The Moscow Summit : Reporter’s Notebook From Moscow : Sprucing Up Shows Class, Angry Teachers Say

Three teachers sulked in a foyer of School No. 29 on Kropotkinskaya Street in Moscow at the end of last week, feeling betrayed and hurt by an article in the weekly Moscow News.

In a caustic commentary on Friday, the newspaper’s Mikhail Shevelyov reported that workmen had spent six weeks at the school painting it, plastering it, replacing its drain pipes and refashioning its front porch in granite. While the work went on, the pupils had to stay home.

“Why all the rush?” Shevelyov asked. “. . . Did the school’s roof threaten to cave in?”

The answer was obvious. Officials had ordered the work to impress First Lady Nancy Reagan when she visits the school this week. It was part of a general face-lift of Moscow sites and streets on the Reagans’ itinerary.

In the view of the Moscow News, the officials were guilty of misplaced pride and favoritism.

“The best things happening in our schools,” Shevelyov commented, “are lessons conducted by . . . fine teachers . . . rather than the new door knobs. I like smooth asphalt, too, but let it be on every street.”

The lesson was lost on the teachers at School No. 29. Standing in front of a special exhibit of children’s paintings prepared for Nancy Reagan, the teachers looked at the floor in embarrassed hurt and shook their heads.

“But all of us, we always fix up our homes when a guest comes,” one bewildered teacher said. “There is nothing wrong with that.”

Everyone agrees that the burnishing of Moscow for President and Mrs. Reagan hardly compares with what the Soviets managed for President Richard M. Nixon on his first summit in Moscow in 1972. Workers even leveled a rocky lot then, planted shrubbery and trees and created a little park that Muscovites began calling “Nixon Square.” So much remodeling went on in the capital that wits, with some bitterness, described Nixon as “Moscow’s architect.”

The name Nixon, in fact, quickly slipped into the Russian language, at least in some Moscow slang. The Russian verb remontirovat means “to repair.” But some trendies started to use a new word-- niksonirovat-- when they wanted to talk about “repairing for a visit.”

Soviets are not the only people in Moscow sprucing up for the Reagans. So are Americans. U.S. officials have ordered niksonirovat at Spaso House, the official residence of the American ambassador. The Reagans will live in the mansion while in Moscow. So the embassy brought in American workers to paint and repair the house that has been the official residence since the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. New asphalt was laid on the outside grounds, and a new garden fence was put up.

The mood is up in Moscow. Officials wave American journalists through Customs without looking at their baggage. Chambermaids grasp the hands of a visiting American in adulation. Police stop traffic near the press center to let an obvious foreigner cross the street. News vendors sell badges with flags of both the United States and the Soviet Union.

The mood is helped by breezy, sunlit days that last from 5 o’clock in the morning until almost 10 at night. Moscow looks green and bright and, for Moscow, almost lovely.

“I pray that it does not rain on Sunday when President Reagan arrives,” a taxi driver said.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has rushed into the mood with a background book for the press that includes a short history of good feelings between America and Russia. The narrative is breathtaking.

In 1775, Empress Catherine II of Russia refused calls from Britain to send troops to help put down the rebellion by the 13 American colonies. Benjamin Franklin was elected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1789. Ekaterina Dashkova of Russia was elected to the American Philosophical Society that same year. In 1867, the Czar of Russia sold Alaska to the United States, in order “to avoid further territorial conflicts with Americans.”

Lenin is called on to sanctify the good feelings. In 1920, according to the ministry, Lenin said: “Let the American capitalists leave us alone. We shall not touch them. We are even ready to pay them in gold for any machinery, tools, etc., useful to our transport and industries.”

Human rights has long been a controversial issue between the United States and the Soviet Union. But most Americans probably do not realize that the Soviets, while listening to American complaints about Soviet repression of dissidents, fire back with their own complaints about American repression of dissidents.

A senior U.S. government official, briefing journalists in Moscow, said that Americans do not believe that the Soviets are serious about their complaints and just bring them up to save face. A perennial complaint, the official said, is over the jailing of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier for the killing of two FBI agents.

“When they brought up the case last time,” the official said, “I asked them, ‘What would happen in the Soviet Union if someone killed two KGB men?’ The reply I got was, ‘Oh, did Peltier kill two KGB men?’ ”

It appears to be a coincidence, but the first American-Soviet baseball game in history will be played in Moscow while President Reagan is in town. The Mendeleyev Institute of Chemical Technology of Moscow will take on Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore on Wednesday in the first of three games. For two years the Soviet Union, which is using Cuban coaches, has been encouraging its people to play the game.

“This will be a meeting between the inventors of the game and novices,” the Soviet news agency Tass said. But it promised that the Soviet team “does not intend to be easy prey.”

Times Moscow Bureau Chief Michael Parks contributed to this story.