You know, there isn’t any index on this blog. So, in my 350 or so posts to date, I really don’t know what I have said and what I have left unsaid. When I started, I assumed that I would concentrate mostly on events from my past. But it hasn’t turned out that way, has it? The present has stolen the thunder from the past and most of what I have been writing has been material which could come from an amateur op-ed writer. In fact, I guess that is what I have become for better or for worse.

Today, for some reason, though, I thought about my first trip to Russia in the early 1970s. Maybe I have written about it here before? I don’t recall, but if I did and you are alert enough to remember, you can fact check me against myself and tell me how I did.

I was a young lawyer in my first year or two at my first law firm – that means that this must have been 1972 or 1973 or so. The firm was small then, so I knew everyone who wandered the hall (note: the hall, not the halls), including the fellow who sold us our insurance policies. We were chatting and he told me that he had just come from another of his clients, a travel agency that specialized in trips behind the Iron Curtain (such trips being then a big deal), and that they had a trip going to Leningrad and Moscow in ten days, and they were holding a “fire sale” because it was far from filled. It was being sponsored, he said, by the Georgetown University Alumni, but that wasn’t important and that they were offering the ten day (?) trip for $250 all included. My phone tells me that $250 in 1972 is about $1800 today – but I will tell you that $250 in 1972 sounded like a bargain basement price for a trip to the Soviet Union. All I needed to do, he said, was to get the agency my money, and get myself a visa. But I was told that Soviet visas usually took about six weeks, so it would probably be impossible.
I decided to give it a try. I don’t remember the details, but I remember I had to contact an expediter, and lo and behold, two days or so before the trip was to start, I had in hand a very fancy visa for the Soviet Union.

I was very excited. I had studied Russian in college and knew quite a bit about the country, but had never been there. I didn’t know what to expect from my tour. All I knew is that I better pack for cold weather – I didn’t say this above, but it was January.

As our group got on the Pan American plane at Dulles, one thing was clear: no one seemed to have gone to Georgetown. So, my fear of being an outsider faded away. I sat on the plane next to a young (as I recall – maybe my age, maybe a bit older) African American woman who was a recent graduate of the Howard University Dental School, and who came across this trip much as I did at the last minute, and decided to take it with her very cute 7 year old daughter.

We flew to Leningrad. Leningrad looked cold and gray, the airport and the first area we bused through looked quite unpleasant, with tall Soviet-style (surprise?) apartment blocks. But then – all of a sudden – we were in a fairly land. Still cold and gray, but beautiful buildings, water everywhere you turned. Magical.

We stayed a big tourist hotel – the Moskva. On each floor, there was a concierge lady who sat at a desk near the elevators. Like a house mother, I guess, she knew who came in and who went out. We had been warned in advance that hotel rooms were all bugged, and that we should be careful what we said inside them. This lady added to our paranoia.

On the one hand. On the other, she made you feel secure, because she had everything under control. Until one night, she didn’t and I had someone banging on my door, yelling and yelling at me in Russian that I couldn’t understand at all. I assume it was someone drunk and at the wrong room (or maybe in the wrong hotel), but it was frightening, and it made me realize that our lady was more for show than for action.

I also saw that everyone couldn’t come into our hotel. You had to be a foreigner or have special permission. There was one group of Russians who did seem to have special permission. They were a group of very attractive young women who were allowed in and allowed to hang around the bar. It became clear to us that they were there to hang around with us, and that our hanging around would them would be a first class mistake. So they were ignored.

Because it was winter and cold in Leningrad, it wasn’t ideal touring weather. In addition, because Leningrad is pretty far north, the sun came up about 10 a.m., and it began to get dark by about 3 p.m. A short day, to be sure, and even during the day, there was a heavy cloud cover while we were there.
On the first morning, I got up early, and decided to take a walk. Seemed safe enough. I really didn’t know where to go, and I decided to stick near the water. Not one of the canals of the city, but the Neva, the river, and I wandered into an area that was filled with small buildings, seeming more like warehouses or workshops or something. It was dark, there were no people, I was a bit concerned that I was being stupid, but it was all so interesting. It was very cold, the ground was snow covered. I felt like I was in Russia.

Then all of a sudden I heard people talking and laughing. I got concerned. Who were they? What would they do if they saw me? It sounded like a large group of people.

All of a sudden I saw them. They ran in front of me, from my left to my right. They paid to attention to me. Had other things on their minds. They were all dressed in bathing suits, men and women, all ages, all running, many laughing. Then, all was quiet again.

This was the last sight I expected to see that morning. I decided to try to see where they ran to. I left the road I was on (all small roads) and found that they had run up a road that led, on the next block, to a small wooden building with a simple sign that said: “Winter Swimming Club”. Welcome to Russia.

Interestingly, I remember little about what we saw in Leningrad. I remember we went to the Hermitage, but little about the art. The Hermitage is in what had been the tsarist Winter Palace, and there is a lot of history on that spot, and I found that interesting. I remember seeing the statue of Peter the Great as the sun set mid-afternoon. I remember walking on the Nevsky Prospekt, the main shopping street of Leningrad, going into a beautiful building that had been (and now again is) the Kazan Cathedral, which had been repurposed as a Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. It was a fancy museum and, albeit in derogatory terms, taught about religion in the pre-Bolshevik country. And I remember the part of the museum that dealt with Judaism. The Judaism exhibit, itself interesting with a lot of exhibits, was not called an exhibit of the Jewish religion, but rather (and unlike anything else in the building) an exhibit of the Cult of Judaism.

Nearby on Nevsky Prospekt, I went into a very large (no, a very, very, very large) bookstore (it too is still there), and I was surprised at the variety and the amount of available reading material. I did my part – bought a few small books showing the progress of Communist Russia and a Victory Calendar and of course a print of Lenin – and went on my way.

My other memory of Leningrad is visiting Vasilevsky Island, of course. But what struck me on this trip was not the high steepled church or the other famous landmark buildings, but the inside of the Museum of Anthropology (I think that’s what it is called) and the preserved woolly mammoths, which are still there on display.

What I don’t remember is the food – that’s because it was so bad. Meat you couldn’t chew, the only vegetables being cabbage and potatoes. Good tea. Pepsi Cola. Paper napkins at each restaurant torn in quarters – you only got one quarter. Maybe that’s all you needed.

And I only remember one restaurant visit. There was a single woman on the trip, about my age, who also could speak pigeon Russian, and she and I (her name was Joan) went off on our own several times, leaving the group and missing out on some of the official tours. We did that one day for lunch in Leningrad and stepped into a restaurant on one of the canals. As in most European restaurants in those days, if there were two of you, and there was a table for four with two others sitting at the table, you would be seated there, as well. No privacy of tables in the Soviet Union.

So we were shown to a table that had a woman in her 30s or so, and her young son – maybe he was 9 or 10. After a while, we started talking, and the woman became nervous, rather than excited, when she learned that we were American and not from England, which she had first assumed. Why became clear when her son said “My father is in America!” Thinking he was joking, I asked what he was doing there. He then told us that he was in a submarine going up and down the American coast!! With that, and with no words, his mother grabbed the boy, and they were out of that restaurant as quick as can be.

After four days or so in Leningrad, we got on an overnight train to Moscow.

To be continued.