Russia: 1975

I went to Russia in January 1975. This is a long time ago. But when I thought about the trip, I thought it was in 1972, and then I thought it was in 1974. But then I learned it was in 1975; how I learned, you will find out (not very exciting).

One day, I was sitting in my office when the man that sold us insurance came by and said hello. (I don't remember his name; I probably knew it then.) I asked him "what's new?", something I often ask people. He told me that he had just come from another customer (I don't think insurance salesmen have clients or patients, but maybe they do, or maybe they think they do), who was in the business of putting together travel groups. I told him that sounded interesting, and he told me that some times they had last minute cancellations and would allow people to join the groups at "fire sale" prices, if they could leave on short notice. I said to keep me in mind.

Two days later, he calls and says that they have a group going to the USSR for a week or so leaving in 72 hours. I said "I'll go" after he told me that the entire "fire sale" price would be about $300, and that would include air fare, hotels, food and touring. Even in 1975, that was a bargain. I had never been to Russia, although I had studied Russian and Russian history in college; I had kept putting off the trip, for reasons that must have had some psychological basis, although I have never quite figured out what it was.

Going to Russia in those days was much rarer than now, as you would expect. They were our cold war enemy. The Russian Jewish refusenik movement was just taking off. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else. So, it was a somewhat exotic trip.

You also needed a visa, and normally this took several weeks to process. With a lot of running around and some help from someone (I don't remember who, and wouldn't tell you if I remembered), the visa was in hand the day of the departure, and off I went, non-stop on Pan Am from Dulles to..........

And that's the problem. I can't remember if we flew to Moscow and then went to Leningrad, or if we flew to Leningrad and then went to Moscow. My memory is mixed; I remember flying out of both cities, and flying in to neither, for example. I am sure that did not happen.

At some point, I knew the answer to this question, and you have to admit that it is a very weird thing to forget. But I don't even remember when I forgot it. I did not even know that I forgot it until this week, when I tried to remember it. Which leads to several questions. What else have I forgotten that I have forgotten I have forgotten? And if I remember something, is it possible that, sometime previously, I had forgotten it? And if I can remember exactly when I forgot, and remember one second previous to that time, will I remember it?

At any rate, I have been puzzling about how to remember this very important fact in describing a trip. Last night, I figured out how I would find out. I remember I took slides (everyone used to take slides, then), and if I looked at the sequence of my slides, I would see what city I visited first. So this morning, I opened by slide cabinet, and took out my two boxes of Russian slides with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning. I would get what I most wished for.

Well, I must have been more naughty than nice last year, because one of my boxes was clearly marked Moscow, and one Leningrad, and there was no overlap, and no pictures of airports or train stations (something that probably was forbidden at that time: remind me to tell you the story of my adventure taking a picture of a military facility in East Berlin in 1962). So, I still do not remember. But you can be sure that, as soon as I do, I will post it on this blog well before I announce it elsewhere. You can count on that.

So, since I cannot give you a day by day description, I am going to stick to those things that (I bet you guessed) I remember. And those things that made an impression on me, and might be interesting to you in 2005, thirty years later.

I should also say that the group was a Georgetown University alumni group, but like many such groups, very few of my fellow travelers seemed to be Hoyas. I also remember very few of them (I don't remember if I even spoke to most of them, or they to me). There was one young woman on the group, who like me, spoke and read a little Russian (ok, so she spoke better than me; but I read better than she did), and because of these she and I took off a fair amount away from the group and did a little exploring. And, there was a woman who was, I think, a dentistry professor at Howard, who was travelling with her daughter (probably about 13); we all got along nicely, and they were often bus or meal companions. (By the way, if anyone reading this blog was on that trip, don't be shy; let me know)

So here is what I remember.

1. It was dark. In my memory, it was not really morning until about 9:30, and by 2:30, the lights had to go on.

2. It was cold. But no one seemed to mind. The streets outside were always busy with pedestrians, and they had outside vendors selling, yes, piroshki, but also ice cream (morozhonoe) which Muscovites at while strolling in below freezing weather.

3. People were well dressed. At least, they all had attractive winter coats, hats and gloves. I did not know this would be the case.

4. No one was smiling outside. (Was this my pre-trained brainwashed brain's reaction, or was it so?)

5. Absolutely everyone outside had a hat on.

6. You were not allowed to keep your coat or your hat when you went inside a building. Every building had enormous coat checking facilities, and you absolutely had to use them. In a restaurant, your coat did not go on the back of your chair. You could not carry your coat through a museum, etc.

7. The streets were very clean. This is because 70 year old overweight Russian women were brooming them down continually.

8. The buildings were all over heated with steam heat. So you went from 10 degree temperature to 75 degree temperature and back again all day long.

9. The architecture in Moscow was monumental in feel (heavy and bulky like I sometime think of Chicago; a city that means what it says); in Leningrad it was monumental in fact.

10. The food was horrible. No exceptions. There were no fruits or vegetables to be found, other than canned or jarred cabbage. The meat and fish was relatively inedible (and we were eating at the best places). What was good? The iced tea, the bread, and, oh yes, the ice cream.

11. When I ate with the group, it was either at the hotel (in special rooms; I am not sure that there was a public restaurant in the hotel), or at tourist restaurants. For example, there was an Armenian restaurant in Moscow, and there was a Georgian restaurant. We ate there. The food was no better than at the hotel. But there was "entertainment", required frivolity and cameraderie, and liquor.

12. You did see a lot of people at night on the street who looked like they had too much to drink. Staggering.

13. The subways worked well, but the escalators ran at what seemed to be twice American speed. That was a revelation, because in my experience every elevator operated at the same tempo, wherever you were. It had never occurred to me that it could ever be different. Has it to you?

14. There were stores in hotels called Beryozka, or something like that, where you could buy nice souvenirs. The trick to these stores: all "hard currency" (i.e., no rubles), and no Russians were allowed in.

15. In fact it was unclear to me whether or not normal Russians were allowed in the hotels at all. There were bars in the hotels, which looked like normal places, and there were some young Russians there, all of whom could speak English and who fraternized with the guests, but who were they? Did they have ulterior motives? Were they on an assignment? Were they freely able to mix with the hotel guests just because they wanted to? I never figured this out.

16. On each floor of the hotel, there was a woman at a desk near the elevator, who saw who was coming in and who was going out. The Russians seem to think this was normal. I assume they thought all hotels around the world had this. But what was there job? (It couldn't have been to keep out the unruly, as one night some drunk was yelling and pounding on every door threatening the guests in Russian, and no one seemed to stop him)

17. In the restaurants, they had paper napkins. Each of the napkins was cut in quarters. That is all you got.

18. There were some small stores, such as convenience stores. I think that all stores then were owned by the government. In these stores, there were no cash registers. The clerk tallied up the sale (very, very quickly, as if she knew what she was doing) on an abacus.

19. The people were surprisingly varied, not like most European countries then, when people were relatively homogeneous. It was more like America, with some exotic types, whom I assumed were all Uzbeks, although now I know they could have Kyrghiz, Tadjiks, Azerbaijani, or who knows whom? There were a lot of blond, blue eyed Russians, as well.

20. When you were in Russia, you clearly were not in America, but just as clearly, it did not have the feel of Europe. It was not like other Communist countries in which I had then been (Czechoslovakia and Hungary); they were clearly European. Russia was something else.

Those are my general impressions. Now some specific happenings:

Moscow

1. Red Square. Red Square is very impressive. In the snow, with the neon red stars on the steeples of the Kremlin. The Kremlin on one long side, with the tomb of Lenin in the middle. The extraordinarily appealing St. Basil's church with its many onion shaped domes. GUM, the pre-Communist, then Communist and now post-Communist department store/mall, and the Lenin Museum, in turn of the century decorated Russian red-brick architecture.

2. The Kremlin. I was surprised at the number and variety of buildings within the Kremlin walls. Having said this, I do not have great recollection of my time within the Kremlin. I remember driving in on a bus, but am not sure what we went to see. I remember seeing bells, and jewels. Is my memory correct?

3. The Lenin Museum. A real highlight, particularly if you knew Russian history and could speak Russian, because all of the exhibits were carefully described. Not only did it go through the entire background of the Russian revolution and Lenin's role in it, it had a lot of Lenin memorabilia, including clothes, glasses, and most fascinating, Lenin's office, with all furniture, etc. in place. The other interesting part of this exhibit, was an exhibit of pre-revolutionary Russia, which included ephemera about capitalistic Russia. Pictures of advertisements of merchants who no longer could possibly exist, and other paraphernalia, which in any non-Communist country looked very ordinary, but here, looked out of place, and were described in virtually salacious terms.

4. A Winter Swimming Pool. In one of the parks (perhaps in more than one), there was a large outdoor swimming pool, which was used all winter long. The water was warm, the steam billowed up from it, almost choking you and creating a strange fog. You started out inside and swam under a guard to get to the outside. Why could that not be done here, I said? (The steam heat here was undoubtedly from the same source that overheated all of the buildings. And there were no utility charges in Russia, just as there was no rent for apartments)

5. The Bolshoi Ballet. We did go to the Bolshoi. We did see Swan Lake. It was just fine. And the Bolshoi Theater was filled. All were not tourists. They looked prosperous. I wondered who they were.

6. The Circus. Yes, we went to the famous Moscow Circus. Guess what? It was a one ring circus, in a large but very plain buildings, with theatre in the round seating. There were all the normal circus acts, there were clowns, there were kids in the audience having a good time. But there was something else, and that was a clown skit that dealt with religion. The villain in the peace was a priest (an ugly clown), who came to the village where the innocent people lived (cute clowns) and tried to get them to go to church or some such thing. Then the hero-atheist-communist came (handsome clown) and chased (literally, and with sticks and things) the priest out of town, to the joy of the villagers. Talk about moralty being turned on its head. This was really fascinating. By the way, while the Bolshoi seemed to be catering to the elite and the tourists, the circus was clearly for the people.

7. My friend Edward. This is hard to describe, but on the first or second night, I went to Red Square with the Howard U. dental professor and her daughter. There had been a light snow, and the sqare was absolutely magical. We were walking across it, when this young kid (in his 20s) sort of sauntered up to us, and with his heel, in English, wrote in the snow: "Israel yes, USSR no". And then, quickly, he erased it.

Now this was during the heat of the Refusenik movement, when people were smuggling in prayerbooks at great risk, etc. No one knew where this would end, but it was clear that it was nothing to fool around with, but Edward was fooling around.

We began to talk. His English was pretty good. He was a university student, who planned on going to medical school, and then moving to the United States. There was no question but in his mind that this is what he was going to do. (At that time, even for Russian Jews, moving to the U.S. appeared a pipe dream). He and I corresponded for a short while after I returned, but I quickly lost touch, and have no idea what happened to him.

But he and I spent the next day or two together. He became my tour guide. And we did some very unusual things.

First, I knew that there was a large Jewish population in Moscow, but frankly, I could not identify it. It was not like in the U.S., where I can often see someone and decide they are Jewish. But in Moscow, to me, no one and everyone looked Jewish. Other than discounting the Uzbeks, I had no idea, and found this fascinating.

But Edward told me that he knew who was Jewish. He could tell. And he would show me, and did, by going up to people on the street and saying "you're Jewish, aren't you?) and when they said yes, as they always, did, he would introduce me as his friend from America. This seemed utterly crazy to me. No other Russian that I met even wanted to talk to Americans, and certainly relationships between Russian and American Jews were dangerous, but here was Edward ignoring all of this (and ignoring, as well, my worried looks and warnings).

He took me to many places where he hung out (where he went to school, went for coffee, etc.), but not to his home. (I imagined his parents would not understand).

At that time, there was a monthly magazine (sorry, name escapes me: I will think of it), which was published to show the great happiness and success of the Russian Jewish population. Of course, it was only a propaganda piece and nobody (and I mean nobody) took it seriously. But it was there, and we walked by an office building, which Edward told me contained the offices of the magazine. 'Interesting', I said, and of course, he said, 'Let's go see.", and before I knew it we were in the office of the magazine, and he was telling the receptionist that I was a tourist from the U.S. and a friend, and that I really thought that this was a great publication and I was a regular reader. I thought we were both dead.

The receptionist said "just a minute", and before I knew it, we were in the office of the editor, an old man in a fairly plush office, talking to him about the magazine and how important it was. I was happy that this conversation took about 5 minutes (of course, it was going on in Russian, so I was only a voyeur), and we were out on the street, with no one apparently following us.

We had lunch in a very fancy restaurant (fancier than the one in Leningrad, described below), and yes the matire d' was Jewish.

One last thing about Edward. We were in Dzerzhinski Square, and he pointed to a massive four story building, and told me that the top floor was the highest spot in all of Moscow. As Moscow had a number of Stalinist high rise buildings scattered around it, I was confused, and said "Huh?" So, he told me. He said that the building housed the headquarters of the KGB, and if you ever got to the top floor, you were going to see Siberia.

This was Edward.

Leningrad

1. Tsar Peter's Petrograd. Leningrad was beautiful. The classical buildings along the Neva, and the still mercantile sense of the shops and restaurants on Nevsky Prospekt (yet how different this street must be today). But if you go a little astray, you are in an absolute wasteland of drab, decrepit high rise residential buildings, and equally drab industrial facilities. Two separate worlds. And this is Leningrad: what could the rest of Russia be like. The other cities. The villages. And the endless rural tracts.

2. The Winter Palace; Home of the Romanovs. The green Winter Palace was just as it was supposed to be, as I guess was the Hermitage. But perhaps I was tired that day, because while the masterworks in the museum were clearly masterworks, the primitive nature of the museum itself was depressing to me, and I did not enjoy my visit. This was a surprise.

3. The Wooly Mammoth. On the other hand, I was absolutely fascinating by the Museum of Anthropology, which was also old fashioned (later the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem and to an extent the Brooklyn Museum also struck me similarly; they all have the same feel), and had speciman after speciman lined up in wooden speciman cases. It was as if everything in the insect drawers in the Smithsonian were set out for view. And all of these examples of preservation and taxidermy were fascinating, but none more fascinating than the Siberian mammoth, dug out of the tundra almost 100 years before, with its fur and its tusks still in tact. This example of the now extinct, hairy, elephant-like mammal was, to me, beyond belief.

4. The Winter Swim Club. On Sunday morning, as the sun was coming up (it must have been close to 9), I wandered by myself from the hotel in the opposite direction from the city center, going up river. It was well below freezing, and, as it was in both Moscow and Leningrad, snow was on the ground. I was in an area of what appeared to be small warehouses lining the river bank. Nothing residential in sight and, because it was a Sunday morning, no people. Then I heard a rustling, and turned my head and had an apparation. I thought that I saw about a dozen people, men and women, younger and older, running from the river into an alley, in skimpy bathing suits, and nothing else. You can imagine what I thought! (In fact you can't, because I thought that I was not capable of thought, what I had seen made so little sense.) Well, I followed in the direction toward which they were (or would have been, had they been real) running, and their trail ended at a small metal building (almost like a large shed), on which was a simple sign (in Russian, of course), saying: Headquarters of the Leningrad Winter Swim Club. It takes all kinds.

5. There was a very famous book store on the Nevsky Prospekt that was still open, although now it was of course state run. But it was large (almost Barnes and Noble size). I wandered around it, thinking I was now really in old St. Petersburg. I bought two things, that I recall. A small Lenin poster (billions of those were for sale everywhere), which I brought home, but which somehow got waterlogged and ruined. And a four volume, paperback set called Historical Atlas of the USSR (again in Russian),which I still have.

6. My Russian speaking friend and I went out for lunch on our own one day (might have been the day of the bookstore) and ate at a Russian restaurant on Nesky Prospekt. This was the only real restaurant in Leningrad I went into, I believe. I also ate in some cafeterias (each, a stolovaya, I think), which were very plain and cheap.

At any rate, this day we went into a real restaurant, white tablecloths and all. In those days (maybe now), if you were two people, and there was a four person table with two empty seats, they sat you at it, and so we were put at a table with a woman about our own age, or maybe a few years older, and her son, which I guessed to be about 6. They were very friendly, spoke no English, and told us a bit about life in Leningrad. The woman had told us that her husband was in the Navy. It wasn't until then that it came out that we were American; she must have assumed we were English. Her son then said that his father was in America. Really, I said, where is he? He said in South Carolina. His mother clearly was shocked (probably, more accurate, she was scared) and without finishing her meal, took her son by the hand, got up and left the restaurant. At that time, we later learned, Russian submarines were trawling off the South Carolina coast.


Perhaps the most interesting thing about this experience (which would be very different today) was that here were two very large cities, filled with people, living what looked to be (on the street at least) normal lives. But there was a feeling of utter isolation. It was as if the world did not exist outside of Moscow. They could not get out; and few tourists came in. They were thousands of miles from the west, and separated by communist east Europe. It was just like being in a parallel universe. It is hard to describe the feeling, but it was pervasive.