READINGS

On April 26, 1986, I left the Soviet Union after touring cities, meeting some fascinating people, and generally improving my knowledge of the incredible influence of the past on the present.  I kept a journal to record my impressions and later wrote an extensive travel narrative of a very different world that I was completely taken with. 

    The narrative manuscript took me two months to complete and wound up in an old trunk . It  was re-discovered in March, 2000. It was originally written as I was reading from David K. Shipler's 1983 work RUSSIA: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York: Penguin Books, Ltd.) Thorough some of Mr. Shipler's observations (he was the former Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times), I filtered my own impressions and observations and developed my ideas more fully (I have tried to give credit where it is due).

    I was a guest of the Soviet Union for one week, from April 19th to April 26th, 1986, the day the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl blew up. Ironically, for many Russians, Chernobyl is today synonymous with the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union- not only did it symbolize the frightening economic and political chaos of the years to come, but it also was the first time that Soviet officials publicly acknowledged an ecological disaster of that magnitude. It was the beginning of the age of glasnost, of Gorbachev, and the beginning of the end. In retrospect, this manuscript is a snapshot of some of the troubles that led to the collapse of the United States' main rival only 5 years later.

    A decade after the fall of the socialist system in Russia, the narrative has turned out to be a goldmine of information  about a system on death's door from the perspective of an outsider who knew he could only look in. I wrote a lot trying to make sense of what I saw. My students have asked me to publish it, so here it is:

CONTENTS:

Arrival, April 19th, 1986

Soviet Customs

Gloomy day in Moscow

Stalinism

Line at Lenin’s Tomb

Young Pioneers

Incident in Line

Soviet Physicist

Inside the Tomb

Lunch

Palace of Young Pioneers

BJ and Tom

Tamara the Tour Guide

Bad Boys

Secondary School

Kids

Teachers

Nature of students in the System

Two girl students

My talk with students

My talk with teacher

Judy and hostile kid

Christianity

Marx and Religion

TV on Easter

Bad Boys II

Kids and Gum

“No more War”

“Girl on boy’s knees”

Russian Drinking

Obsession with Western Goods

Zagorsk Monastery

Lost in Moscow

Bad Boys III

Scott and Wayne

The Money Changer

Trading on Train

Leningrad- WWII

Catherine Palace

Leningrad Economic Institute

Bookstore

Nevsky Prospekt

Bloody Sunday

Dissatisfied Girl

Hermitage- the Winter Palace

Young People’s Palace

Irina

Peter and Paul Fortress

Siege of Leningrad

Democracy?

US Embassy

Soviet WWII Dead-Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery

Search for Irina

Irina’s Apartment

Marxism-Leninism

A Kiss and Goodbye

Subway

Wild Cab Ride

“God Bless Amerika”

Chernobyl

“Smuggle my Letter”

Soviet Customs- the Other End

He Let Me Go

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We are the forbidden.

We are looked upon with envy, and we are looked upon with scorn.

We fascinate and we frighten. We may as well be from outer space.

 We are the Americans, and we are in Russia.

I have been lucky. I was presented with a fleeting glimpse of life on the other side, one that most Americans will never see. My visit to the Soviet Union will not be forgotten and is destined to be repeated.

I don't pretend to be an authority on Russia. A Westerner who lives for years among its peoples observes the hustle and bustle of life around him but can only speculate about the complex, often paradoxical nature of the Russian character and the Soviet state. Rather, I offer to the reader a detailed account of my own experiences and observations, in the hopes that he or she may come away with a better understanding of the Russian people, who in many respects are quite different from citizens of the West, but nonetheless a proud and mighty people with a rich cultural heritage that we westerners have been fascinated with for centuries. The history of the USSR is also unique. It is my hope that the reader will gain an appreciation of the uniqueness of the Russian people in the heart of the Communist monolith, and will draw his/her own conclusions about the nature of Soviet society before it passed into history.

The tour group was organized and headed by a social studies teacher from South Glens Falls, NY.  The group included about thirty-five people from the area, teachers, retired people,, and a couple students. My mother (a school nurse) went, as did my sister Mary, my aunt Judy, and my mom's friend Kathleen, an English teacher from the same school.

The group was too big. Some seemed to be just along for the show, Sunday visitors to the zoo viewing the Soviet Union from the comfort and isolated luxury of a tour bus window. They were just as complacently indoctrinated in unanimous condescension as the Russians they chided, and I quickly removed myself from their company.

SHEREMETYEVO AIRPORT: MOSCOW,  SAT., APRIL 19  

ARRIVAL

After twenty-four hours of travel we broke through the clouds on our descent in the cramped Aeroflot jet much smaller than the Scandinavian DC-10 that had carried us over the Atlantic), and I got my first look at Russia from the air- rolling hills and forests of birch and evergreens, the wide Moscow River twisting through a countryside dotted with small lakes, receding patches of snow, and an occasional cottage.

A safe landing. and everyone is in a hurry to get off the plane.

I can't blame them, it's been a long trip, but I kick back and let them pass. Hurry up and wait, a scene to be repeated many times. I said goodbye to our helpful stewardesses, smiling, good-looking Russian girls, wishing I knew some Russian. We get a nod of the head from our pilots, too busy bustling about in the tiny cockpit chattering with one another to be bothered with these crazy foreigners .

My first encounter with the green-uniformed guardians of Soviet Union, the KGB border patrol, was at the passport/visa checkpoint where two padlocked booths of solid wood and glass each housed an officer. They beckoned us one-by-one through the turnstile, demanding our documents and subjecting each of us to a long moment of intense eyeball-to-eyeball scrutiny. Once satisfied that I was indeed the person represented on the passport, the officer slid it in my general direction on the counter beneath the glass barrier that shielded him from the outside world, and I was on my way to the next obstacle after retrieving my luggage- Soviet Customs, perhaps the most restrictive in the world.

I dutifully emptied my pockets in front of a guard before passing through a metal detector and sent my bags through the x-ray machine. The customs examiner, a beautiful Russian woman with short dark hair and a broad, clear face, asked me if I was carrying any literature into the U.S.S.R. I said," Yes, a novel dealing with American history," and she let me pass with no problem. Others in our group had some of their reading materials scrutinized, People magazines scanned page by page. A few had their luggage searched with a fine-toothed comb. Despite the inconvenience, we had nothing confiscated.

MOSCOW, FIVE P.M.

We were greeted by our Russian guide Tamara, a pleasant young woman of about thirty who was to accompany us for the rest of the tour. We had a thirty minute busride to our high rise hotel on the outskirts of the city, a building erected in 1980 for the athletes of the Olympic Games that were boycotted by the United States to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The accommodations were satisfactory but the hotel seems much older than it was, due to the generally poor workmanship that plagues the U.S.S.R. This was anticipated because we were on a Sputnik tour, administered by the state for students. First class is Intourist.

Our family occupied a suite, Mary and I in one room, Mom, Judy, and Kathleen in another, with our own bathroom, of course. Mary turned on a small radio on the desk and tuned in some classical music. There weren't a lot of stations but later on I got Radio Moscow broadcasting in English the life story of The Man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.