In late summer, 1988, I traveled to Ukraine, part of what was then the Soviet Union, to take part in a Peace Walk.  We traveled from Odessa to Kiev, walking through tiny villages that would explode with people who came out to see the Americans in our tented campgrounds.  The goal of the Walk was to promote peace through person-to-person contact, unfettered by politics.  I was there for a month with 460 other American and Soviets marching through the countryside, carrying banners, discussing politics, giving out autographs and eating watermelons.  We were acting like diplomats trying to end the arms race.  We didn’t know that success, at least for a time, was right around the corner.
            In September 2008, in preparation for a return to Russia, I tried to contact some friends I had made. I called 20-year-old phone numbers and dug up other friends with whitepages.com.  I contacted the president of the 1988 Peace Walk.  I sent a fan letter to members of the band that was with us on the Walk.  I called people in Arizona, Seattle, California, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  I touched on any American Peace Walk veterans I knew. 

            I also joined odnoklassniki, a Russian social networking site. I ordered searches for the names of walkers that appear in my battered walker-directory that I have been carrying around for 20 years.  With the click of the mouse, it was simple to send over 300 messages to people who happened to have the same name as people who were on the walk.  I achieved a couple tepid contacts but I didn’t find any of my buddies. In October, my visa was ready and it was time for my trip.

            The first person I tried to find was Misha. I found his 20-year-old address and pushed the button on the outdoor intercom. When a woman answered, I said, in my halting Russian, “Ah, ??? James Martin. ? ??? Misha Ivanov.”
            “James from Ames?!?” she said, “Come in!” It was Lena, another Peace Walker. She had been Misha’s girlfriend during the Walk.  I had finished my degree at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa one week before the Walk in 1988.  How she could have recognized my voice and remembered who I was after 20 years of no contact is still a mystery. 
            I was thrilled with relief and excitement. To tell the truth, I wasn’t optimistic that I would find anyone. She greeted me at her door holding their 6-week-old son. Five minutes later, I was sitting at their dinner table. Lena said, “This is the legacy of such peace walks, you show up at our door after 20 years with no warning and the next thing, you are sitting down eating borsht and holding our kid.”
           

As expected, we did some reminiscing. Lena remembered the first day of the Peace Walk—

            During the Walk, we talked about nuclear weapons and disarmament but the coolest thing was the people. The friends I made during that month were immediately like family. One day, I wore a red bandana around my neck. 
            I’m not sure why I did it; I think it may have been a desire to support a persona that would allow me to be more of a cowboy instead of just a tractor driver from Iowa.  The next day, Ivan, Artiom and Misha (Lena’s future husband) appeared wearing similar red bandanas that we all wore everyday for the rest of the month as a sign of brotherhood.
            After returning from the Walk, I was too busy with my life to understand how amazing my experiences were.  As a 22-years-old youngster, I didn’t realize the awesome power of the winds of fate that lead an Iowa farm boy to pal around with residents of Moscow skyscrapers.  Lena also views with sadness the erosion of interest between the people of these two former enemies. 

I really missed the time when people from our countries just started to get to know each other. Even right after the Cold War ended, they were very open minded and they want to learn more, they want to understand each other. But now situation is quite different, people become more ignorant. If you come today to the United States and say, “Hey, I am from Russia,” nobody really care.  And it’s the same here.  When you are in Moscow and say, “Hello, I’m American,” nobody interested.  And the bad thing is that people think that they know everything. But they don’t know nothing.

            In 1988, we were guests at typically Soviet “meetings”, and many of us were able to make speeches. Imagine, Americans making speeches in the Soviet Union! I wanted to give at least a bit of my speech in Russian so I asked Ivan how to say that we had been treated like royalty. Confused, he asked, “Why do you want to say that? You are treated like friends.”

            Around the dinner table this fall, Lena and I naturally spent some time discussing politics. I wondered how things had changed between our two countries.

Me, I love American people. I have many good friends among them. But quite often nowadays because of the politics, because of the mass media, I hear from people, “Oh I don’t like Americans. I don’t believe they are smart people. They don’t have anything interesting. They don’t have culture; they just have McDonald’s. I don’t like them.”

(translation)  You must separate the relationship between the governments and the relationship between people. Between people, it’s always good. Americans are warm, friendly people; Russians also like to make friends. The Peace Walk that we did showed that people do not have to be controlled by politics.

It was great. It was a romantic period in the relationship between our countries. People could make an impact. Now there is no way to have such a trip because right now it is easy for people to travel between the two countries. At that time we were the first people to come in contact. Therefore, it was a surprising trip, a surprising event.