Behind the polish of the Soviet Olympic Show case
Scene 1: Burly drivers gathered from Taxi "parks" (regional centers) across Moscow, sit at desks much too small for them in a classroom on the outskirts of the city , doggedly learning English.
"Altogether," calls the instructor, and the shirt-sleeved men begin to chant:
"The sky is blue, my taxi is green, I work in taxi park 19."
In a variety of well-worn clothes, the men filed in for crash courses lasting from 40 to 80 hours. They came after their shifts and on weekends.
"They didn't have to pay," said Alexander Provilyov proudly didn't have to pay," said Alexander Provilyov proudly. Mr. Provilyov. chief of Moscow City Council's Olympic Games Department, added in an interview: "And they are all getting uniforms, which they can keep for their own" -- blue jacket and trousers with soft, small-brimmed cap worn well back on the head.
Scence 2:
On the concrete apron surrounding the circular, 45,000- seat stadium just built near my apartment house for Olympic boxing and basketball sit half a dozen long, low, West German and Hungarian trucks -- red, green, and yello. Blue cables snake around and into them. Men in jeans and T-shirts work steadily. Electric motors hum.
Similar trucks are tucked beside all major games sites: They are portable television control centers. The cables connect them to Thompson color-TV cameras made in France, and the men are ready to beam Moscow around the world.
Scene 3:
"Ah, an American," exclaimed a senior Soviet official as he caught sight for me in the cavernous granite Olympic press center building, also brand new.
"Come," he said eagerly, "I'll show you everything." For an hour we trotted down endless corridors, in and out of the Latin American Bar and the Russian Tea Room and the 24- hour grill and the working areas with their TV sets and electric typewriters.
"Look, look, look," he kept saying, clutching my arm. And then: "If your President Carter could see all this, he'd change his position [on the US boycott ]!"
Scence 4:
Unbrotusively, the young, blond man begins to follow us, a walkie-talkie set under his suit jacket. Around the "international zone" of the Olympic village we go. He pads behind -- past brand new repair shops ("repair and refilling of fountain pens"), past glittering Western sports shoes and track suits ablaze with color, past a souvenir shop looking like an American supermarket, past a cafeteria of colossal size, around a sunken central lawn, threading through white outdoor tables and chairs shaded by gay Italian beach umbrellas.
I stop to talk into a tape recorder. A soldier carrying a pack of communications gear watches me impassively. Several police stare. By blond friend tries not to look as though he is looking. I can glimpse beyond them all , the head-high wire fence surrounding the entire village, soldiers stationed every 100 yards, Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifles slung across their backs.
These scences mirror the enormously detailed, yet frequently defensive, preparations for the games in Moscow and the four other Olympic cities: Tallinn on the Gulf of Finland (yachting), Leningrad, Minsk, and Kiev (football matches).
