I arrived in Moscow on a flight from Paris one day in August, 1972 and was immediately ejected and tossed on the plane going back to Paris.
I had committed the unforgivable sin of arriving without a visa. The International Research and Exchanges Board in New York, the agency that oversaw the academic exchanges between the USA and the USSR, was responsible for procuring the visas for the exchange participants. To ensure that they would be able to send the visas to the right addresses at the right times, they required the participants to keep them informed of their movements during the summer prior to departure.
I was living in Washington, D.C. during June and July 1972, doing research in the Library of Congress on my dissertation topic. I took a short vacation to Southern California in late July, then flew to Paris. All the participants were to take the same flight from Paris to Moscow. I hadn’t received my visa by then, but I wasn’t worried about it. I figured that IREX would send the visa with their representative on the flight to Moscow. That was the procedure which had been used on my previous visit to the USSR in the summer of 1964. I spent a day or so visiting Alan Williams, a fellow graduate student from Yale, who was spending his year abroad doing dissertation research in Paris, before catching the plane to Moscow.
The joke was on me. When we arrived at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, everyone pulled out their visas – except me. Nobody came running up to me on the plane with my visa.
We were met at the airport by representatives of the Ministry of Education, who quickly took in the situation and contacted their superiors at the Ministry to get a copy of my visa. They knew I had one, I was on their list. While we were waiting for the visa to arrive, some jerk of a border guard lieutenant, turning a deaf ear to the Ministry’s reps, grabbed me and tossed me back on the plane.
Back in Paris, I contacted IREX to find out what was going on. It turned out that they had sent my visa to American Express in Paris, but had neglected to tell me about that. I guess they expected me to figure it out on my own. I retrieved the visa and booked another flight to Moscow. IREX covered it, but they said that I would have to pay them the money back – both for the return flight from Moscow to Paris, for which I had to sign a promissory note, and the second flight from Paris to Moscow. That was kind of a distressing prospect, because as a graduate student I didn’t have a lot of money and the repayment would cut heavily into my finances.
As it turned out, I never had to reimburse IREX for the extra flights. I did have to write them an explanatory letter, and they eventually figured out that they had dropped the ball, or at least thrown it to the wrong base.
That was the inauspicious beginning to my year in the Soviet Union. When I finally arrived at the airport for the second time, I was whisked off to a temporary hostel somewhere in Moscow for a few days while awaiting assignment to permanent quarters in Moscow University. I was “entertained” by a group of young men who purported to be students. They all spoke excellent English and some of them claimed to have lived in the USA as sons of diplomats. I figure they were assigned to evaluate me and determine what kind of threat I represented to the Soviet regime. No matter – they were genial and hospitable, and I passed the time well in their company.
After a few days I was able to move into my room on the 5th floor of Zona V of the main building of Moscow State University (abbreviated MGU after its Russian initials) in Sparrow Hills. The rooms in MGU were grouped into “blocks”, two rooms to a block, sharing a common entrance, toilet and shower. The rooms were quite small, and the Soviet students were assigned two to a room, four to a block, so their quarters were rather cramped. The exchange students, such as me, had one room to themselves, so that our roommates were really block-mates, and we had relative privacy. I had even more privacy at first since my assigned block-mate didn’t arrive until I had been there a month or so.
The main building of MGU consists of a central tower of 36 stories flanked by two huge wings that branch out like tuning forks. The place is gigantic, with 33 kilometers of corridors and 5000 rooms. It was one of the “Seven Sisters” – giant skyscrapers which Joseph Stalin ordered to be constructed around Moscow during the post-World War II era, in his favorite architectural style, a combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic, sometimes characterized as “Stalinist wedding-cake.” It was built in 1953 using gulag convict labor, and it had some of the features of a prison. Access was strictly limited. There was a fence around the building with entrances manned by babushki – older women who provided much of the clerical and menial labor for the Soviet workforce and whose duty was to check everybody’s passes to make sure that no unauthorized persons got in or out. Further control points were distributed inside the building at the entrance to each korpus (ward or section). You had to show your pass to get on an elevator to go to your room. Out of as many as eight elevators for each ward, only one or two would be kept running at a time, so that you generally had to wait in line to get into an elevator to go to your room. Moreover, for the corner towers of each ward the elevators were staged – that is, if you had a room in one of the corner towers you would have to take one elevator to get to the top floor of the lower ward, then another to get to your room in the tower. Luckily, I and the other American students had rooms in the lower floors, which were easy to access.
There was more. Although the building had been constructed with portals allowing people to pass from one wing to another on each floor, all of these were sealed off, so that if you wanted to visit someone who lived in a different wing, you had to exit your ward, and sometimes even the building, go to another entrance, show your pass, explain where you were going and why or try to sneak past the guards, and then wait for the elevator.
Despite the controls, unauthorized people did manage to get in, and it was known that there were many, perhaps hundreds, of people living there whose student status had expired or who had never even been students in the first place. To deal with this situation, the authorities conducted random sweeps, unannounced in advance, to check the passports of everybody in the building. These were conducted by student officials. The same persons also conducted pre-announced periodic military-style inspections of the student rooms for cleanliness and good order. I recall that on one occasion, a gigantic Arab, at least six and a half feet tall, came to inspect my room with white gloves. He ran his glove over the top of the door and found dust on it. He then proceeded to act as if he had unearthed some heinous crime. I thought he was going to haul me off to the brig. He relented and became more courteous when he discovered that I was a foreigner and an American. It also turned out that he was an officer in the Egyptian army as well as a student at MGU.
The first month of our stay, all the American students were required to attend a class to bring us up to speed on our command of Russian. Most of us needed it. There were two instructors, both women. They were extremely competent and very personable. I improved my fluency in Russian a great deal in the class and thought it was in some ways the best part of the year.
Sometime in that first month, I started getting visits from a youngish woman in a short skirt and high leather boots, who said she was looking for a graduate student named Ronald Feldstein from Princeton, who had been there the previous year. This was clearly a pretext to come in and talk, and maybe drum up some trade. She said her name was Laima and she was from Latvia. Each time she showed up, she stayed and talked a while. She began by telling be how bad my Russian was. I already knew that. She also liked to tell me how brilliant and extraordinary Ronald Feldstein was. I never did find out how well she had known Feldstein, and I figure she was probably just using his name to get her foot in the door. She also liked to tell sex jokes, which to me was a clear indication of what her game was. She was not bad-looking, but her manner put me off, and it was easy to imagine she was there for some nefarious purpose, like perhaps trying to get some compromising information that the KGB could use to blackmail me with. I didn’t bite, and her visits soon ceased. She also visited other Americans in our party, who told much the same story. We called her Crazy Laima.
At the end of the first month, I got a roommate. I think I was the only American who got a roommate who wasn’t from the Soviet Union. His name was Waldemar Ariel Camaño-Brañas and he said he was from Uruguay but had gone to university in Brazil. When I asked him how he had ended up in MGU, his reply was a bit vague – something to the effect that the Soviets accepted students from all over the world. Ariel, as he preferred to be called, was very personable, outgoing, and generous. He helped me as well as some of the other American students get acquainted with the university facilities, with Moscow, shopping, dining, in general learning the ropes. He got to know some of the other foreigners in the ward, including some Scandinavian exchange students, and introduced us to them. (They had great parties and were in general lots of fun.) He even took me to the Uruguayan embassy and introduced me to some of the people there. He got us great coffee from the Brazilian embassy. And so on.
It soon became apparent that he was really disillusioned with the Soviet Union. He had nothing good to say about it. He was paranoid about being spied upon. He kept looking for microphones in the rooms, and thought he found where they were embedded in the wall. One time the American Communist professor Angela Davis came to Moscow University to give speeches supporting, among other things, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. We could see her in the auditorium where she was speaking from our dorm windows. Ariel grabbed an imaginary AK-47 and mimicked shooting at her.
Of course it turned out in the end that he was working with the KGB. Not that he was doing it voluntarily, at least not by the time I got there. As far as I could gather, when he first came to the Soviet Union, he had been a dedicated Communist, and the Soviets took care of his finances. As time went on his enthusiasm for Communism had withered, but to keep his stipend he had to perform services for the regime, which involved reporting on other foreign students to the KGB. But he didn’t feel good about it, and he wanted out. The trouble was, by that time he couldn’t go back to either Uruguay or Brazil; he was persona non grata to the authorities there, and they either wouldn’t let him in or would clap him in jail once he got there – it wasn’t clear which. But his handlers in the KGB had by that time gotten wind of his distaste for his assignments, and they cut off his stipend in the middle of the school year. At the time he told us that they had said to him something like “You people are all alike. You lose faith [in communism] and you go and sell yourselves to the Pope!” So he was in a dilemma. He had no money, and he could neither go nor stay.
He resolved the situation in an interesting way. One of the women he was involved with – there were several – was from Denmark, and he made known his situation to her. She invited him to come to Denmark and live with her and her husband until he could find a job. Around the end of December, I think it was, he left. I gave him $100 to help out with expenses. A few months later I heard from him again. He said that he was going to Sweden under the auspices of the same organization that helped the American draft-dodgers to find refuge there, and he needed more money, and could I send him some? I couldn’t. Later I heard from some of the other Danes and Norwegians who knew the couple he had been living with that he hadn’t shown much motivation, hadn’t really tried to find a job, etc., and finally decided to seek greener pastures. I never heard his side of the story, so I don’t really have a good idea of what his situation was in Denmark. In any case, I never heard from him again. I hope he finally found a niche somewhere.
After Ariel left I knew that I would be assigned a new roommate sooner or later; it would probably be a male Soviet student, and for various reasons I didn’t particularly relish the prospect. Around the same time, another member of our American IREX contingent, Chris Buck, a fellow graduate student from Yale, had a change in his circumstances. His wife Michelle left to go back to New Haven – they were en route to a divorce – and like me, he didn’t relish the idea of having to adjust to an unknown new roommate either. So we applied to the university administration to become roommates with one another, our request was immediately approved, and I moved into the second room of his block on the third floor. This made matters very convenient for us. I had a Russian girlfriend, Chris very shortly acquired one of his own, and if the powers that be wanted to listen in to our activities via microphones in the walls, assuming there were any, that was fine with us, but we preferred not to have roommates who might report on our comings and goings.
By then I also had contacts outside Moscow University that would not have been especially palatable to the Soviet regime. One of my fellow graduate students in Russian history and his wife had been on the IREX exchange in the spring of 1972, and they passed on to me one of their acquaintances, Boris Khazanov, who worked for the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a computer economist. He was Jewish and wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union. This was the era when the Brezhnev regime was in theory letting Jews emigrate but putting all kinds of obstacles in their path. One way of making it difficult was to simply drag their heels on processing the application; another was to raise all kinds of legal obstacles, such as prior employment in jobs that gave access to sensitive military or scientific employment. Fortunately Boris didn’t have to worry about that. Still another way was to make would-be emigres pay for the education they had received at state expense, and since all education in the Soviet Union was at state expense, that could add up to a considerable sum of money, depending on how much education one had obtained. Boris of course had a lot, and I think the fee for him was about 90,000 rubles, which at the official ruble-to-dollar exchange ration of 1:1.3 or so would have been $117,000, a hefty sum of money. (Not that the official rate meant much in those circumstances; even though Soviet salaries were low, rubles were not so hard to come by via borrowing because there wasn’t much worth spending them on.) When Boris applied to emigrate, just before I arrived in Moscow, he was fired from his Academy position, which would have made it hard for him to stay afloat financially, were it not for the fact that the regime neglected to fire his wife from her job as an English teacher, so they were able to eke out a living on her salary. But the financial aspect was the lesser of his worries; the major obstacle was simply the bureaucratic refusal to grant him the foreign passport. That was where he was when I showed up. The role I inherited from my predecessors was to pass Boris’ letters to people in the West who might help him get out by raising a fuss in academic and scientific circles and thereby embarrassing the Soviets – people like the famous economist Paul Samuelson. If Boris sent his appeals via the regular Soviet post, they would be subject to scrutiny or censorship, or quite likely simply trashed. I was able to send out his letters unhindered through the American Embassy’s secure diplomatic post, to which we as exchange students had access.
In return for my help, which to be honest involved little effort or risk on my part, Boris did a lot to make my stay in the Soviet Union more pleasant and edifying. He took me on walking tours of Moscow and showed me sights that I would never have found on my own. He got me tickets to concerts, plays and ballets, including the Bol’shoi Theater and the Moscow Conservatory, which I would not have been able to obtain otherwise. He also passed me on to a friend of his named Oleg in Leningrad who showed me around that city when I was there. I’ll have more to say about Oleg when I get to the post on Leningrad.
But while I was hobnobbing with Boris, in the fall and winter of 1972, a curious episode occurred which, although it doesn’t reflect well on me, I’ll relate anyway, omitting the names of most of the participants to protect the guilty. One day out of the blue I received a letter from a fellow graduate student at Yale, who informed me that she was dating a guy, I’ll call him Sam, who had also been on the IREX exchange in spring 1972 and who knew Boris. He had told her that Boris, contrary to what he had told me, had actually been involved in highly classified work with the Academy of Sciences, that the Soviets would therefore never give him permission to emigrate, and that Boris was not to be trusted and I could get in big trouble with the authorities for associating with him. Needless to say I was dismayed to hear this. It was all the more believable since Sam was himself Jewish and could be expected to at least feel some empathy with persons of similar ethnic background. I wrote to the couple at Yale who had passed Boris on to me, asking for clarification, and in the meantime told Boris that something had come up and I would have to stop seeing him for a while. A few weeks passed before I got a reply from my friends at Yale. They berated me in no uncertain terms, and rightly so, for believing hearsay and for abandoning Boris. They also had a few things to say about Sam – to put it as kindly as possible, he was apparently prone to pose as an authority on subjects he knew nothing about. It turned out that Sam, indeed, knew not whereof he spoke; I shortly resumed relations with Boris and continued to pass on his letters, with no adverse consequences. The Soviet authorities finally did relent and allow Boris to emigrate – he left the USSR with his wife and daughter in the spring of ’73, while I was still in the Soviet Union – and subsequently settled in Boston, where he immediately found a job and, as far as I know, lived happily ever after.
After that episode, and Ariel’s departure, things settled down a bit. And it was during the remainder of the winter and the spring – January through May of 1973 – that I did most of my traveling in the Soviet Union. But I also continued to explore Moscow, and that is where this photographic odyssey sets forth.