[Part 6 of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” is the last installment of my account of the high school journey I took to the Soviet Union. I pick up the chronicle with the entry for 21 April 1965 and follow my steps through the final ramifications of my visa SNAFU with Hungary and my ultimate departure from the U.S.S.R.
[Because the journal actually ends with my arrival in Vienna, Austria, I’ve added a coda that takes me from Vienna to Bonn, Germany, and on to Geneva. Switzerland, in order to finish out the whole voyage east.
[As always, I recommend that readers who are just encountering this chronicle go back to 23 May and start with the first installment and then pick up Parts 2 through 5, posted on 26 and 29 May and 1 and 4 June, before continuing with this final section. You’ll find many identifications and explanations that will pertain to this installment but which I haven’t repeated.].
Wednesday, 21 April – 2:50 p.m. – Kiev/Vienna, Austria
I thought everything was settled, but when I arrived at the [Kiev] airport [probably Boryspil, but I’m not sure], and tried to change my rubles, I then realized that I had no [currency-exchange] declaration slip or money slip. In other words, I was stuck with ₽16 [officially $17.60] that I could not take out of the country. I had the choice of spending it [in the airport] or leaving it and being able to retrieve it in three years—when I returned. I ended up buying two bottles of vodka and one of [Russian] champagne.
[As I reported earlier concerning Polish zloty (see Part 1, entry for 12 April 1965), exchanging Western currency outside government-run exchange offices was illegal in communist Eastern Europe. Holding rubles without receipts for their official exchange invited confiscation and more.]
In addition to having no declaration slip, I was not allowed to have dollars, but [the customs officials] waived that and did not confiscate my money.
I had tried to sell my rubles to some people traveling to Moscow, but then they would have my problem as well—a lack of dollars with no declaration of change.
Then, of course, they went through all my bags, and almost took my [phonograph] records. I was almost screaming!
VIENNA, REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA
The plane trip was awful. The landing was so rough, I thought I was going to be sick! [I don’t get motion sickness as a rule.]
Finally we landed—and was I glad. I can’t express how happy I am to be out of that place. I’m almost glad to miss two more days behind the [Iron] Curtain.
Then, here, I began to worry about a room and money. But that was little trouble. It’s only costing me 80 schillings [about $3 in 1965, about $27.53 today], which I have, to stay a day here [Hotel Schönbrunn, named for the main summer residence of the Habsburg monarchs; the name means ‘beautiful spring’)]. I will eat my dinner out.
I noticed a strange thing, not very important, but funny in the light of everything that’s happened. The [hotel] porter put me in the wrong room, and no one noticed until I told the receptionist. They changed me.
I sent a telegram to Mr. Brunst, ℅ the Hungarian travel agent. I hope he gets it. I also hope it’s not expensive, though he may pay for it.
I reconfirmed my ticket for Bonn, so at least that’s settled.
I keep feeling that I’m not going to have enough money. I hope I make it, or it may prove troublesome. I must find out when I have to vacate the room in order not to pay another day. I must also buy breakfast and lunch tomorrow, but I can do without much. This is really growing out of proportion.
* *
* *
[That’s where my journal of my 1965 trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ended. In Part 5 of “Going to a Swiss International School,” I recounted the final leg of the journey, from Vienna to Bonn, Germany, for the last days of the spring vacation, and back to Geneva to finish the second semester of my senior year in high school.
[In order to wrap up the entire voyage, I’ve decided to append the last paragraphs of the 11 May 2021 post to the transcription of the journal. I’ve edited them lightly.]
RETURN: VIENNA – BONN – GENEVA
I had reservations on a direct flight to Vienna at noon on 21 April. At the Kiev airport, I went through the check-in procedure without a hitch—after all, I had my very own Intourist minder with me! Then I asked about exchanging the 16 rubles I had left for Austrian schillings (about 440) or dollars ($17.60 – worth about $157.27 today).
My minder advised me that I’d have to spend them in the airport or surrender them at customs. The Kiev airport in 1965, however, didn’t have a shopping concourse or anything like a duty-free area—it would be bourgeois and capitalistic—so I was relegated to cruising the snack bars and souvenir stands. I was on my way to my parents’ new home in Bonn, so I ended up buying a bottle of Russian champagne (shampanskoye), two bottles of vodka, and a couple of jars of caviar (ikra).
When I got to customs, after the Intourist minder had left me, the environment changed. The agents went through everything. I suspect they saw my official passport and decided to be hyper-diligent. They made me open every bag, including my camera bag. I smoked a pipe in those days, and they not only opened my tin of tobacco, but actually rooted around in the tobacco itself. (Maybe I had diamonds or microfilm in there!)
In Leningrad, readers will recall, I had bought “lots of” propaganda posters as souvenirs (see Part 4, entry for 17 April 1965) and they were rolled up and wrapped in brown paper by the store clerk. The customs agents made me open the roll and unravel every one of the posters.
They had words over them, as if they had to decide if I should be allowed to take the posters out of the country with me. As if the store hadn’t sold them to me openly and legally! What? I was smuggling anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-Nazi propaganda into the West?
The customs guys examined the classical records I had bought for my father as well. I guess they suspected I might be secreting coded messages in the music or something. The camera bag got the same level of scrutiny; thank goodness they didn’t expose all the film I had—just out of orneriness.
Well, I made it out of the Soviet Union, which I was never sure I would. I had visions, not so much of being stuck in the airport in some kind of limbo (like Tom Hanks in 2004’s The Terminal), but of being hauled off to a jail in Kiev or some place and forgotten forever.
(I had read George Orwell’s 1984 and about two years before this trip, I’d participated in a high school production of Darkness at Noon, adapted from Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel by Sidney Kingsley in 1951.)
The group’s visit to the Hungarian capital was overnight, so I arrived in Vienna before them and was on my own for several hours. I arrived about 1 p.m. on the afternoon of the 21st and went to the Hotel Schönbrunn where the Ecolint group was supposed to meet me on the evening of the 22nd.
I was relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and, as I’ve said, I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people. I still had almost no cash, however, until the group arrived in town some hours after I did. So I walked around Vienna this time and sang “Hard Day’s Night” some more! To this day, I can’t hear that song—which I still love like most Beatles tunes—without flashing back to that spring trip to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.
The Ecolint group arrived at about 7 in the evening and joined me at the hotel. The trip ended as planned and we all went our separate ways to finish up the spring vacation. The group took the train back to Geneva by way of Zürich on the evening of Friday, the 23rd; I flew home to Germany to spend the rest of the break with my folks.
I flew into Cologne Bonn Airport on the 23rd where my parents met me. As readers know, I’d arranged before we left Geneva to fly home from Vienna instead of going back to Geneva with the group. We drove to Bad Godesberg, the district of the West German capital of Bonn where many foreign embassies, including the Embassy of the United States, were located, and our new residence.
This home wasn’t the house in Koblenz where we’d been living since my father started this assignment in Germany in 1962. (Looking back, I was a little like the kid who comes home from summer camp and finds that his parents had moved. Except, of course, that I knew this was going to happen.)
In late March 1965, Dad had been transferred from the Amerika Haus in Koblenz to the U.S. embassy in Bad Godesberg. From Information Center Director, Dad was now Cultural Affairs Officer, informally, the Cultural Attaché.
Our new home was a three-bedroom apartment in the garden-apartment complex in Plittersdorf, a section of Bad Godesberg that was the site of the U.S. embassy residence compound. When we arrived at the apartment, my parents had to attend a function and they left me to unpack and rest until they returned in the early evening.
The apartment was festooned with hand-made banners and other decorations to welcome me home. I put the champagne and caviar in the fridge and put the vodka in the freezer (Russians drink vodka literally ice cold from a little glass called a ryumka, a bit larger than a shot glass), and waited for my folks to get back.
When they got home, we had a little celebration en famille and I told them about the trip east. I had called them from Vienna, so they already knew about the adventure in Kiev; of course, they’d also known about the visa problem when it surfaced while I was still in Geneva.
There wasn’t much left of the vacation, so I was soon on my way back to Geneva by air on Monday, 26 April, for the remainder of the spring term—the end of my last semester in high school. With my dad’s new job, he also shifted from the Consular Corps to the Diplomatic Corps (we all got those black-covered Diplomatic Passports—mine came in July).
After graduation in Geneva on 6 June, my parents, my brother, my maternal grandmother, and I took a trip through the Loire Valley, ending up in Paris. Then, in August, Dad took home leave and my family and I sailed on the SS Independence out of Cannes, France, for New York City so my brother could start his junior year at his prep school and my folks could deliver me to start my freshman year as a college student.
That was the first time I used my new dip card. In September 1965, I would start commuting between Bonn and Virginia for college breaks on a fairly regular basis. I now had diplomatic immunity—not that I ever invoked it, but it was neat to know I had it.
[Transcribing these old journals has been a peculiar experience for me. (I’m including the two previous transcriptions: “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” 11-23 July 2021 and 2-20 August 2021; “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980,” 24 December 2021-5 January 2022.)
[That’s been especially true of the Russia journal, which was an exceptionally memorable experience. This was both because of the Hungarian visa matter and because I was so young. This was only my second experience visiting a land that was entirely alien to my experience; the first was my arrival in Europe the first time at Christmastime 1962.
[(Before that visit to Germany and Paris—see “An American Teen in Germany”—my only experience with foreign travel was a skiing trip my family took to Sainte-Agathe, Quebec, when I was probably 8-10 years old. Otherwise, I’d never been off the East Coast of the U.S.)
[The
trip to the Soviet Union also reaches way back into my past (almost 60 years as
opposed to 40+ for the subjects of the two newer journals) and it was a world
that’s completely disappeared. It felt
very strange, revisiting all that. I’d
be very curious to hear what anyone else felt about this account.]
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