A Country, Not a Scenario
Essay on the Soviet Union for Parade, 19 August 1984, drawn from the fifteen days Mailer spent in Russia in March. He argues that the superpower standoff serves powerful interests on both sides and that Reagan's 'evil empire' rhetoric is the worst possible course.
“A Country, Not a Scenario,” Mailer’s essay on the Soviet Union, ran in Parade on 19 August 1984 (4–9), drawn from the fifteen days he spent in Russia in March 1984. The title states its argument: Russia is a country to be understood, not a “scenario” — a cold-war abstraction — to be feared. Mailer holds that the superpower standoff is sustained because “a good many powerful people in both countries depend on keeping these two superpowers at the same ongoing abominable level” (84.15a), and he reports a country transformed “from a stern, war-rationed economy, bulwarked by prodigious terror, to an immense welfare state drowning in cynicism, bribery, waste, shoddy products and oppression” (84.15b).
The piece belongs with the political motive Mailer voiced repeatedly that year. He told Poet News that when Reagan “called Russia ‘an evil force,’ he did the worst possible single thing he could have done in terms of bringing our countries closer together. Nothing could have driven them further apart” (84.2) — a conviction Mailer named as the seed of several later projects. The trip and essay anticipate the Soviet milieu he would take up at length in Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (95.16) a decade later.