[In “Going to a Swiss International School, Part 4,”
I wrote about some of what Ecolint interns got up to when we hit downtown
Geneva during free time from school. I’m
devoting Part 5 exclusively to one trip I took with the school in the spring of
my senior year. I think you’ll see why I’m
spotlighting this event—and even here I’ll be cherry-picking aspects of the
trip.
[This may be the one installment of “Swiss International
School” that can stand somewhat on its own—though it’ll make a lot more sense if
you’ve read what went before. I still
recommend that ROTters
who haven’t read Parts 1 through 4 go back to the beginning and do so. The previous sections of my high school
memoir were posted on 29 April and 2, 5, and 8 May.]
When I returned to
Geneva, school picked up again immediately.
During spring vacation, however, which came in early April 1965, Ecolint
organized a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The school had made this journey a year or so
before and it proved very popular. 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.
(Neither school
offered a regular course in Russian in its curriculum. When I got to university, I was finally able
to take a credit-bearing course in Russian, but my school only offered two
years of the language at that time. It
wasn’t until I was in the army that I got to study the language intensely; I
was assigned to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for a
year-long Russian-language program. It
was the best duty I had in the five years I was in the service!)
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 or
pass through. (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 USSR. 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.
I began keeping a
travel journal for this trip, and my first entry on 9 April was about the visa
problem. I must have told my father as
soon as I knew, but it was no help in the end.
In any case, some of what follows in this account is from that
chronicle. (I have travel journals for
trips to the People’s Republic of China in 1980, as well as Israel and Egypt in
1982 and I’m contemplating posting them—or excerpts from
them—on this blog sometime in the future.)
The other
embassies—Poland and the Soviet Union—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. (CIA pilot Francis Gary
Powers was shot down over Russia in his U-2 spy plane in May 1960 and the Cuban
Missile Crisis had been in October and November 1963.)
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. The group’s leader 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 fellow travelers (no
political comment intended).
The trip east was
by train—three trains, to be precise. We
left from Geneva’s Gare Cornavin at oh-dark-thirty (actually 1 a.m.) on 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).
This was the train
ride on which Keats French brought along his portable guitar rig and set it up
in the train compartments [for introductions to my schoolmates, see Part 1]. We blasted
rock ’n’ roll music out the windows at each station we stopped at along the route. Before we reached Vienna, after
dinner—probably around 7 the first evening—we had a party in Keats’s
compartment.
I doubt the
railroad authorities appreciated our efforts much, especially the further east
we went. Communist authorities
disapproved of rock ’n’ roll music because it was counter-revolutionary and
decadent! (So were chewing gum and blue
jeans, by the way.)
Our shenanigans en
route weren’t always appreciated by passengers on other trains. When we stopped in Zürich and had changed
stations for the train-change, it was very early in the morning. According to my notes, “We were in a mess,”
doubtlessly from 5½ hours in a Schweizerische Bundesbahn (Swiss Federal Railway)
compartment. My journal records: “Mark
got a gift of a bag of rubbish from some English schoolgirls—in his face. He kindly returned it—in the window of their
train.”
Someone in our
group had brought along a Playboy (oh, come on!—we were a bunch of
mostly teenaged boys and sometimes you just do what you’re expected to do!) and
it had ended up face-up on the compartment floor when we fell asleep waiting
for the rigamarole at the Czech-Polish border.
My journal recounts:
We dozed off until the Czech and Polish officials met us at the Polish
border. Here the Poles looked at our
[customs] declaration sheets, and, in signing mine, [one guard] picked up a Playboy
as a rest. He began to leaf through
it. When the second official came up,
[the first one] dropped the magazine and said something in Polish. The second man stared at the magazine on the
floor for a short while.
We arrived in Warsaw
at a little before 8:30 in the morning of 11 April and headed for the Hotel
Europejski (near Piłsudski Square and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), where
we stayed. The Polish capital was my
first introduction to a communist country.
I suppose it’s a good place to start because of all the Soviet Bloc nations,
it might have been the most liberal, at least culturally and artistically. I didn’t know this at the time, of course,
even though I’d had a small peek at this phenomenon some years earlier.
As some ROTters
will know, my parents became involved in an art gallery in Washington, D.C.,
when I was about 11 (see “Gres Gallery,” 7 and 10 July 2018). One of the gallery’s most successful shows
was Contemporary Polish Painters in April and May 1961; it was an
exhibit of artists working in a non-representative style that wasn’t officially
sanctioned in Poland or anywhere in the Soviet Bloc where the only recognized
style was Socialist Realism. The Polish
artists, however, persisted in producing art that reporter Stephen S. Rosenfeld
of the Washington Post quipped was “as far from the official
Soviet ‘socialist realism’ as Picasso is from ‘The Happy Milkmaid.’”
Painting wasn’t
the only clue that Poland was cutting its own path. Note, for example, the blossoming of Polish
cinema in the early 1960s. We saw, as it
happens, what I can only describe as an experimental film in Warsaw that
trip—keeping in mind that we were only shown things the tourism authorities
wanted us to see. It was black and
white, but that wasn’t surprising in the early ’60s—even in the U.S.—and
though the actors were live, they were made to look artificial, almost as if it
were an animation. (Remember, this was
in the days long before computer imagery was available in the film industry.)
(Film and visual
art weren’t alone in this kind of experimentalism. This was the era of avant-garde theater
director Tadeusz Kantor (1915-90) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), experimental
stage director and theorist, among many others.)
In any case,
Warsaw was like an airlock between liberal democratic Western Europe and the
communist, even Stalinist USSR. So we
boarded a 3:20 p.m. (Warsaw time) LOT flight from Warsaw-Okecie Airport (renamed
Chopin Airport in 2001) on 13 April for Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International
Airport (renamed in 2019 in honor of poet Aleksandr Pushkin). We arrived at 7:45 Moscow time that evening.
The visit to
Moscow was crammed with tourist sights. We
stayed at the Hotel Bucharest (since 1992, the Hotel Baltschug) on the Moskva
River across from the Kremlin. In my
memory, it was a dark rabbit warren of hallways which weren’t all on the same
level; we frequently had to go up and down flights of two or three steps as we
crossed from the elevators to our rooms.
I also remember
that this was the first time I had encountered concierges—or whatever they were
called in such cases—on each floor, seated at a small desk in an upper
lobby. I was sure they were there to
keep tabs on us and any other foreign guests.
(We were also certain that there were microphones hidden in all our
rooms!)
As soon as we
landed in Moscow, we picked up a cadre of Intourist “guides” (read: “minders”).
Intourist, started under the first
communist leader, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), was ostensibly the official
agency for looking after foreign visitors, but it was really a means of keeping
an eye on them so they don’t get to see anything the authorities don’t want
them to see or go off somewhere the security establishment doesn’t want them to
go.
One Intourist
guide stayed with us throughout our visit to the USSR, and we picked up a local
guide in each city. Later, for reasons
you’ll learn, I had my very own Intourist minder. (Fifteen years later, when I went to the
People’s Republic of China, I encountered the same set-up with the China
International Travel Service [CITS].)
Included in the
tour of the city, of course, were visits to most of the main tourist sites in
the Soviet capital city. The Kremlin (which
is Russian for ‘fortress’ and was 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 Kremlin sits
on Red Square, the heart of Moscow. Dating
from the late 15th century during the rule of Tsar Ivan the Great (1440-1505),
the square has served many purposes over the centuries, from marketplace to
coronation site to parade ground. One
interesting fact, which I may have learned on this trip (though it’s possible I
knew it from before, but I think not) 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 it 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—La Belle Place, so to speak; only later, when the Russian word split
into two cognates, did the designation’s English translation became Red Square.
So there’s an age-old association in the
Russian psyche between the color red and the idea of beauty—which is why the
color became so prominent in Russian culture.
It’s not completely unrelated to the adoption of red as the signature
color of the communists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was
because the color was already a symbol of beauty and significance in Russian thinking
that the communist revolutionaries took it as their signature.
On the southwest
side of the rectangular 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. (It still stands despite occasional calls for
its removal.)
In front of the
necropolis is the Lenin Mausoleum in which the preserved corpse of Vladimir
Lenin 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
USSR was still enduring. It’s still a
major tourist attraction.
Until 1961, just 3½
years before I was there, Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), 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 the
de-Stalinization program of Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), the body of
the former leader was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The gravesite is marked only with a bust of
Stalin; his name is not inscribed anywhere.
On the
southeastern end of Red Square sits St. Basil’s Cathedral, recognizable the
world over from its nine highly colored onion domes, it was built in the 16th
century by Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1530-84).
The cathedral 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).
Along the
northeast side of the square is the former department store GUM (ГУМ; 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 would 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 USSR, you bought what you might need when it was
offered.
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 (1672-1725). 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.
There was a wry
joke told by Russians in the bad old days (see my post “Short Takes: Russian
Jokes,” 28 May 2010). It goes like this:
A man sees a woman carrying a bag of toilet paper down the street.
“Hey, lady,” he shouts, “where did you buy all that?”
“Buy it? Are you nuts? You can’t buy toilet paper these days! These rolls are five years old. I’m just getting them back from the cleaners.”
I can’t even tell
you how many times someone came up to us in both Moscow and Leningrad with the
offer: “I can buy pen-ball!” They meant
‘ballpoint pen’ (stylo in most Western European countries), which
weren’t commonly available in the USSR.
If you brought a supply with you, you could get a lot in trade for them. (This contrasted with what we encountered in
Warsaw, where we were inundated with enticements to exchange currency.)
On the streets,
two other things locals did that were notable was, first, stare. Sometimes they’d even follow us around for a
couple of blocks, just watching us. They
might have been being vigilant about Western foreigners in their city, but
mostly it was just naked curiosity. And
they had no compunction about being blatant.
I had some acerbic
remarks about Russian manners in my journal—I said they didn’t believe in
them—but I’ll leave further discussion of this aspect of my visit until I
transcribe the whole account. I also
wrote down “my thoughts on the Russian people”!
(Years later, when
my parents made a trip to the USSR, my dad had a similar experience—except with
a really funny addition. He recounted
this to me when my folks stopped in Berlin on their way home after the visit east.
(A man began following
my folks as they were window shopping in central Moscow. He stayed a few yards back, but he stared
intently at them and kept following wherever they went. Finally, he approached and came up to my
father, who in those days had white hair and wore a beard.
(“You
Kheming-vay,” he said questioningly in a heavy Russian accent. There’s no H or W in the
Russian alphabet, so they come out Kh, like clearing your throat, and V. “No, Hemingway’s dead,” replied my
father. “Yes, but you Kheming-vay!” the
man insisted. My dad bought a set of
Hemingway stories in Russian and gave it to me when we saw one another
afterwards.)
The second thing
that Russians did on the streets that struck me was come up to us and try to
engage us in English. If they’d been
learning English at all, they wanted to practice, and they weren’t shy about
approaching compete strangers. (I guess
to Russians in the ’60s, any Western foreigner was an American and spoke
English. That we were a bunch of
international students wasn’t a factor.)
Two aspects of
this were odd. One was that all those
people wanted to do was show off their English—not have a conversation of any
kind. (We encountered a guy in Leningrad
who did the same thing in French.) They
weren’t curious about us at all: they had a spiel and they delivered it.
The other thing
was that at that time in the USSR, unauthorized contact with foreigners was
suspect. The kind of thing that these
people were doing, as innocent as it was, could get them arrested. And that’s no joke or exaggeration.
I’m reminded of
two stories bearing on this truth about life in the communist East during the
Cold War. Both these incidents were on
my mind while I was traveling in the Soviet Union, One was about a friend of mine in Washington,
a boy I grew up and went to school with.
A few years before I went to Russia, Jim had gone with a high school
group. He was somewhere in downtown
Moscow, on the street, and he stopped to take some snapshots of the street
scene.
A pair of cops
swooped down on him—he’d have been all of about 15 or 16—and took him into
custody and relieved him of his camera.
He was interrogated for a short while, but the authorities never told
him what he’d done. Eventually, they
released him, returned his camera, but kept the film he’d been shooting. We eventually surmised that he’d unknowingly
taken pictures of something the Soviet government didn’t want him to, possibly
a police station or something of that sort—hence the confiscation of his exposed
film.
The second
incident concerned a member of the embassy or consular staff that Dad knew or
knew about. She had taken leave and made
a trip to Eastern Europe. At one stop,
she wrote a postcard to a friend and said, in what turned out to be an ill-advised
joke, that she had 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 stay in Moscow
included other events, such as an evening at a circus. Moscow circuses 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.
One attraction in
Moscow of which I took advantage was the Beryozka store. These were a chain of state-run retail stores
in the Soviet Union that sold goods in exchange for “hard” (that is, Western) currency. You couldn’t spend rubles at a Beryozka—only
dollars, francs, Westmarks (not Ostmarks, the money of East Germany), pounds,
or several other Western currencies. (In
China, they had Friendship Stores which served the same purpose.)
Beryozkas—which is
Russian for ‘little birch tree,’ though I have no idea why—sold everything
Russian from cheesy souvenirs to luxury goods—furs were popular—even caviar and
Russian champagne. It was useful, at
least to me and some of my schoolmates, because we could buy some of our
souvenirs without having to purchase rubles at the official exchange
kiosks. I bought some souvenirs, mostly
folk art pieces that I ended up giving as house gifts, and an ushanka,
the familiar Russian fur hat with ear flaps that I wore for years against the
bitter cold and as a ski hat.
Aside from the inflated
exchange rate, set artificially by the Soviet government, there were other
issues with buying rubles. The Soviet ruble
was set at about $1.10 (though the purchasing power of a ruble was really about
a Swiss franc—around 23¢). You could do better
on the black market, but if you got caught doing that, or with rubles for which
you didn’t have the exchange receipts, you could be arrested or at least have
the money confiscated.
Without the
official exchange documents to prove that you made the currency purchases at an
authorized exchange bureau, you also can’t turn the rubles back into dollars or
francs when you leave the country. Since
you can’t leave the Soviet Union with rubles, you have to spend the undocumented
currency or lose it at the customs check on the way out of the country. Believe me, I learned this lesson very
clearly.
In Moscow, my
roommate, Mark Dyen; our friend, David; and I were supposed to meet David’s
pen-pal [see Part 2]. She was a student at a Moscow
university—I forget which one now, as well as what she was studying—but our
schedule kept changing and we couldn’t get together.
The changing
schedule was a tactic the Soviets used to keep Westerners like us from making
contact with local citizens. The same
gambit was used with a Polish artist my parents had gotten to know in
Washington. He’d been allowed to travel
to West Germany and my folks had arranged to meet with him—except his itinerary
changed at the last minute and they couldn’t link up. They did eventually manage to get together
somewhere in Germany, but it took several tries.
Just like the
artist and my parents, we did ultimately connect with the pen-pal—in Kiev,
where she was from.
In the whirlwind
of the visit to Moscow, our Ecolint chaperone forgot about the call on the
Hungarian embassy regarding my visa. I
forgot, too, and didn’t remember until we were en route to Leningrad via an
Aeroflot flight to Shosseynaya Airport (renamed Pulkovo Airport in 1973). We left Moscow at around 10:30 on the morning
of 16 April, arriving in Leningrad an hour-and-a-quarter later.
We immediately
tried to get the visa at the Hungarian consulate in Leningrad, but there wasn’t
enough time before we moved on to Kiev.
Of course, we tried again at the consulate there, but to no avail. I was stuck: without a visa, I couldn’t
accompany the group to Budapest and I couldn’t pass through Hungary on the
train, either. All I could do was fly
over the country directly from Kiev to Vienna, where I’d have to wait for the
group to catch up with me. My comment on
this development in my travel journal is: “What a crapped-up job!”
Two things
happened to me on the plane to Leningrad.
One was that I discovered that Russians made delicious hard candy. The stewardesses passed it out liberally on
the flight, and it was really tasty. The
other was that my seatmate, a middle-aged Russian lady, was very friendly. She was taken with all these foreign young
people around her and we got to talking a little. I don’t recall that she spoke any English, so
I was trying out my very limited Russian.
Fortunately, it was only about an hour-and-a-half to fly from Moscow to
Leningrad, but when we were getting set to get off the plane, the woman told me
I had an excellent Russian accent. Made
my day!
In Leningrad,
arguably the most curious experience was visiting the Hermitage Museum which
houses art from the Paleolithic period (Stone Age) to the last few centuries. The museum, started by Empress Catherine the
Great (1729-96) in 1764, comprises six buildings, including the Winter Palace, the
former main residence of Russian tsars.
However, there’s one
specific collection that was the most intriguing during the Soviet period. It’s a collection of works by the
Impressionists and early 20th-century artists, particularly Henri Matisse
(1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), but much of it was kept hidden
during the Soviet era because it was regarded as decadent. We got to see it—I guess our Intourist
minders figured we were already corrupted by this time—and two things astounded
me. Well, three if you count the effect
the art itself had on me; this is the art period that I love the most, from the
Impressionists through the Post-Impressionists to the early 20th-century
moderns.
The other two facts of this collection that
struck me were, first, the fact that it existed, that the stolid, artistically
hide-bound Soviet Union owned such a collection of magnificent art. I don’t know how many pieces of art were in
this secret stash—we only got to see a small section of the hidden art—but it
was a stunning collection. The hidden
art contained, alongside paintings by Matisse and Picasso, works by Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), and others.
Striking fact
number two: this art, as wonderful and moving as it is, was hidden away from
public view, and had been for decades.
Of all the atrocities of the Soviet regime, this one was probably not
very consequential, but it was still painful to contemplate—saddening and
disheartening.
(A peculiar fact
about Leningrad: It’s the only city I
can think of where someone could have been alive for all of its historical
names. If a man was born in, say 1906, he’d
have been born in Saint Petersburg. If
he lived till he was 85, he’d have lived in Petrograd, the city’s name from
1914 to 1924; then Leningrad, 1924 to 1991; and finally Saint Petersburg again
in ’91. That’s three name-changes over a
lifetime.)
In our wanderings
around Leningrad—as well as Moscow and Kiev—we stopped at shops and several
cafés and restaurants. In my ignorance
at the time, I didn’t make much of this freedom of movement, but in retrospect,
I’m surprised we were let loose in the Soviet cities so freely.
There’s a
peculiarly Russian thing about the cafés, by the way. All over Europe, both East and West, people
drink tea from glasses. (The Brits use
cups or mugs, but on the Continent, it’s almost always a glass.) But only in Russia, as far as I ever saw, do
they also drink coffee from a glass. It
might be an ordinary glass, or a glass with a handle like a mug, or a glass
fitted into a metal holder with a handle—but it’s always a glass of coffee.
Russians also had
two other unique habits connected with tea- and coffee-drinking. Their sugar cubes are very hard—they don’t
dissolve easily, even in hot liquid. So
many Russians hold the cube between their teeth as they sip the tea or coffee so
that it dissolves the sugar as it goes into their mouths. The side-effect of this habit is many
Russians with rotten front teeth.
The other
practice, only for tea, is to sweeten the tea not with sugar at all, but with
jam. The drinker puts a spoonful of
fruit jam in the glass and gets a taste of not just sweetened tea, but
fruit-flavored tea. This is a practice
of mostly peasants and laborers for whom sugar is a great expense—and, in the
Soviet Union, hard to get.
(As long as we’re
on the subject of Russian tea-drinking, let me say a word about the ubiquitous samovar. First of all, samovars are for tea, not any
other drink. They’re not a Russian
equivalent to a hot-drink urn. Second, the
large reservoir isn’t for the tea—it’s filled with hot water. The little pot on top holds tea essence
(essentially very, very strong tea), kept hot by the water in the samovar. The drinkers pour a small amount of the tea
essence into a glass, then add hot water from the samovar to dilute it to their
taste.)
Having failed to
obtain my Hungarian visa in Leningrad, I flew with the group to Kiev, the
capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent republic of Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. We left Leningrad
on 19 April at quarter of noon and probably flew Aeroflot into Boryspil Airport,
but I’m not sure anymore. We landed in
Kiev at five after one that afternoon and went from the airport to the Hotel
Intourist where we were staying.
(A note about the
Ukraine: my paternal grandfather’s family came from there around the turn of
the 20th century when it was part of the Russian Empire. My grandfather was born in Uman, a small city
130 miles south of Kiev, in 1890. In
1897, when my grandfather was 7, it had a population of about 30,000. Uman had a large Jewish community of about
17,000 until 1941, when the Nazis captured the city and slaughtered or
transported all the Jews. My
grandfather’s family emigrated to the United States between 1897 and 1901.)
In addition to our seeing most of the tourist sights in this middle-sized city (population in
1965: 1.4 million), David was engaged in making contact with his pen-pal. This time, he was successful—she lived near
Kiev and took a break from her university in Moscow—and the three of us went
off to meet her before dinner the evening we arrived.
We met at the
apartment of a friend of hers. This
whole episode was unusual because, not only did we contrive to meet, but we
were successful and we met at a private residence. How we, a trio of foreign teenagers, managed
to accomplish that, I have no idea. I
suppose it was just a matter of dumb luck: we didn’t know any better, so we
just did it! (I can tell you that the
fate of my friend Jim was not on my mind at this moment, or I would have
been very frightened, I’m sure.)
The correspondent
and her friend—and, I recall, another young man—and the three of us sat in the
apartment living room and talked. I’m
sure some kind of (non-alcoholic) refreshment and perhaps even a snack was
offered; no European, including Russians, would entertain visitors in their
homes, even total strangers, without serving something.
Then, after
introducing ourselves—David’s pen-pal knew we were accompanying him, but she
didn’t know who we were—we started talking.
We started off talking about literature, Khrushchev, who’d been deposed as
Soviet leader in October 1964, and a range of other subjects. Then the questions we fielded got far more
curious than any casual conversation we’d been having. The conversation was in English; all three
students had been learning English—practically a requirement for Soviet
university students in those days.
The first things
that David’s correspondent brought up was the social situation in the U.S. as
they had learned about it. “Is it true,”
she asked, “that there are lines of unemployed in all the cities where the
workers collect their few pennies?” They
also asked about the children as young as 8 working in the factories.
Mark and I
practically gasped! This is actually
what she and her peers were being taught in school—including university. We explained that her image was from the
Depression, 30 year ago. She had
probably been seeing old newsreels or movies like The Grapes of Wrath
and told they were current events!
I don’t know if
she believed us or dismissed our explanations and protests as propaganda and
the naïvete of youth, but we moved on.
As I mentioned
earlier, Barry Goldwater’s candidacy had worried Europeans of all stripes. Soviet university students were no
exception. The first thing they wanted
to know was how a man could be nominated by his party like Goldwater and then
not win. They literally couldn’t
comprehend the U.S. political system, especially the notion of primary
elections and party nominations.
Back in Germany,
my father was having the same problem.
The Germans with whom he dealt as Information Center (that is, Amerika
Haus) Director didn’t understand the whole electoral system in the United
States. (Almost all European democracies
had parliamentary systems in which the country’s political leader takes
office—prime minister, chancellor—when his party wins a majority in the legislature.) Dad was regularly called upon to explain our
system to, I’m sure, limited success.)
The Soviet system,
of course, was different from both ours here in the States and the one common
to parliamentary democracies. In the
communist world, no candidate was named unless chosen by the central party
establishment. There was no opposition
party to put up a rival candidate, and if there was any opposition within the
ruling party, it was settled internally (sometimes by violence or punitive
means) out of sight of the public.
The premiership,
usually the same as the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party, wasn’t
elected at all, not even in a show election.
I mean, of course, a “popular” election; the Politburo selected the
country’s leader, sometimes ousting the existing leader (Leonid Brezhnev [1906-82] succeeding Khrushchev in 1964) and
sometimes after his death (Yuri Andropov [1914-84] succeeding Brezhnev in 1982).
In other words,
there was no such thing as a losing candidate, since the election’s outcome was
predetermined and only one candidate was on the ballot. So how could a Barry Goldwater even
exist? We tried our best to explain how
this worked, but I didn’t know how successful we were. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that we were all
only about 17 years old—and only two of us were American—so none of us was even
eligible to vote. Besides, anything we
told our friend’s pen-pal could be written off as propaganda.
If it hadn’t been
so absurd—less Kafkaesque, perhaps, than Beckettian—it might have been
frightening. I mean, here were three
university students, presumably members of the Soviet intellectual elite,
believing things that weren’t only untrue but based on a 30-year-old catastrophe—what’s
more, a worldwide catastrophe that affected even Europe.
As far as the
differences in our political systems were concerned . . . well, that, as I
observed, was pretty commonly misunderstood.
One didn’t have to be indoctrinated in Marxist-Stalinism to be
confounded by that. But the
international fear of a potential Goldwater presidency, generated to a great
extent by internal American partisan propaganda—that “Daisy” commercial was
terrifying in 1964—was unnerving.
Then it came time
to leave Kiev—and things got sticky for me.
I remind readers again that I was all of 18 and spoke a tiny bit of
Russian and no Ukrainian. With no more
luck with the Hungarian visa in Kiev than we had in Leningrad, the Ecolint
group had no choice but to get me on a plane non-stop to Vienna.
With the
intervention of Intourist, which was responsible for all such tourist matters, I
had a seat for the day after the group left by train for Budapest early in the
morning of 20 April.
While I had an
Intourist agent to look after/keep tabs on me in Kiev after the school group
left, I’d be solo in Vienna. That didn’t
faze me because, first, I was used to traveling in Europe on my own by this
time, I wasn’t a little boy at 18, and I spoke German by this time. In addition, should the need arise, I could
always go to the U.S. embassy in Vienna and have them contact my dad at the
embassy in Bonn, where he was by this date posted (explanation shortly).
There was little I
could do in Kiev for the half day or so when I was on my own. The Intourist agent didn’t stay with me; she
just checked in in the morning and made arrangements to pick me up that
afternoon to get to the airport for my flight.
So I just walked around in the area of the hotel.
Window shopping
was all I could do because the first consequence of this ad hoc plan became
clear almost immediately. I had little
pocket money. After purchasing the plane
ticket, the group leader collected all the remaining rubles—they wouldn’t be
needing them anymore since you can’t take them out of the Soviet Union and,
even if you did, you can’t spend them since no one in the West accepts Soviet
Bloc currency, and you can’t exchange them for schillings or any other Western
money—and turned them over to me. But it
was just a few rubles, enough for me to buy some lunch and something to drink
later while I was waiting for my plane.
So I wandered around
and amused myself—or assuaged myself, if you prefer—by singing the Beatles’ “A
Hard Day’s Night” over and over. The
movie had only been released in Europe in July 1964, less than a year before the
trip to Eastern Europe. The songs from
the film were in all our heads—probably with the help of Keats French and his
rock ’n’ roll guitar.
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 or dollars. That was $17.60 at the official exchange rate
(more than I’d get selling rubles back for hard currency) or about 440 schillings.
But as far as
reconverting the rubles, I was SOL. The
Ecolint chaperone had also kept all the exchange receipts from when the rubles
had been purchased, so I had no legal proof that I had gotten them legitimately
and not on the black market—so I couldn’t convert them back. My minder advised me that I’d have to spend
them in the airport or surrender them at customs.
The Kiev airport
in 1965 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, albeit circuitously, to my parents’ new home in Bonn, so I ended up buying
a bottle of Russian champaign (shampanskoye), two bottles of vodka, and
a couple of jars of caviar (ikra).
Then the second
scary bit of info came up. Without
currency declarations attesting to the Western cash I’d brought into the
country with me, the customs people could seize my few dollars, leaving me with
nothing when I got to Vienna on my own.
They decided to waive that regulation and left me my dollars.
That left me with
a few coins as souvenirs, long since gone.
(After drinking the champaign, I kept the bottle for a year or so, but
it sat on a shelf at the foot of my bed in my freshman college dorm room, and
one night, I kicked it over and broke it.)
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!)
Many of us had
shopped in poster stores in Leningrad and I bought “lots of” propaganda posters
as souvenirs—they were really fascinating both artistically and politically—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?
I had also bought
some classical records for my father.
(Soviet records were peculiar: they had recordings only on one side; the
other side was blank—no grooves!) The
customs guys examined these 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. Now I was thinking of my
friend Jim and the embassy/consular secretary pulled off a bus.
The group’s visit
to the Hungarian capital was overnight, so I’d arrive in Vienna before them and
be on my own for several hours. I
arrived about 1 p.m. on the afternoon of the 21st (it’s about a two-hour
flight, but Vienna is an hour earlier than Kiev) 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 the 23rd; I flew back to Germany to spend the rest of the break with my
folks.
I flew into
Cologne Bonn Airport where my parents met me.
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 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 champaign 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 did, 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 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 dip cards—mine came in July).
A three-week family trip driving around Spain in July and August ’66 was
the first time I used my new passport for more than just coming and going. (I now had diplomatic immunity—not that I
ever invoked it, but it was neat to know I had it.)
[I said above that I’m
contemplating posting the travel journal I kept on this trip to Eastern Europe
and the USSR—or excerpts from it—on Rick On Theater in the future. I still plan to do that, though I don’t know
how soon. (I also pointed out that I
have two other travel logs—a trip to the People’s Republic of China and one to Israel
and Egypt—and I may post those first since I’ve just given ROTters a
taste of the Russia trip.)
[A word or two about the travel
journals: I used to have them in my apartment within easy reach because, when I
taught a writing class at New York University in the 1980s, I used excerpts
from them as examples of journal writing for my unit on that topic. At some point, I seem to have put the booklets
in a storage trunk, probably when I stopped teaching, and the trunk went into
my building’s basement storage room.
They were effectively inaccessible, at least without help.
[When I started Rick On Theater 12 years
ago, I thought the journals would render some good material for posts—but I
couldn’t find them where I used to keep them here in the apartment. I looked on my list of items stored in the
trunks, but I’d apparently neglected to make note of the journals when I
stashed them. So for years now, I’ve
been wanting to get at the trunks to see if the journals were there, and this
week, I finally made arrangements to do that.
[Lo and behold! there they
were, three precious little notebooks. (I
also found some other related stuff I didn’t even remember that I’d kept, including
old passports—visas and entrance/exit stamps, when the customs people put them
in, are useful for dates and even border-crossing points.)
[Now I’m prepared to transcribe
the journals and annotate them as necessary for posting in the blog. For me, the journals will be a trip into
nostalgia—just like this memoir has been; for you all—well, I don’t know. I hope you’ll find them an interesting look
back at times past in far-off and exotic places. (The Russia visit was 56 years ago, when I
was 18 years old; China and the Middle East were 41 and 39 years ago.)
[Now, “Going to a Swiss
International School, Part 6” will be published here on 14 May. That’ll conclude my memoir of the life of a
Swiss international schoolboy. It starts
upon my return to Geneva for the remainder of the spring term of my senior year
of high school and graduation from the International School of Geneva. Please return to ROT for the final
installment of “Going to a Swiss International School.”]
