A Year in the Soviet Union, 1972-1973 – The Intergalactic Tourist

In the fall of 1971, I submitted a dissertation prospectus and passed my oral qualifying examinations for Ph.D. candidacy. I also put in an application for a spot on the Graduate Student and Young Faculty Exchange Program to the USSR for the following academic year, 1972-1973. The academic exchanges with the Soviet Union were handled by the International Research and Exchanges Board, a non-profit organization established in 1968 by the American Council of Learned Societies, U. S. State Department and other organizations to administer educational exchanges with Soviet-bloc countries. In the spring of 1972, I was accepted for the 1972-73 exchange and awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant to help finance the trip. I was one of about 40 Americans selected for the exchange that year; many of them took their spouses and even children along, so the American contingent included probably around 60 people in all. There was another exchange for senior faculty which expanded the numbers of American academics in the Soviet Union still further.

My term of residence in the Soviet Union was scheduled to start in August 1972 and end in June 1973, lasting a total of ten months. In the spring of 1973 I applied for an extra month, which was granted, and so I ended up leaving in July, 1973 and staying eleven months in all.

I was based in Moscow, but as it turned out, I needed to conduct much of my research in Imperial Russian Archives in Leningrad (since reverted to its pre-1917 name of St. Petersburg). So I wound up spending time there as well – a long period of about a month in February, and a shorter one of three weeks or so in May. While in Moscow, I lived in the dormitory of the main building of Moscow State University in Sparrow Hills on the west side of Moscow; in Leningrad I lived in a dormitory building belonging to Leningrad University.

In addition to Moscow and Leningrad, I participated in several excursions to other areas during the course of the year. Some of these were organized tours in which all or most of the exchange students participated; others were arranged on an individual and informal basis. Our first organized excursion was to the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery in Zagorsk in the fall; later I rode in a car rented by an American family to Pereiaslavl’-Zalessky, an old Russian town about 140 km/80 miles northeast of Moscow. In January a number of us took a trip to some of the other old Russian towns on the so-called Golden Ring north of Moscow.

By then I had acquired a Russian girlfriend, Vera Antonova, a student at Moscow University, and we went on several short outings in the Moscow area, as well as a longer one to another of the old Russian towns, Suzdal’.

In the spring, in April, most of the American exchange students signed up for a major tour of Central Asia and the Caucasus. We flew out to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, thence to Bukhara and Samarkand, and finally across the Caspian to Tbilisi in Georgia, spending several days in each city.

Vera and I got married in Moscow on June 6, which happened to be the same day that my grandparents had been married 55 years earlier. After months of waiting, she was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union and join me in New Haven in February of 1974.

To record my experiences in the Soviet Union on film, I took with me the little Voigtländer Vitoret camera I had purchased in Munich, Germany on my first visit to Europe in 1964. It was a very basic camera, but I didn’t have money for anything much better. I knew, of course, that neither Kodak nor other Western films such as AGFA were available in the Soviet Union. I took what I thought would be plenty of Kodak color slide film with me, but it turned out to be nowhere near enough. When it ran out, I was able to find some color film made in East Germany, under the brand name ORWO. The trouble was that there was no place in Moscow to get the film developed; Russian photo shops were not equipped to develop color film in those days. I thought, however, that it would be easy to get the ORWO film developed after getting back to the States, because it was said to be identical to AGFA, since ORWO was the product of the original AGFA factory which was located in Soviet-occupied East Germany.

It didn’t work out that way. It wasn’t easy to find a lab in the USA that would touch the ORWO film, and when I did find one it charged outrageous prices. But I did get the pictures in the end, though I had to cut and mount them in the slide frames myself.

I also found that Soviet-made color slides of some of the major tourist attractions – mainly in Moscow – were available for purchase in shops. To save film, I avoided photographing some of the major sights myself and concentrated on shooting those which couldn’t be found on the commercial slides. Unfortunately, the Soviet-made slides turned out to be junk. Within a few years they had mostly faded into washed-out shades of gray. I’ve used a few of them in these chronicles anyway, and I’ve included one in the header of this page just to show what I mean.

So here is the chronicle of my year in the Soviet Union. At present (spring 2020) this is very much a work in progress, and the first few posts are mostly devoted to Moscow and its environs. I’ll be adding more, expanding the range geographically, as time goes on. One caveat: the first post in the series, devoted to Moscow University, is an introductory page with a lot of text but not many photos; however, it does provide some background information which will be helpful, especially for those not conversant with the history of the Soviet Union, for the following posts.