RANSVESTIA

"America." He asked me if I would write down the words for him which I did later. But as I was playing, a group, which grew to about 20 people, gathered around me with great interest in what the American woman was doing. When my small repertoire was exhausted, a young Red Army soldier, one of many walking around the city, took my place and began to play one of his country's anthems. This was a bit of people-to-people activity and once again gave the lie to ideas that the Russian people are aloof or afraid of foreigners.

I can't take the space to go into all the things we did and exper- iences we had but I will mention a couple. I observed all over Russia that there are dozens and hundreds of museums. They are all crowded with people. There are lots of bookstores and they are crowded, too. The people are much more interested in learning than we are; partly, I supposed, because although they have several television channels I don't think they broadcast all the time and that probably everybody doesn't have a set so they are not chained to the "boob tube" as our people are. We went to visit the Museum of Economic Achievements. This is not a building as most museums are, but an enormous park probably bigger than Disneyland, crowded with buildings each dedi- cated to one aspect of Russian activities like, petroleum, mining, electronics, agriculture, fisheries, metallurgy, music, art, and of course, space, and many more. The place is so big that you take a litle tram around it just to get to what you want to see. Not surprisingly I wanted to see the space building and what a place. In front is the whole ori- ginal launching mechanism for Yuri Gegarin's first Sputnik flight to- gether with an identical full-sized rocket to the one that launched him. Pretty impressive. Inside the large building, every kind of space vehicle the Russians ever launched, and they have sent up hundreds, was hanging from the ceiling. Even one of the Soyuz ships which several weeks later was to link up with the U.S. Apollo for their historic flight. There were great arrays of charts, diagrams and explanations of every aspect of space flight. I suppose that the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. has much the same for our space efforts but I venture the observation that the number of Americans who go through the Smithsonian space room is considerably fewer than the number of Russians who see this exhibit, partly because the Soviet exhibit is not only in the capital city but in their largest city. Washington is our capitol but not one of our larger cities. This building was crowded with classes of students going through it and I expect that this is true. about every day the place is open. Interest in what their society is doing is obviously high. Not about what General Motors or Westing-

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