The Soviets & the Olympics.

WILL THE Soviet Union boycott our Olympics? at this point it isn't absolutely obvious that it won't do so. There are the temptations. They are: 1) to punish the U.S. for having pulled out of the Moscow Olympics in 1980; 2) to guard against the temptation of Soviet athletes arrived in America to head for the nearest McDonald's, order a milk shake, smile from ear to ear, and defect. And then, 3) Soviet Olympic athletes may not be so hot this year.

It isn't until June 2 that the Soviet Olympic delegation needs to declare itself definitively on the Games. And the presumption of course is that the soviet Union will indeed send its athletes to Los Angeles, and that they will do well. And why shouldn't they? No Strasbourg goose intended to yield foie gras sitable for royal tables was ever fed more copiously, or more carefully, than the Soviet athlete. If he does not win the gold medal, or score right up tere, it is simply a failure of Russian biology. Perhaps the next cultural exchange program sponsored by the Soviet Union will call for stud arrangements between prize-winning American athletes and hearty Soviet girls. Mr. Mondale will come out for it, in the spirit of international intercourse.

Soon after the Korean airliner incident (remember?) the Los Angeles Times's Robert Gillette published a story reporting on the official Soviet press's warnings to Soviet athletes about life in Los Angeles. Is it a "City of Angels or of Hell?" one Soviet paper asked rhetorically. The Soviets are warning not only about danger in the streets but about the extra danger resulting from the Reagan Administration's fomenting of "anti-Soviet hysteria." The police chief of Los Angeles, which has had a black mayor for a number of years, is described in the soviet trade-union newspaper under the headline, "Daryl Gates Blusters." And the question is asked, "Will he provide security for Olympians in Los angeles?" How could he be expected to do so, the Soviet periodical goes, on given that he is a rabid anti-Communist "mournfully known for his savage reprisals against blacks."

So the serious folks in Los Angeles are wondering whether the Soviet Union is preparing to yank its athletes. Blither spirits, perhaps less concerned about what the absence of Soviet bionic men would do to the Games, are otherwise, and more healthily, engaged. Lewis Van Gelder, a journalist, published a column in Los angeles, "The Magazine of Southern California," giving a "translation" (a spool) of a Soviet article surveying the California scene, and warning Soviet athletes what they should expect in traveling to America. "Such a hazardous undertaking will not be--as the Americans say--'a piece of Coke.'"

I like that. As also I like the references to the well-documented proclivities of America for bloody massacres. The "translation" illustrates: "Vast interior portions of the U.S.A., as is well documented, were taken outright from defenseless Indian tribes in a series of bloody massacres during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many gunslinging Western 'heroes' such as Alfred ('Wild bill') Hitchcock and John Wayne are still revered by American schoolchildren and glorified in Hollywood films for their exploits in shooting and 'scalping' entire villages."

The trouble with criticizing that kind of thing is that, really, one can never criticize as excessive any attempted parody of Soviet polemics. Is there such a thing? Well, you can ham it up. Los Angeles magazine goes on: "the 'gold' state, as its residents sardonically refer to this bastion of poverty and unemployment, has become a magnet for criminals, sexual deviants, and other assorted misfits from the Eastern territories. The capital city of California is San Diego, site of the infamous 'Alamo,' where Western outlaws Davey Crocker and Pat Boone were killed in a gun battle with Mexican athorities..." Whoa!

Too much? But feel the ferrous spinal column. These are words no Soviet athlete coming to America would read and dismiss. "The loved ones you are leaving behind," the article concludes, "eagerly await your swift return. We at the KGB stand inseparably with them in counting the hours until you are with us again." And the Arctic air blows over the whole enterprise in Los angeles and the smog and the heat and the damp scurry off, chased away by the glacial airs of Gulag.