This past summer meditation teachers Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and a group of vipassana yogis traveled to the Soviet Union to sow a few seeds of Buddhadharma in the fresh soil of glasnost. The journey was the brainchild of citizen diplomat Adi Bemak, who sensed that the time was ripe. She enlisted the help of Fran Macy, a Berkeley psychotherapist, meditator and Soviet specialist who speaks Russian and has led numerous delegations to the Soviet Union. Together, Adi and Fran arranged for Joseph and Sharon to meet and talk with groups of Soviet psychotherapists in the cities of Leningrad, Tbilisi, and Moscow.

Riding from the airport into the city of Leningrad, we notice that the streets seem empty. Compared to our departure cities of London or New York, the atmosphere here feels subdued and slowed down—perhaps the word is “solemn.” Then someone realizes that there are no advertisements on the streets, no flashy multicolored billboards or signs demanding our attention and stimulating our desires. Several people comment that they think they will like this “communist calm.” Maybe the Soviet Union is a perfect place for the dharma. Perhaps Marxism has paved the way for meditation and spiritual practice, which is simply the next step in the ongoing dialectic of history, the missing link on the path to a utopian future. Move over Lenin; here comes the Buddha!

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Our first meeting with the group of Soviet psychologists in Leningrad is like love at first sight, like finding cousins you knew existed but have never seen before, or like meeting peers from another universe. There is an immediate rapport and bonding between the sons and daughters of the two “superpowers.” We all can sense the significance of our coming together on levels that are simultaneously personal, political and spiritual.

We gather in an apartment which is large and sumptuous by Soviet standards, located just off the Nevsky Prospect, the main street of Leningrad. Joseph gives an introductory talk on meditation, his first presentation in a communist country, during which he makes unusually few references to the Buddha. Then we meditate for a half hour, and follow that with questions and answers and discussion. The Soviets are very enthusiastic. As psychologists they are naturally interested in how the mind works, and also, many of them have read about Eastern spiritual practice and they are eager to explore this new discipline. One wistfully beautiful Soviet woman, who looks like she might have been a heroine in some Tolstoy novel, tells Sharon that she has done some meditating on her own. When Sharon asks her how she learned what to do, the woman replies simply, “Grief has been my teacher.”

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Life has not been easy for our Soviet friends. We have come to give them a taste of absolute freedom, but they have had very little relative freedom. Personally and professionally, they have been kept from fully exploring their interests and following their dreams. One woman tells us how lucky we are to be able to travel and learn about other cultures. Most of them have not been permitted to travel outside of the Soviet Union or even to move to another city within the Soviet Union. We have brought them books and cassettes as gifts and they are very grateful. They haven’t been able to receive journals from the West without special permission. One man tells me that they have been passing around one copy of Doctor Zhivago for years, and now with glasnost, he says hopefully, “maybe each of us will be able to have our own copy.”

Our Soviet friends are cautiously optimistic about the Gorbachev reforms. Several of them tell us how surprised and excited they are to watch Communist party members debating and criticizing each other openly on TV, and to read daily newspaper articles critical of the Party and its policies. However, as psychologists, they are also aware of how long it might take for the Soviet people to break out of their centuries-old habits of oppression. One young man says, “We have to learn how to be free. I don’t think it will be so easy for us.” A woman therapist tells us, “It will take at least a generation or two before we will be able to create the kind of open society that I dream about.” I have become quite friendly with one young man, an energetic political activist, and as we part I give him a gift of a cassette of Sting’s album which includes the song, “The Russians,” with the refrain, “I hope the Russians love their children too.” He thanks me and says he knows the song, but since Gorbachev has come to power he thinks the refrain should be, “I hope the Russians love their democracy too.”

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We are all shocked by the low standard of living we find in the Soviet Union. After all, this is the world’s other superpower, a country that builds nuclear submarines and sends space probes to Mars, yet it can’t seem to supply its major cities with adequate food produce. While we are in Leningrad there is rationing of butter, sugar and meat. There are no fruits available anywhere, and very few vegetables. Our tour guide tells us she has not seen a banana in seven years. There are long waiting lists for private automobiles and apartments, and very few “luxury items” available in the department stores. After just a short time in the Soviet Union, one begins to realize that the price the Soviet people have had to pay for the cold war and their nation’s superpower status has been much steeper than the price that Americans have had to pay.

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One afternoon a few of us are walking down the Nevsky Prospect when we come upon a group of about four hundred Soviet youth dressed in a combination of punk and hippie styles, gathered in the plaza of a boarded-up church. As a radio reporter in San Francisco in the late ’60s, I covered many such gatherings—we used to call them “human be-ins”—and this is unmistakably a Soviet version, twenty years later. On one side of the plaza is an art exhibit that certainly wouldn’t have been allowed before Gorbachev and glasnost. There is no Socialist Realism being portrayed here; instead, canvases full of swirls of color and splashes of paint—nothing Day-Glo mind you, but definitely in the psychedelic style. There is also some protest art on display, such as a statue of the three little pigs with the labels, “Stalin, Krushchev, and Brezhnev.” Around the plaza groups of people are playing guitars and singing protest songs, and there is a stage where poetry is being read and skits performed.

I have my tape recorder with me and begin talking to a few of the people in the crowd who speak English. I ask one young man dressed in tie-dye why he chooses the hippie style. “I don’t trust the older generation,” he replies, “and I don’t believe in our government or the Soviet ideology. I just want to be myself and express myself. Being a hippie is the way to do this.”

Many passers-by have assembled on the edges of the plaza to watch the proceedings, and when I ask these “straight people” what they think of this gathering, they echo the sentiments of their American counterparts of twenty years ago. One woman dressed in a business suit says, “Why are these young people so dirty? I don’t think they ever take a bath and this is disgusting.” An older man in a work shirt gives me a knowing wink and tells me, “They are protesting just to protest. They really don’t have anything to say.”

Somebody gives me a record album by one of the current top Soviet rock and roll bands, a group called Aquarium, their name being a wordplay on the sign of the Zodiac. I notice that some of the songs on their album have titles like “The Tibetan Tango” and “The Art of Being Silent.” Obviously some Eastern spirituality and mysticism is filtering into the Soviet youth scene. For them, finally, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarium.

Standing in the middle of this Soviet “be-in,” I am experiencing a complete déjà vu. There are so many uncanny parallels between the social upheavals of the American ’60s and the Soviet ’80s. Gorbachev is their John F. Kennedy, and glasnost their New Frontier. Their World War II generation is passing from power, allowing the Soviet people to break out of a rigid cold-war mentality—their McCarthyite ’50s. Afghanistan is their Vietnam War, with the returning soldiers bringing back drugs and disillusionment, contributing to a growing generation gap. As I look around the church plaza I can see the solid red of the workers’ state dissolving into many colors as “decadent” individualism begins dancing in the streets. It is much too early to tell what will come of the transformations now taking place in the Soviet Union, but there is very little doubt that, “the times they are a changin’.”

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After five evenings together we have grown quite close with our Leningrad circle of friends and our last meeting with them is very poignant. We sit in meditation and then Joseph and Sharon give their final talk, which is about the concept of anatta, or selflessness. I wonder if this idea isn’t too radical and outrageous for the Soviets to hear after just a few evenings of sitting practice, and I get a little nervous watching our interpreter struggle with the translation. However, during the question and answer period it becomes evident that the group was quite ready to hear about selflessness and excited by the profundity of the insight. I ask one woman if she had any trouble understanding the concept of “no self.” She points to her head and asks, “Do you mean here?” Then she smiles and points to her heart and asks rhetorically, “Or here?” Later Joseph says he believes that the Soviets have less difficulty with the idea of selflessness than Americans, because “self” is not the primary emphasis of Soviet culture and society. While we glorify the individual, under communist theory the individual is subordinate to the welfare of all and the good of the state. In some respects at least, maybe the Beatles were right when they sang, “You don’t know how lucky you are, boys, back in the U.S.S.R.”

On this last evening in Leningrad, we are nearly overwhelmed by the hospitality of our Soviet hosts. After the meditation session there is feasting and drinking, with numerous toasts and many gifts exchanged. The Soviets express their deepest gratitude for the meditation teachings and are eager to have Joseph and Sharon return to lead an intensive retreat. One of the Leningrad group, a jolly Jewish man who looks exactly like Karl Marx, is especially excited about further practice. He almost bursts into tears when Joseph mentions the possibility of returning in a year. “That is too far away,” he cries. “Please, please come in only six months!”

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In Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet republic of Georgia, we meet with a Christian-oriented encounter group, consisting of about twenty people who gather together regularly under the leadership of one very intense and charismatic man. He and several members of his group paint icons for Russian Orthodox churches in the area. They tell us that during their usual encounter-group sessions they each confess something they did wrong during the week or talk about what has given them happiness, and then they pray together. Unlike the more intellectual, atheistic Leningrad group, these Georgians already have their own religious beliefs and practices, and therefore aren’t so open to Buddhist meditation. During our first meeting in Tbilisi, Joseph and Sharon get a lot of unusual questions, such as one about how the devil affects the meditation practice. Another question comes from a woman who asks, “Do you really think you can achieve enlightenment on your own? Don’t you need some kind of divine grace?” Perhaps one could answer by saying that certain karmic factors must indeed be present in order to become enlightened—maybe it’s just different semantic labels for the same thing. Whatever you call it, grace or karma, during our stay in Tbilisi the paths never quite come together.

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We have time for only one meeting with the group of psychologists in Moscow, but the rapport is similar to what we experienced in Leningrad. One woman delights Joseph with the information that his book The Experience of Insight is available at the Lenin Library in Moscow. The Muscovites are all very interested in the meditation practice and before the evening is over they have decided to form a regular sitting group. We also start talking excitedly with the Soviets about coming back next summer for a full ten-day meditation retreat that would be held somewhere in the countryside between Moscow and Leningrad.

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In the Soviet Union there has been very little psychological treatment as we know it, and believe it or not, almost nobody is in therapy. Some people who are diagnosed as extremely disturbed (a few political dissidents have fallen into this category) are admitted to institutions and treated with drugs or other radical therapies. People with less severe psychological problems are often afraid to seek counseling help because it will be reported to their bosses at work and cause trouble for their families.

According to Marxist doctrine, society is the root cause of psychological problems, and as soon as you create a perfect, classless, communist social order, then everyone will automatically become well-adjusted and happy. Most Soviet psychology has therefore revolved around Pavlov and Skinner, fine-tuning the stimulus and response, with research in behaviorism as the main focus of the state-controlled psychological institutions. Since Gorbachev, however, psychologists are being allowed greater freedom to investigate and practice other forms of therapy. Some of our Soviet friends in Leningrad and Moscow are now forming cooperatives for the practice of individual and family counseling. Others are starting up humanistic psychology centers and Gestalt groups.

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One day in Moscow, I remembered that the Democratic National Convention was taking place back in the U.S.A. so I went looking for a newspaper, imagining a Herald-Tribune or a London Times. I tried several big hotels until I was finally reminded that there are no Western newspapers allowed in the Soviet Union except for officially sanctioned Communist papers from Europe, with their “red” version of “yellow” journalism. At that moment—longing for news and information about the world—I began to understand, on some deeper level, how precious it is to have freedom of the press.

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The day we are to leave for home, Fran Macy meets with some people at the Soviet Institute of Psychology in Moscow to plan an upcoming boat trip down the Volga River with a group of American and Soviet psychologists. Nobody had mentioned meditation until the subject was brought up by a high-level Soviet official who is also a Communist Party member. “Why don’t we have meditation on this boat trip,” he says. Fran’s jaw drops. Where is this suggestion coming from? Another Soviet official who had been at the meditation talk the night before tells the Party member about Joseph and Sharon’s visit, and in the end they all agree to have some meditation during the psychologists’ boat trip.

Later our vipassana group is joking about a fantasy future when the Soviet Union becomes a Buddhist nation and statues of the Buddha are erected next to those of Marx and Lenin. Joseph and Sharon, the twentieth-century Bodhidharmas, would each get a few squares named after them. Why not? It’s “Kremlin Karma,” and, “Dharma in the Dacha.” Certainly the Buddha would have no argument with the communist manifesto: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Everyone sharing wealth equally, nobody above anyone else in status—these are common values of both Buddhists and communists. However, it seems that sharing and compassion cannot be dictated from above or mandated by law or organized by a centralized bureaucracy. The history of the Soviet communist experiment is a testament to the failure of those methods.

I believe that in the end, the Buddha has the key to the revolution—a spiritual revolution—the necessary inner work of individual comrades or citizens that must accompany any real and meaningful social revolution, whether communist or capitalist. This past summer some seeds of Buddhadharma were planted in the Soviet Union. May they grow, along with glasnost, until everyone, including communists and capitalists and nonaligned beings, East, West, North and South, are everywhere enlightened and there is a final, glorious “withering away of the states.”

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From the Winter 1989 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 5, No. 2)

Text & photograph © 1989–2022 by Wes Nisker