THE USSR

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Issue # 122-March/April 1990

REPORTS FROM ABROAD

Ommm, ommm, ommm-ing with Gorby

by Ben Finney

Red Square in Moscow has seen its share of history, but little as momentous as what is now unfolding.

MOSCOW, USSR—During mid-January a most ecumenical group of spiritual leaders—ranging from severely garbed rabbis, long-bearded Russian Orthodox priests, and robed Hindu swamis to brilliandy plumed Native American shamans—together with parliamentarians from around the world and a collection of environmentally concerned scientists, met in Armand Hammer's conference center on the snowy banks of the Moscow River for the Global Forum on the Environment and the Survival and Development of Humanity.

The forum itself constituted a kind of global consciousness raising—with environmentalists trying to get parliamentarians and spiritual leaders on their side for a worldwide campaign to save the earth, while the spiritual leaders were admonishing the scientists and technologists to mend their ways and to learn how to protect the environment. All of us looked forward to the concluding address, which, it was promised, would be delivered by President Gorbachev. So, at the end of the last session, the delegates were bused to the Kremlin, where, once inside the fortress walls, we were led into the old meeting room of the Supreme Soviet—the one you see in old newsreels, where a huge statue of Lenin, standing with upraised arm and clenched fist, looms over the speakers.

After an appropriate wait, first Gorbachev, then Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, entered the room and, as we stood to applaud, took their place on the speakers' platform. Times obviously had changed from the antireligion campaigns of Lenin and Stalin, for, along with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and academician Evgeuniij Velikhov, there sat on the speakers' platform Bishop James Park Morton of New York and—resplendent in black robe, tall white hat, and full beard—Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk. This juxtaposition of political, scientific, and religious leadership was calculated; in fact, the Global Forum was officially cohosted by the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the "Religious Communities of the Soviet Union."