Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 2

 

[Below is the second part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965.”  If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 23 May, I recommend that you do that before starting with Part 2. 

[In this installment, I end my visit to Warsaw and my school group flies on to Moscow in the Soviet Union.  We’d been in Warsaw for 2½ days and we’d be in Moscow for 3 days before moving on to Leningrad.

[Since I broach the subject of Russian food, ROTters will find that I’ve allowed myself a little digression to recount an anecdote about borsht that took place in 1970, five years after I visited the Soviet Union.]

Thursday, 15 April – 11:30 p.m. – Warsaw/Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, U.S.S.R. [now Russian Federation]

On Tuesday [the 13th] after breakfast, we saw Vilanova [Wilanów], a large palace, like a cheap Versailles [which I had visited on Christmas Day, 1962—my 16th birthday; see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1,” 9 March 2013].  Then we saw an art (sculpture) museum.  Before Vilanova we went to the Chopin Museum.

[Wilanów Palace is a former royal palace, completed in 1696, and one of Poland’s most important monuments.  The palace’s museum, established in 1805, is a repository of the country’s royal and artistic heritage. 

[The Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, opened in 1965 in the rebuilt historic Królikarnia (The Rabbit House), a palace erected between 1782 and 1786, is now a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw.  It’s dedicated to sculptor Xawery Dunikowski (1875-1964), a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.  The Fryderyk Chopin Museum was established in 1954 and dedicated to the Polish composer (known as Frédéric Chopin, 1810-49).]

MOSCOW, RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC (U.S.S.R.)

After lunch, we went to the airport and flew to Moscow [on LOT Polish Airlines].  The trip was uneventful.  We had dinner on the plane.

[In the years I lived in Europe and flew around frequently between European cities and various U.S. destinations, I kept a mental list of airlines on which I flew and airports where I landed or took off.  This trip was “uneventful” as far as the flight itself was concerned—but I added a new carrier to my list, LOT, and Warsaw-Okecie Airport (renamed Warsaw Chopin Airport in 2001).

[Later, I’d also add Aeroflot, the flag carrier of the U.S.S.R., and the main airports of Moscow (Sheremetyevo International Airport, renamed in 2019 in honor of poet Alexandr Pushkin, 1799-1837), Leningrad (Shosseynaya Airport, renamed Pulkovo Airport in 1973), and Kiev (probably Boryspil Airport, but I’m not sure).]

In Moscow, after a second dinner at the airport, we went to our hotel where we played Mr. Brunst’s “room game.”  [Obviously, this had to do with assigning hotel rooms (at the Boukharest, near Red Square; originally built in 1898 and taking the name Boukharest, or Bucharest, in 1957, though only the façade remains from the original building; it has 227 rooms and now goes by the name Baltschug Kempinski) and giving out keys, but if there was a gag here, I don’t remember what it was.]

Next morning [Wednesday, the 14th], breakfast was lousy.

[This was to be a constant in the Soviet Union: the food was universally unprepossessing.  Except the hard candy on the planes—excellent!—and the ice cream—plain (vanilla), but delicious.  Go know!

[Russia has never been known for its cuisine.  There are some dishes considered exceptional, such as blini and chicken Kiev or veal Prince Orloff, but they’re heavily influenced by French cooking from the days when Russian society modeled itself after the French, largely the 17th-through-19th centuries.]

[A Sidebar: One domestic dish, really “peasant” food, stands out: borsht (борщ [borshch] in Russian).  I don’t mean the red, beet-based cold soup, which is quite wonderful in its own right, but it’s actually Polish or Ukrainian.  I mean true Russian borsht, a beef-based, heavy soup with veggies and potatoes that’s a whole meal in a pot.

[Made by the right hands, it’s plain but delicious.  In some rural Russian homes, such as farms, a pot of borsht sits on the stove pretty much all the time.  Left-overs from other meals are often just scraped into the pot so that it’s almost never emptied.

[When I was in the army Russian-language course at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I helped make a large pot of authentic borsht under the tutelage of one of our teachers, Vera Vetrova.  The occasion was one of two “picnics” set aside in the year-long course for the class to socialize together away from the classrooms.

[Every language class at DLI-West Coast had a scheduled picnic—shorter courses had only one—which the class could plan any way they wanted.  Our second one was just a sort of afternoon off to hang around the Presidio of Monterey, where DLIWC is based, and enjoy the sight of Monterey Bay below us as we threw around a baseball, football, or frisbee. 

[But for the first one, we chose to have a true Russian meal, prepared by Gospozha (Mrs.) Vetrova and her section—she had the top section that week—in the International Kitchen on the post for just this kind of activity.  Gospozha Vetrova had pre-made sladkoye (‘sweets’), in this case pirozhki with sweet fillings instead of ground meat, mashed potato, or mushrooms.  While the sladkoye baked, Gospozha Vetrova guided us through the making of the borsht.

[We discovered immediately that the one thing we needed most wasn’t included in the generally fully-equipped kitchen.  There was no pot large enough to make borsht for the whole class, perhaps 50 soldiers, marines, and sailors, plus our teachers.  Someone was going to have to borrow a large soup pot from the Presidio officers’ club.

[The problem was that of the class, only three of us were officers.  Of the three, only one was an army officer.  Guess who!  That’s right; I was the only member of the class who was a member of the Presidio O-club.  (The other two officers, who were in different sections anyway and weren’t at the kitchen with Gospozha Vetrova, were naval lieutenants, temporarily assigned to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey so they could attend the Russian course.)

[So I walked over to the O-club, signed out the pot—which is why the borrower had to be a member—and brought it back to the kitchen building.  We made the borsht, had our picnic, and everyone went home except the cooking team, who stayed to clean up.

[Everything was fine—except one small thing.  We hadn’t eaten all the borsht.  We over-made it and there was left-over soup.  We couldn’t return the pot with borsht in it.  There was too much to just eat the remaining soup.  It was too good to throw out!  So, what to do?

[Well, I cajoled the remaining class section to take some back to the barracks—they had a communal fridge, but it had limited space, being shared, as it was, by a hundred or so enlisted servicemen.  So, since I owned the pot, I had to take the rest home to my off-post apartment so we could wash the pot and I could take it back to the O-club and sign it back in.

[For almost the whole rest of the course, I had small containers of borsht in my freezer.  I’d take one out and let it thaw in the fridge and heat up a bowl every afternoon when I got home from class as an after-school snack.  I’d invite some of my classmates over to help me eat the borsht up, but that was hard since it was officially “fraternizing,” a no-no by army regs. 

[I can’t say I suffered much from chowing down on my private stash of home-made, authentic Russian borsht.  It made a wonderful after-school nosh.  Occasionally, I’d gussy it up with a spoonful of sour cream, but it didn’t need the help.

[My one regret is that while we were putting the soup together, I carefully noted the ingredients as Gospozha Vetrova instructed us to add them to the pot . . . but I didn’t get the proportions.  I still have the list of ingredients, but I never made the borsht at home because I never tried to figure out how much of each ingredient to put in. 

[I wish I’d asked Gospozha Vetrova for the actual recipe while I had the opportunity—she was always helpful when we had any kind of question on any tangential topic—but, tragically, she died during the course and I never got the chance.

[Vera Vetrova was a wonderful woman and a terrific teacher.  My Russian class (February 1970-February 1971) was the last one at DLIWC with a full complement of teachers who were either born in Russia/the Soviet Union or whose parents had been. 

[A few of our teachers grew up outside Russia—one was born in Yugoslavia of Russian parents and another grew up in, of all places, Manchuria.  The class behind ours had mostly teachers who were born and grew up in the U.S.—San Francisco, a short drive north of Monterey, had a large Russian community—and Germany.

[Gospozha Vetrova had been a Russian teacher in the Soviet Army; she taught Russian to Russians.  (Actually, many Soviet soldiers were from republics where Russian wasn’t the first language: Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia.)  She was, as I said, always open to questions and she helped students with work outside the curriculum.  A couple of my classmates and I, for instance, bought a Russian-language Scrabble game, and she helped us learn to play in Russian until we got confident enough to play on our own.

[One assignment was for each of us to compose some kind of oral presentation in Russian and deliver it to the class.  Most did a translation of song lyrics or a short monologue of some kind, using the simplest language.  A classmate and I took on a much more challenging idea.  We decided to do a Meeting of Minds scenario (the Steve Allen talk show with historical figures that had its prototype première in the 1960s) with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

[It was based on their writings and we found passages where they talked about the same things and made it seem like the two communist thinkers and revolutionaries were having a conversation.  Gospozha Vetrova helped us find sources—the Presidio had a decent little library of foreign language books on a wide selection of topics—and then advised us on turning the writings into speech.  I think she actually liked helping us with this project.  (I still have the manuscript.)

[Sometime in the middle of the course, Gospozha Vetrova had a car accident.  She was reported to be recovering and would be rejoining the course.  A few days later, though, we learned that she had died suddenly.  Obviously, Gospozha Vetrova wasn’t a young woman—but she wasn’t old, either.  I’d say she was in her 60’s, maybe even only late 50’s.  She was our only teacher who’d been a language teacher in her previous career.  (The head teacher in our group, Gospodin Yablokov, had been a Soviet Army colonel, for instance.)  We were very sad and we missed her a great deal.]

Two people were sent home for misbehavior.  [I don’t recall what this was about.]

On the tour we saw Red Square, the Bolshoi Theater, the University, a Pioneer Palace, and did some souvenir shopping.  After dinner we saw a ballet at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.  We took a Metro home.

[For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t mention our visit to the Kremlin (Кремль [kreml’] – Russian for ‘fortress’), so I’ll fill in the gap a little here.  The Kremlin, built in the 15th century, and many of the buildings within it such as the Great Kremlin Palace, the Tsar’s former Moscow residence and now the official residence of the President of the Russian Federation and a museum, and the four cathedrals within the Kremlin walls, was a major stop.  The walled compound was the seat of government of the U.S.S.R. (and today’s Russian Federation), the equivalent of the whole of Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill.

[On the southeastern end of Red Square sits Saint Basil’s Cathedral, recognizable the world over from its nine multi-colored onion domes; it was built in the 16th century by Tsar Ivan the Terrible (aka: Ivan IV, 1530-84; Grand Prince of Moscow: 1533-47; first Tsar of All Russia: 1547-84).  Officially called the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, it was secularized in 1929 and serves as a museum today (though since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Orthodox services have been restored since 1997).

[Red Square is the heart of Moscow.  Dating from the late 15th century during the rule of Tsar Ivan the Great (aka: Ivan III, 1440-1505; reigned: 1462-1505), the 18⅓-acre square (800,000 sq. ft.) has served many purposes over the centuries, from marketplace to coronation site to parade ground.  One interesting fact is where the name came from. 

[Most people, I think, believe that Red Square’s name is derived from the Communist Party’s and the Soviet Union’s association with the color red.  In a sense, it’s actually the other way around.  From the 17th century onward, some two centuries after the square was formed and almost three before the rise of Bolshevism, Muscovites began calling the square by its current name, Krasnaya Ploshchad (Красная Площадь) in Russian. 

[The name’s derived from the word krasnyi (красный), which meant ‘beautiful’ in Old Russian (krasivyi [красивый] in modern Russian) and only later came to mean ‘red.’  The name given to the plaza was actually Beautiful Square; only later, when the Russian word split into two cognates, did the designation’s English translation became Red Square.

[The Bolshoi (Grand) Theater, officially the Bolshoi Academic Theater—nearby is the Maly (Little) Academic Theater; many Russian cities have this pairing—houses ballet (the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet) and opera performances.  The current building, Moscow’s biggest theater (2,000 seats), opened in 1825, but the company was authorized in 1776 by Empress Catherine the Great (aka: Catherine II, 1729-96; reigned: 1762-96).  (We didn’t see a performance, just the empty theater.)

[Founded in 1755, Moscow State University—formally the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, named for Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65), a Russian polymath, scientist, and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science—is the oldest and largest Soviet institute of higher learning.  Among its graduates have been writers such as poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), novelist and playwright Ivan Turgeniev (1818-83), and playwright and short story-writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), as well as prominent diplomats, politicians, musicians, singers, historians, scientists, and mathematicians.

[The Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union was a communist party-run organization for children.  They joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.  Ostensibly, the Young Pioneers, founded in 1922, were analogous to the Boy Scouts, but it was an organization for indoctrination, along with its sports programs and other activities.  Membership was virtually mandatory as the Young Pioneers and the Young Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth.

[The Young Pioneer Palace in Moscow, now called the Palace of Child and Youth Creativity, was built in 1959-63 and consisted of seven buildings when I was there.  It covers 133½ acres and includes facilities for dozens of creative, sport, and extracurricular activities. 

[The Kremlin Palace of Congresses, opened in 1961, is a large, contemporary building faced with white marble inside the Kremlin.  Built of glass and concrete as a modern arena for Communist Party meetings, it contrasts sharply with its historic setting.  Intended for mass state events like party congresses, it’s now used for official gatherings and popular concerts. 

[The Palace of Congresses, which had what was then labeled the world’s biggest stage (there are a lot of superlatives in Soviet tourist guides), often played host to the Bolshoi dance and opera troupes, as well as visiting artists from abroad.  We saw a performance that was described as “one-act ballets” (одноактные балеты) but I don’t recall any details.

[The Moscow Metro, opened in 1935, is world-renowned for the décor of its platforms and street entrances, a tourist attraction in itself.  As of 2021, excluding the Moscow Central Diameters and the Moscow Monorail, it has 287 stations and covers 271 miles, making it the fifth-longest subway system in the world.  The Metro is closed for maintenance from 1:00 a.m. to about 5:30 a.m. 

[Stations constructed under the regime of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and de facto leader of the country: 1922-52), were designed as underground “palaces of the people” in the style of socialist classicism.  Some stations built between 1935 and 1955, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971; First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1953-64) put a stop to what he called “excesses,” had elaborate decoration and large chandeliers.]

Today [Thursday, the 15th] we had a better breakfast and then saw the Armory and Lenin’s Tomb and Gum (ГУМ).  The afternoon was free.

[The Kremlin Armory is one of the oldest museums of Moscow.  It started as the royal arsenal in 1508, but after the tsar’s capital was transferred to Saint Petersburg in 1713, it served a number of other functions until Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825; reigned: 1801-25) designated the Armory as the first public museum in Moscow in 1806.  The collections weren’t opened to the public until seven years later.  

[The current building was erected in 1844-51.  In 1960, the Armory became the official museum of the Kremlin, displaying Russian and European artifacts from the 12th to the 18th centuries, such as thrones, carriages, bejeweled harnesses, arms and armor, crowns of the tsars and tsaritsas, and tapestries; the museum also holds arms and armor from Persia and Turkey.

[On the southwest side of Red Square (which runs northwest to southeast) is the eastern wall of the Kremlin.  It served as the Soviet Union’s National Cemetery, known as the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, from 1917 to 1985, the burial site for heroes who died for the Soviet Union.  

[In front of the necropolis is the Lenin Mausoleum in which the preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924; Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic: 1917-24; Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union: 1923-24) is displayed in a glass coffin.  The line to get into the tomb is very long, and, of course, keeps moving because it’s not customary to stop at the coffin, even back in ’65 when the U.S.S.R. was still enduring.  It’s still a major tourist attraction.

[Until 1961, just 3½ years before I was there, Stalin, Lenin’s successor and the Soviet Union’s World War II (called there the Great Patriotic War) leader, was also interred in the mausoleum.  During Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program (approximately 1953-64), the body of his predecessor was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.  The gravesite is marked only with a bust of Stalin; his name is not inscribed anywhere.

[Along the northeast side of the square is the former department store GUM (pronounced goom, to rhyme with ‘room’).  Believe it or not, this was one of the sights that made the most impression on me; it was sort of emblematic of the Soviet Union for me. 

[GUM was an acronym for Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín (Государственный Универсальный Магазин), or State Universal (that is, ‘Department’) Store; since 1991, the name has been Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin (Главный Универсальный Магазин), literally Main Universal Store).

[GUM is huge: with a frontage of 794 feet, it offers 743,000 square feet of floor space over three stories.  Today it’s a shopping center, but such things barely existed in the West in 1965, and in the Soviet Union, they’d have been anathema as hotbeds of commercialism and capitalism.  The place was (apparently always) crowded with shoppers.

[One problem, though: there was nothing to buy, to speak of.  The “shoppers” were mostly “searchers” or “hopers.”  The shelves and racks and display cases were pretty much empty or, at most, sparsely stocked.  There were some drab coats (out of season for early spring—but in the U.S.S.R., you bought what you might need when it was offered. 

[(Compare this description of GUM to my description of the No. 1 Department Store in Shanghai, China, in 1980 in “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2,” 27 December 2021; Rick On Theater: Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2.)

[The old building—built in the 1890s in what was called the Russian Revival style, using elements of Russian medieval architecture and 18th-century design and decorative elements popularized by Tsar Peter the Great (aka: Peter I, 1672-1725; reigned: 1682-1725).  But the interior looked like a huge warehouse. 

[That was what the Soviet Union seemed to me: lots of hype about the needs of the workers, but almost no amenities and precious little upkeep.  Things were clean, but not really “cared for.”  On the streets, for instance, were battalions of old women sweeping the gutters with old-fashioned besoms, but there were almost no cars on the roadways and nothing in the shops.  Consumer goods were virtually nonexistent.]

This evening, we saw the Moscow circus.  Again Metro home.  Tomorrow we take a plane to Leningrad [now Saint Petersburg].

[Russian circuses, like the Moscow State Circus, are world famous, for several reasons of which the quality of the acts is only one.  First, Russian circuses aren’t all traveling ones, like they are in the U.S. and even Western Europe.  Many perform in permanent buildings, not tents, and have remained in their home bases for decades, even centuries.

[The acts are fairly traditional—acrobats, animal acts, clowns, and so on—but there are real stars among them, attractions that Russians from all over the country come to see.  I’m not a great lover of circuses—I’ve been to a Cirque du Soleil once and that’s enough for me—but the phenomenon of the Moscow circus was fascinating. 

[The Moscow State Circus, a prominent part of Soviet culture and a point of pride, was the Soviet Union’s largest.  It predates the revolution (founded in 1880), but, like many such institutions, was nationalized in 1919.  (It was privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union.  There is a modern company in a brand-new building that’s designated the Moscow State Circus, but it wasn’t opened until 1971, six years after I was in Moscow.)]

P.S.  At the Pioneer Palace I met a young Russian girl who was very interested in America and American schools and people.  [You never knew, back in the bad old days, when someone was a plant, an informer, or an agent provocateur.  Some were even genuinely curious.  Sometimes, Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said, a cigar is just a cigar.]

[I hope all you readers will return to Rick On Theater to read the next installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965.”  Part 3 will be posted on Sunday, 29 May, and will start with my entry of 16 April 1965, our arrival in Leningrad. 

[In addition to seeing some of the main historical sights of the former imperial capital of the Russian Empire, I give a précis of the city’s founding and history.  We also saw another ballet, this one by a Soviet Azerbaijani, performed by the world-renowned Kirov Ballet.]