“Russia: “A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!”–Winston Churchill Prior to my departure from the US, I had hoped to travel on my own in Russia entering from Finland. Theoretically, that was possible and I applied for a visa through the USSR Embassy in Washington. I didn’t get a response as my departure date approached, so I called the embassy and they were not able to give me any information. Consequently, I arrived in London without a visa to enter the USSR. As noted above, I tried to obtain a visa through the USSR Embassy in London but was unsuccessful as they referred me to the government-run Intourist Agency which I didn’t trust. As I was walking around London my first days of the trip, I saw brochures in the window of a Thomas Cook Travel Office advertising summer tours of the Soviet Union through Intourist. The Thomas Cook agent said they had excellent experience with booking Intourist tours and that Intourist was the only option as a practical matter. The all-inclusive price was pretty attractive–15 days including air, rail, coach, food and lodging for about $500 US. I thought about it and decided the Great Russian Cities tour from July 22–August 5, 1978 was a good fit in my itinerary and I booked it during my first week in London.

Scotland Yard Officer Questioned Me and Soviet Border Police in Kiev Took My Pack Apart: Prior to the trip departure, the trip was modified to begin in Kiev which was not on the original itinerary. On the date of departure, I went to Gatwick Airport and checked in at the Aeroflot Russian National Airline desk and went through security. As I was walking to my gate, a well dressed guy in a suit came up to me and said, “Mr. Oviatt, I am Inspector X with Scotland Yard. Do you mind answering a few questions?” He asked me what the purpose of my trip was to the Soviet Union. I explained my plan to travel in Europe and on the Hippie Trail for a year. I also explained that I and was taking this tour because I couldn’t get a visa to enter Russia on my own. He commented that it all was unusual especially an American joining a tour out of London to Russia. He thanked me for my time and said he hoped I would enjoy my travels.

In the waiting area for the flight to Kiev, I met other members of the tour–all of them were British history teachers except for two other solo British travelers. They all found it odd that an American with a backpack and jeans was joining their tour–they all had normal luggage and travel clothes.

When we landed in Kiev, I headed through customs and a Soviet Customs Official asked me to follow him into a small office adjacent to the customs area. In the office, he and another officer asked me why I was visiting the Soviet Union and how I ended up on a British tour. I explained my travel plans. They said they would need to inspect my belongings–it wasn’t a request. They literally took my backpack apart–removed all the contents, scanned and searched along the seams and frame and then slowly sifted through my clothing, the guidebooks and reading books, and finally, they went through the entire package of mail I had in a plastic jacket. At some point, they found the business card of Oleg Lobanov-Rovtosky, the Business Manager of the National Symphony Orchestra, which I had been given during dinner at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center in New York City after the Carnegie Hall concert the night before I flew to London in February. On the back of his business card, Oleg had written the address of his family’s former home in Leningrad and he had asked me to take a picture of the house if I got a chance. The Soviet Customs guys had me explain all of this including how I met the Business Manager–that involved me explaining how I worked on the US Congressional Staff which is where I met the Business Manager’s girlfriend who had introduced us. None of this pleased them and they stepped outside for a while to discuss it with their boss. Eventually, they came in and told me they were keeping the business card and I was not to take a picture of that address and I should just stay with my tour the entire time I was in the Soviet Union. By the time they cleared me through customs, all the rest of the tour group had been sitting on a bus for two hours waiting for me–a really poor start to the tour for them and for me. The tour guide was very interested in all that had happened in customs and viewed me very suspiciously the entire tour.

Kiev, Kalinin, Novgorod & St. Petersberg

Kiev/Kalinin/Novgorod/St. Petersberg: We alternated between nice buses and trains as we made our way from Kiev to Kalinin to Novgorod and on to St. Petersberg (formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad). We largely toured Kiev in a bus to see the historic and architectural sights. Everyone on the tour was getting used to “how things are done in the Soviet Union”, listening to the heavy Russian accents, exploring how shops and restaurants work there, and getting to know each other and, especially, our tour director. The tour director certainly gave us the “party line” about how great everything was in the Soviet Union but he also was very security conscious and he let us know that there isn’t much flexibility in our itinerary and we need to “follow the rules”. A number of us were born “rule breakers”, so it was “game on”!

The first days were a blur–so much of Soviet life is modern yet very different from the West and much is also very rural and poor–like in the West. The train was older, the cabins were small and sparse, and the service was unfriendly compared to the West. It was interesting seeing the scenery and getting a train-eye view of many villages and towns we passed through on the way to St. Petersburg.

Novgorod is one of the oldest cities in Russia. It is first mentioned in chronicles in 859. In 882, the Prince of Novgorod captured Kiev and moved his capital there.

St. Petersburg was fascinating on multiple fronts. The architecture and historical significance–ancient to WWII to present–is so rich and complex. We spent most of a day touring the Peterhoff Palace and grounds.

Vladimir/Suzdahl: The train from St. Petersburg to Moscow took ten hours and then we bused three hours to the Vladimir/Suzdahl area east of Moscow which is home to the government run Vladimir-Suzdahl Museum-Reserve created in 1958. Vladimir and Suzdahl contain over 2,000 exhibits of Russian art and architecture including nearly 100 “onion-domed” churches and buildings. Our visit was somewhat hurried given that my fellow passengers were all history teachers and I was a history major–we wanted to read all the exhibits but our tour largely focused on walking through the collections of historical structures. It was very interesting, but I really regretted being on a “tour” rather than the luxury I had grown accustomed to on my trip of taking all the time I wanted to see things.

Moscow, August 2-4: Moscow was the final stop of our tour and it was a highlight on multiple fronts. First, the number of iconic sites and decorated buildings was intriguing. I had grown up at the peak of the Soviet-US “Cold War” during which I had “nuclear attack drills” in grade school at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, newspaper headlines continuously emphasized the Soviet threat of “mutual nuclear annihilation”, my parents prepared a “bomb shelter” in the old cistern of my grandmother’s old house that we moved into in the early 1970’s, and the “wall” still existed along the border of Soviet-controlled “Eastern Europe” with US-allied “Western Europe”. It was a complete paradigm shift for me to actually see the Kremlin buildings and meet Russians including Russian soldiers and realize that people are all really largely the same everywhere. I realized that western media was almost as guilty of generating biased “propoganda” about the east as western media accused Russia of generating about the west.

Second, it was so interesting to visit Russian retail stores in Moscow to realize the difference between a centralized production and distribution system in Russia compared to the crazy consumer-centric production and distribution system in the US. I couldn’t help but wonder “which is actually worse?” The Russian system appeared to produce most of the necessities needed by society though Muscovites had to que to purchase high-demand items and many items were supposedly not available in rural areas where there was less affluence (the same was true in the US as I thought about it). The huge GUM department store facing Red Square was a large as any shopping mall I had ever seen. It was constructed in the late 1800’s and the name is an abbreviation for the Russian words for Main Universal Store. It had a huge variety of goods including some specialty and imported goods but many items could only be purchased in US Dollars, so it wasn’t generally available to locals but targeted tourists and the much desired “hard currency” that the Soviet Union desparately needed before its petroleum industry grew decades later. Nowhere did I find the ridiculous choices among thirty types of cola or a hundred types of candy bars that plague Americans.                    

Nationalistic symbols, flags, monuments, and reminders of the devastating wars fought by Russia over the centuries were both common and very striking. While the history I studied was fairly balanced, even university curriculum in the US has a strong US-centric and western-centric bias. Moscow provided a heavy counter-bias and the endless military cemeteries and monuments drove home the reality of the sacrifices made in the east over the centuries. I had viewed with great emotion the memorials in St. Petersburg including the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery where over 650,000 Leningrad citizens and soldiers were buried in mass graves, saw many more in Moscow, and was always surprised to see the X-shaped Tank Trap Barricade monuments located in a perimeter close to the center of Moscow that marked the line where German Panzer tanks were stopped in the 1941 siege of Moscow at a cost of over 500,000 Russian lives. The siege of Leningrad/St. Petersburg claimed 650,000 lives in 1942 alone.

Two of the top highlights were when I left the tour to hang out with locals in Moscow. In hindsight, I was a real nightmare for the guide assigned to our tour–he was a government employee and Intourist was a government tour agency that worked closely with the KGB intelligence people. We were reminded frequently that we must stay with the tour and not mix with locals. One of the English history teachers was close friends with a young couple in Moscow–she lived next door to them in Africa during the early 1970’s when she was in the British equivalent of the Peace Corps and they were in the Soviet Pioneer program providing assistance to poor countries. She was worried about leaving the tour to visit them at their home and I convinced her it would be a great idea and that I would gladly join her. We spent the better part of two days and two nights with them–meeting their children and his mother, dining at their house, visiting GUM (the giant department store), going to an amusement park, and a wild night out at a fancy show club that served a lot of champagne. The history teacher had a really low tolerance for alcohol and a high appetite for it–she was pretty hammered each evening. Still, we all had a really good time with lots of laughs and singing.

Traditional Moscow Men’s Bathhouse/Sauna: The most unusual, memorable, and surprising outing was when our Russian host took me to a traditional men’s bathhouse/sauna in downtown Moscow. He said it was one of the oldest and most traditional–and it was. We undressed in a large locker room and then walked around naked through the various sauna rooms that had different levels of heat and humidity. There were boxes of branches in several areas and we took turns swatting each other’s backs with the branches which was supposed to have some health benefits and you also could work out any anger you had towards your companion if you wanted to swat a little harder. I was simply stunned and couldn’t help but stare a bit at the fact that just about every older man in the sauna had obvious war injuries–many partial and full amputees, huge scars, bullet and other wounds, and burns and disfigurement of every type. We pretty much kept to ourselves but the fact we were speaking English made us stick out and the fact that neither of us had any scars probably was another reason that the regulars checked us out. I obviously couldn’t take pictures in the bathhouse but did locate a picture that reminds me of it.

Staying in a Moscow Apartment Block: The other highlight of leaving the tour was two different locals I met in Moscow. Both sought me out supposedly to “practice speaking English”, so I really don’t know if it was coincidental or if I was being targeted. The first was a reasonably attractive, but not glamorous, single mom who was probably ten years older than me. She approached me in a Moscow subway station, wanted to practice English, and we ended up having coffee and chatting. A female Russian accent is quite attractive. One thing led to another and she invited me home to her apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. We exited the subway and walked a mile through a never-ending maze of identical, massive, concrete apartment buildings (pictured below) which each had 10 stories. I had no idea where we were and we walked up the stairs in a building to the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother and her daughter. We all had dinner together and eventually the grandmother and daughter went to the bedroom and we stayed on a hide-a-bed in the living room. I remember thinking that my tour guide was probably going crazy since I again missed the group event that evening (and for most of our three days in Moscow) and also didn’t come back to my hotel room. I also wondered how much trouble I would be in if security personnel found me. I headed out early the next morning and made my way back to my hotel in downtown Moscow.

Being a slow learner, I didn’t really give it a second thought when a guy about my age approached me as I was walking out of the subway station and he “wanted to practice English”. He quickly let me know that he wanted to know more about the West and that all of his information inside Russia was propaganda. He said he had a couple of friends who also would enjoy talking with me but they probably wouldn’t feel comfortable unless we talked in my room in the hotel. I told him when I would be getting back from the tour event that evening and, sure enough, he and two friends were outside the hotel waiting for me. I naively though, “well, I don’t know if they are allowed in the hotel or not but I guess that is their problem”. We walked across the lobby and took the elevator up to my room on an upper floor. In my room, we hadn’t chatted for more than five minutes when there was a pretty firm knock on my door. I opened it to find three pretty fit guys in suits. They didn’t say anything to me at first but just talked to the Russians in Russian and it was clear they told them that they had to leave and were going to be questioned. Two of the suits left with the Russian guys and the other suit said in fairly clear English, “Mr. Oviatt, you are a guest in our country and you are not following the rules of your tour. You need to stay with your tour at all times and not seek local people because they can get into trouble.” He didn’t state the obvious that “and you, Mr. Oviatt, also could get into trouble.” I may be slow, but I got it. The tour guide was very formal and curt when I saw him the next morning. He just said, “You really need to stay with the tour or we are both going to have problems.” I did just that (probably because the tour was effectively over anyway) and was relieved that I cleared customs for departure from Moscow airport without any delay. As my Aeroflot plane headed to London, I felt like I really had a great tour of the Soviet Union and probably had taken some unnecessary risks, but I didn’t regret any of it.