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The Contrasting Extremes. Between the best in Russia and the next best, Westerners have found, there is a yawning gap: what is good is very good; what is not so good is apt to be horrid. Contrasts abound. Visitors to Dubna, duly impressed by the lavishness of the laboratories, were equally impressed by the women driving oxcarts on the outside. "You step off a Tupolev jet," says Paris Bacteriologist Marcel Raynaud, "and you see people wearing rags." One U.S. industrialist found Russia's metallurgy growing by leaps and bounds, but in no laboratory or factory did he see a single pair of safety goggles ("And you see a lot of Russians in bandages, too").
"You sit in Moscow," says one U.S. scientist, "and you wonder how in the hell these people put Sputnik up when they can't even bring your dinner to you. They simply don't seem to know how to get such things done. Everything seems to be in the extreme. They have commercial airplanes that seem to be falling apart, don't even have seat belts in them; yet they have the finest jet airliner in the world. From the street level, Russia seems hopelessly mired down in confusion. Yet you know that it is a nation that has a long-range plan that puts us to shame." ''When I feel really gloomy." says M.I.T.'s Wiesner, "I think that five years from now the Russians will be ahead of us in every area. But when I feel optimistic, I think it may take them ten." This may be so in the scientific and technical fields that the Kremlin thinks are important. But nations do not live by science alone. And when, as it does, the Kremlin demands "results" from its splendidly isolated scientists, the results (except in high-priority specialties) run afoul of all the difficulties and confusions that beset the Russian economic system. To catch up with the West's overall standard of living, Russia will need a good deal more than a decade: it may even have to extend freedom beyond the borders of a favored island.