Behind the polish of the Soviet Olympic Show case

Never before has a communist government played host to an Olympic Games. Not since Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin orbiting the earth April 12, 1961, has the Kremlin had such a golden opportunity to publicize its own way of life, its achievements since 1917, its intense pride and patriotism, its capacity to make long-range plans, its ability to mobilize resources to a single end.

The Olympics have been tackled with single-minded intensity. The mayor of Moscow gives a budget figure of 1.3 billion rubles (about $2 billion) but that could be too low. New sporting arenas are splendidly world class, and cost a fortune in themselves.

The scope of the preparations can not really be compared to previous years. Mosco started off way behind other host cities in basic services -- restaurants, hotels, transportation, flexibility to improvise. So much of the Soviet national budget goes into defense and heavy industry that, compared to most Western countries, only a fraction is left over for the average citizen's everday needs. (The elite have their own privileges, shops, food, clothes, travel, cars, and so on.)

So the Kremlin did what it usually does when confronted with a national emergency. It drew resources from a host of other areas and planned on a gargantuan scale, without the bother of having to confront public opinion or protesting headlines.

It summoned whole armies of people, from thousands of black-booted, baggy-trousered construction corps privates from Central Asia to untold numbers of office and factory workers -- all sent out on weekends to rake grass and carry away debris. Hundreds of students in Moscow missed a year of studies because the state ordered them to wield picks and shovels on construction sites.

The party held countless meetings. It told activist workers in a party handbook published in 1979, "The decision to grant the right to hold the games in the capital of the world's first socialist state was convincing evidence of the universal recognition of the historic importance and correctness of the foreign policy course of our country. . . ."

"(When a Western colleague of mine turned to a Russian and asked, "Well, why was the US awarded the 1980 Winter Games?," the Russian looked surprised. "What's that got to do with it?" he replied.)

One page later the same handbook, of which half a million copies were printed for the party's 17 million elite members, accuses the West of using the games until now "in the interests of the exploiting classes . . . for propaganda of the bourgeois way of life . . . to distract young people from . . . the class struggle."

Logically, then, the party is telling its own members it sees the 1980 games as a political event to publicize the Soviet way of life and to direct the world's youth toward the class struggle. Yet party leaders never tire of saying politics and sport don't mix.

Moscow did not join the Olympic Games until 1952 (apart from two prerevolutionary teams competing in London in 1908 and Stockholm in 1912). But the expensively produced Soviet book, "From Athens to Moscow," devotes a chapter to every Olympics since 1896 and specifically praises the partial boycott of the Berlin games in 1936:

"The world reacted with revolt and indignation against the holding of the Olympics in the Nazi country. . . . The hypocrites called the Olympic village the "Village of Peace". . . Preparatory measures included a number of police actions . . .concealing from the foreign public the practice of routing the democratic demonstrations, repressions, and elimination of democratic freedom. . . ."

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