded folks met in
a city building downtown to talk about what at the time was
flat-out impossible: to link Boulder with a sister city in the
Soviet Union. It was impossible because five of the six existing
such relationships were set up in the 1970s by fiat, by Nixon and
Brezhnev. And even if the Soviets were willing to add more cities,
which was unlikely, they considered a small city like ours out of
the question.
We ignored their rules and began
actively pursuing a relationship. I visited the Soviet Embassy in
Washington, D.C., several times, we wrote repeated letters to
faceless bureaucrats, and finally, having been studiously ignored,
simply chose Dushanbe as our city and pursued officials there
directly. Several failed attempts later, Boulder scientist Joe
Allen made it through the maze and met the mayor of Dushanbe who
said, "You people in Boulder are very persistent." We at
last knew that we were having some effect.
On my next trip
to the mirrored antechamber of the embassy, a Soviet diplomat
leafed through my heavy packet of miscellaneous material promoting
Boulder, his face awash with boredom. Suddenly he stopped and
stared at a particular sheet. "There's a balalaika band in
Boulder?" he asked in total amazement.
The next week
the embassy sent an update of the rules for establishing sister
cities, and the minimum city size now read, "100,000 (or
maybe 80,000)."
All along the way, we have
produced programs about any aspect of the Soviet Union we have
found someone able to discuss. We have showed movies and fed
people exotic food and hosted panels of professors and travelers,
anyone who could shed light on the vast Soviet Union. In the
beginning the audience would become politicized and polarized even
talking about food, but gradually people relaxed a bit and we all
started to learn. After years, we at last broke through and
were able to seal our relationship with Dushanbe in 1987.
Since then, we have received a magnificent teahouse and
hosted dozens of visitors and students, and our long labor has
borne beautiful fruit.
It is now difficult to conjure the
bitter antagonisms that the most banal talk about the Soviet Union
could rouse back at the beginning. The arms race, in retrospect,
looks a little peculiar--what was it about? As we look to our
sister city of Dushanbe, almost exactly half way around the world,
we no longer see a unit of Soviet hegemony but a mysterious land
of Persian heritage troubled by internal conflicts of a sort
unimaginable when we initiated the relationship.
But the
original reasons for becoming sister cities are just as valid now
as ever: to get to know people very unlike ourselves and,
through understanding, to make the world just a little bit better...
...and to have some fun on the road to
understanding."
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