Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 1

 

[In early April 1965, the International School of Geneva, known as Ecolint (from its French name, École Internationale de Genève), where I finished high school (see “Going to a Swiss International School,” my six-part post on Rick On Theater, 29 April-14 May  2021), organized a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (the subject of Part 5 of the referenced post, 11 May 2021).  I jumped at the opportunity and signed up.  The group included 32 student travelers and one Ecolint teacher as chaperone.  (His name was Mr. Brunst, but I don’t remember him at all!) 

[I had been trying to learn Russian for a few years.  A teacher at my New Jersey prep school had gathered some interested students for a non-credit, extra-curricular class in the language, but we hadn’t gotten beyond learning the alphabet.  A teacher at Ecolint did the same thing—we even had a textbook—but we hadn’t gotten very far by the time the trip came along.

[Aside from semi-regular hand-outs and documents we had to fill out and turn in—some for Ecolint and some for the various embassies concerned—our first order of business was applying for visas for all the countries we were going to visit (Poland, the U.S.S.R., and Hungary) or pass through (Austria and Czechoslovakia).  This being an international school, all of us already had valid passports, of course—otherwise we couldn’t have been in Geneva.

[The trip included Warsaw, Poland, for a couple of days, and then a week in the U.S.S.R.  That part of the trip, the main attraction, comprised visits to Moscow and Leningrad (now renamed—or, really, re-renamed Saint Petersburg), Russia, and Kiev (now officially called Kyiv since 1991), Ukraine.  The group went from Kiev to Budapest, Hungary, and then on to Vienna, Austria, before returning to Geneva.

[I immediately ran into a problem, the repercussions of which were to be considerable.  You see, my father was a member of the Consular Corps, an official status just below that of the Diplomatic Corps.  I, therefore, carried an Official Passport (maroon cover instead of turquoise, which was the color of U.S. tourist passports then; Diplomatic Passports—known to foreign service brats like me as “dip cards”—had black covers).  The Hungarian embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, wouldn’t issue a visa for an Official Passport; my application had to be forwarded to the foreign ministry in Budapest for action.

[The other embassies had made some waves, but ultimately issued the necessary visas.  I’m pretty sure, without having any proof, that the Hungarian embassy was just taking advantage of the opportunity to cause a little grief for an American official.  This was the height of the Cold War era, after all. 

[In any case, the bureaucracy for which the communist countries were famous went into slow-motion action—or, rather, non-action.  I guess it’s no surprise that the Hungarian visa didn’t come through before we left Switzerland.  Mr. Brunst was instructed to pick it up at the Hungarian embassy in Moscow when we got there.  So when the departure time came, I boarded the train to Warsaw with my schoolmates and traveling companions.

[Let me make some comments on “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” which I’ll be running in six installments, before I start posting the transcription.  I’m going to stick with the names of cities and countries as they were when I made the trip.  Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, many have been changed; Czechoslovakia, for example, no longer even exists as a nation, having separated into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

[I will do my best in transliterating Russian names and words from the Cyrillic spelling.  Where it might be helpful, I’ll also provide the Russian spelling for those who can read it.  Anything that I add that wasn’t in my original journal, including comments or observations I didn’t make 57 years ago, I’ll indicate by enclosing in brackets.  That may include updated information that I couldn’t have known in 1965.

[I’ll correct spelling and grammar errors in my original, but I won’t edit myself.  Keep in mind, though, that I was just 18 when I wrote this journal and that the world was different, not just politically, but also socially, 57 years ago.

[Oh, one more thing.  I gave this journal a title, printed on the cover: “RUSSIAN TRIP” and, in Russian, “ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ В СССР” (“Puteshestviye v SSSR”, or “Journey in the USSR”). 

[(The initials СССР stand for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик  [Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik], the Russian name for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Though the letters look like the English initials ‘See See See Pee,’ in Russian they’re read: ‘Ess Ess Ess Air.’)]

DEPARTURE: GENEVA, SWISS CONFEDERATION
TRAIN JOURNEY: ZÜRICH – VIENNA – WARSAW

Friday, 9 April 1965 – 7:57 p.m. – Geneva. Switzerland

Finally we’re all packed and ready to go.  Today was absolutely hectic.  I discovered I have no Hungarian visa; it is in Moscow.  I made arrangements to fly to Bonn [Germany] from Vienna [at the end of the trip].

[When I left Geneva at the start of this journey, my father was still posted in Koblenz, Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013), where he was first stationed with the U.S. Information Agency as Amerika Haus director in 1962.  He and my mother would move to the embassy in Bonn (capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany), where Dad would be the Cultural Attaché, while I was in the Soviet Union, so I would be going “home” to a new town after the trip.  The “arrangements” were to go directly from Vienna to Bonn instead of returning to Geneva first.]

We got the food and drink and further sustenance for the trip.

WARSAW, POLISH PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

Sunday, 11 April – 2:45 p.m. – Warsaw, Polish People’s Republic [now Republic of Poland]

We made [it] in one piece.  We arrived at the station [Gare Cornavin, Geneva] on Friday night [the 9th] and got to the train to Zürich.  Many were already “gay.”  [The word hadn’t taken on its current meaning relative to sexuality.  I was referring to our emotional states, possibly enhanced by alcoholic intake.]  Keats French [one of my Ecolint schoolmates who went on the trip with me; see “Going to a Swiss International School, Part 1,” 29 April 2021; he also gets several mentions in Part 5] even pulled a stiletto on the conductor.

[The trip from Geneva to Warsaw was by train—three trains, to be precise.  We left from Geneva’s Gare Cornavin at oh-dark-thirty (actually 1 a.m.) on Saturday, 10 April, for Warsaw, a 1,000-mile, 30-plus-hour journey.  We changed trains in Zürich (at 6:30 in the morning of the 10th) and again in Vienna (at 8:30 that evening) and then crossed the Iron Curtain (at about 11:30 p.m.) into communist-controlled Eastern Europe through Czechoslovakia (for which I needed a transit visa, that I’d gotten with no problem).]

In Zürich we changed trains [and stations, by motorcoach from Zürich Hauptbahnhof  (Main Railway Station) to Zürich-Enge] for Vienna.  We were in a mess.  Mark [Dyen, my roommate at Ecolint; his father was Dr. Isidore Dyen, professor of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale; see Parts 1 and 5 of “International School”] got a gift of a bag of rubbish from some English school girls—in his face.  He kindly returned it—in the window of their train.

When we got on the train, we had breakfast and went room hunting.  Our car (reserved) was not put on yet.  We were afraid of being uncoupled, but we made it.

We had a party in one of our compartments after dinner, before Vienna.

[The party was in Keats French’s compartment.  He’d brought along his portable electric guitar rig—the French boys (Keats’s older brother, Charley, didn’t go on the Russia trip) were from an Oklahoma cattle-and-oil family and very rich—and set it up in the train compartments.  We blasted rock ’n’ roll music out the windows at each station we stopped at along the route.]

In Vienna [another station-change: Vienna-West to Vienna-Sud], we got into our sleepers [wagons-lits] and prepared to “nap” [it was about 10 p.m.; we’d been on the go since Friday evening, about 26 hours total].  We were immediately awakened [about 1½ hours later] by Czech border guards and customs officials.  We dozed off until the Czech and Polish officials met us at the Polish border. 

Here the Poles looked at our declaration sheets, and, in signing mine, [one of the customs officials] picked up a Playboy as a rest.  He began to leaf through it.  When the second official came up, he dropped the magazine and said something in Polish.  The second man stared at the magazine on the floor for a short while.

[It should be remembered that in 1965, the height of the Cold War, crossing from free and democratic Austria into communist-Stalinist Czechoslovakia was more than just an ordinary border-crossing such as Switzerland-to-Austria or the German-Swiss transit I made often in those years.  The slightest infraction, even a perceived violation, could be—and sometimes was—blown into a full-fledged diplomatic incident.

[I’m reminded of an incident concerning a member of the U.S. embassy or consular staff that my dad knew or knew about.  She’d taken leave and made a trip to Eastern Europe.  At one stop, she wrote a postcard to a friend back in Germany saying, in what turned out to be an ill-advised joke, that she’d seen the light and was going to stay in the Workers’ Paradise.  She was pulled off a tour bus, detained, and questioned. 

[The authorities had obviously read her postcard and, as the commie officials had no sense of humor, especially about political matters, either decided to throw a scare into the woman just because they could or actually thought she might be up to something nefarious.  She was truly afraid that she might not get out of Eastern Europe—a feeling I later came to understand quite palpably myself.]

The morning was uneventful.  We are now going out for some exploring.

Monday, 12 April – 4:25 p.m. – Warsaw

Immediately after we stepped out of the hotel [Europejski in central Warsaw, with 260 rooms and 13 suites] we were approached for money-changing.  We were to discover this as not unusual.  We were even asked to come into a café for some wine as part of an inducement.

[Exchanging Western currency outside government-run exchange offices was illegal in communist Eastern Europe.  Holding Polish złoty (official exchange rate: $1 = zł 24; zł 1 = ca. 4¢) without receipts for their official exchange invited confiscation and more.]

We wandered around, into book stores and food stores.  On the way back past the hotel we bought some matzoh.  The storekeeper spoke only Polish, so we pointed and asked, “сколько?” [skolko ­– Russian for ‘how much?’].  She rattled off some Polish, and we asked her to write it.  She could not, so she took out some coins and showed us how much.  We paid and left.

We then went looking for the shopping center and explored a department store.  We tried to find a short-cut back by asking some Poles, who told us to follow them, but ended up showing us the same way we came.

Breakfast this morning was not good (all the other meals were [good]).  The eggs we[re] half-cooked.

On the sight-seeing, we saw a film on Warsaw’s war history [World War II, I suspect; it was only 20-26 years earlier], then we visited a kindergarten, the stadium, the cathedral, a modern church, the ghetto monument, the cultural center, a Supersam supermarket.

[Of the sights I listed above, I have no idea what the kindergarten was.  The stadium was the Stadion Dziesięciolecia (English: 10th-Anniversary Stadium), opened in 1955 with a seating capacity of 100,000; in the 1980s, it had deteriorated beyond affordable repair and was largely abandoned as a sports center.  It was demolished in 2008 and replaced by the National Stadium in 2012.

[The Warsaw Roman Catholic cathedral—Poles are 87.6% Catholic—is St. John’s Archcathedral in the Old Town.  The mother church of the archdiocese of Warsaw, it was originally built in 1390, but rebuilt several times.  It was heavily damaged during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in World War II, but was rebuilt after the war.  The ghetto monument is the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, unveiled in 1948.   

[The cultural center is the Palace of Culture and Science, built in 1955.  It’s a Soviet era high-rise building  built in the Stalinist style and houses various public and cultural institutions such as cinemas, theaters, libraries, sports clubs, university faculties, and authorities of the Polish Academy of Sciences. 

[Supersam was a modernist supermarket built in 1962.   It was demolished in 2006 despite a campaign to save the building as an architectural monument.   I can’t positively identify the “modern church,” but it could be St. Joseph the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, construction of which was started in 1939 but interrupted when the war began in Poland that September.  It was restarted in 1945 and completed in 1961.]

After lunch we went souvenir shopping and I bought some tickets to David and Lisa for tonight.

[David and Lisa is a 1962 American independent film based on the novella Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin.  It was directed by Frank Perry from a screenplay by his wife, Eleanor Perry, telling the story of a young man (Keir Dullea) who believes that being touched can kill him.  He’s brought to a residential treatment center, where he meets Lisa (Janet Margolin), a young woman who has a split personality.  Frank Perry earned a 1963 Academy Award nomination for Best Director and Eleanor Perry was nominated for her screenplay.

[I don’t remember what prompted me to see a three-year-old American movie in Warsaw—though I’m pretty sure I hadn’t seen it in the States before I moved to Germany in 1963.  Poland, of course, had a good film industry of its own (Andrzej Wajda, 1926-2016; Roman Polanski, b. 1933) and later we saw an experimental Polish film as well.]

After dinner, for which we were late, I tried to round up the people for D&L.  We couldn’t find two, but they all got there.

The picture was very good.

[In order to keep date entries together, I’m breaking Part 1 of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” here.  Part 2 will be published on Rick On Theater on Thursday, 26 May, and the following four installments will appear every three days thereafter.

[Please come back to ROT for the rest of my transcribed 57-year-old chronicle of my visit to Warsaw and the Soviet Union, a trip that was very significant to this impressionable young man.  Revisiting this experience has been very moving for me; it remains to be seen of it has any repercussions for ROTters.  (I’d be interested to hear.)

[The second installment of this 1965 travel journal—I have posted two other journals of long-ago travels: “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980” (five parts; 24 December 2021-5 January 2022) and “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982” (12 parts; 11-23 July and 2 -20 August 2021)—will pick up on 15 April 1965 with my final day in Warsaw and my arrival in Moscow in the Soviet Union, the trip’s first stop in that vast country.

[In addition to some of the major sights of the Soviet capital—Red Square, Lenin’s Tomb, the Kremlin, GUM—we saw a ballet performance and the world-renowned Moscow Circus.]