I kind of laugh thinking about how idealistic I was when I was just 17 years old. I'll never forget the look on my retired USAF colonel grandfather's face when he asked me which political party I was going to choose and I gamely replied "the socialist party". Luckily, my grandfather loved me and instead of disowning me, he chose to send me to Europe as a graduation present with one simple criteria. I had to travel to the USSR and East Germany. He told me that, before I made my choice of political party of which he was certain would immediately flag me to be followed for the remainder of my days by FBI or CIA, he wanted me to go to countries that were the extreme form of socialism so I can better judge my choice. My grandpa knew what he was doing. He, himself, had traveled in the USSR in the 1970's after the Yom Kippur War. I was going to the USSR in its decline. The year was 1987.
When I did finally arrive in the USSR, I found it all very comical. The people all looked so poor except for a couple kids bedecked in Mickey Mouse clothing and Levi's and whose primary interest in the tour group I was in was black market trading in the former Leningrad. Things took an almost spy like feeling when we realized that we were followed by someone clinging to the shadows and then, when we secretly met with a larger black market trader who was offering us "anything", including Russian military uniforms in exchange for whatever we had brought in our suitcases. The black market was so big that even little kids engaged in their own miniature version of it, trading us pins with Lenin's bust on it or the hammer and sickle for bubble gum or a cigarette. It was all a game to us. We were like spies in our Cold War enemy's land. Like spoiled little kids, we messed with our designer suited and beautiful tour guide from Ukraine, Julia, when it came to our bus in the USSR. Our bus in the rest of Europe was a brand new Mercedes. Yes, Mercedes makes buses and very nice ones at that. Poor Julia changed our bus every day after hearing our vocal criticisms of the day's latest attempt at "bus approval". In any other country, we were just simple tourists, a few of the thousands visiting the Eiffel Tower or St. Paul's Cathedral. In the USSR, we were less tourist and more regarded as important guests. The infrequency of tourism because of the Cold War was such that an American tourist was kept in the best of hotels, given ringside seats at the Russian Circus, and, for discussion, the top students from the around the USSR were brought to join us for dinner. The Soviet government left little doubt in our minds that impressing us was petite, pretty Julia's number one task.
As such, we were not frequently given opportunity to wander. Our tours of the former Leningrad and Moscow were strictly regimented. We still wandered the cities for hours, a luxury afforded by being in the USSR during white nights. This was when we were approached by non-juvenile black marketers. One of our first after dinner excursions was to walk down to see what was clearly a church down the road from our hotel. My hotel room had a beautiful view of its deep sky blue dome rising above the tops of soft green trees. A few within my group talked about its beauty over dinner and imagined it to be glorious. By the end of dinner, it was decided that we would see this building for ourselves. When we got to the church, we found it surrounded by barbed wire fence and people had dumped their garbage within. The windows were boarded over by huge sheets of plywood while the the windows higher up and unguarded had been broken out. To see this magnificently beautiful building in such a state put us all in a deeply somber mood. I realized that I was in a country where this once beautiful building was treated like nothing better than a garbage dump.
At that moment right there, we were altered. It was the point at which things no longer ceased to be as fun, where we could no longer giggle about the possibility of being followed by KGB. We were in the USSR. A country where stories of people disappearing for being too outspoken were rampant from those who were able to defect. A country with a nearly closed wall and an iron fist. Day by day, we were still the spoiled little brats from the U.S. whining about our bus but every time they changed the bus to a better one, it became less funny and more unnerving. By the time we arrived in Moscow, so jaded and despondent were we that we limply noted that our bus was driving in circles for three hours straight. After dinner, we no longer ventured out into the city. We were too afraid. Instead, we went to the bar housed in our hotel to sullenly drink god awful beer, surrounded by high ranking military officials of what we figured to be probable enemies of our country.
It was here that I met Maria. I had gone to buy another beer when one of these military men approached me. He tried speaking to me in Russian and when I responded, he just smiled and made a rude hand gesture implying that I should sleep with him upstairs in the hotel above. Knowing that he was inferring that I was a high priced call girl, I angrily retorted back in the most indignant voice a 17 year old could muster. A girl sitting alone in a booth watched the exchange with great amusement and laughed heartily at my response. After I had walked away, still in my indignant huff, the girl approached me, still laughing. She was rather short and slightly chubby with dark blonde hair cut in a wispy pixy. Her clothes were skimpier and make up was heavier than anything that I would have ever worn. She looked only a little older than me. In hindsight and with the wisdom of an additional 25 years, I am pretty sure now that she was probably an actual prostitute. At the time, it didn't matter. We hit it off instantly and within a couple hours, we were nothing but a couple of giggling teenage girls, gossiping about all the "old men" in the bar. I told Maria about our having to take a night train into Moscow (she explained that it was because the poverty in the country was so bad, they did not want us to see it) and how our tour bus always circled the same path (that was all they wanted us to see, according to Maria). As I was walking her outside of the hotel, she offered to take me on a real tour of Moscow the next day. I agreed.
I am still not sure how I got away with it. Perhaps it was the fear of what I was about to do that has made it so that I have no idea how I did it or whether I even entirely got away with doing it. That afternoon, however, I was riding a public streetcar with Maria through Moscow. She didn't show me the pretty palaces of the former Russian imperial family. She showed me the ghettos of Moscow. They were slums to rival probably the worst slums in the US but, in Moscow, most of the population lived in these areas. The palaces that she did show me were not immense but still beautiful, with green flower filled and iron gated gardens distancing them from the streets. This, Maria said, is where the government officials live. The import of her words did not miss their mark. See how poor the people of Moscow were and how finely the government officials live. This is what Maria wanted me to see and I saw it with open eyes. With mirth and laughter, she showed me the monstrously huge battleship of a building that was our US Embassy in Moscow, whispering that the USSR had forced the US to use only Russian builders and that the entire building was unusable because of bugs for the purpose of espionage. Between Maria's chosen "sites", we talked about all that I was seeing on the streets. The long lines along the street that stretched down several blocks were people waiting for toilet paper. There had been a shortage of toilet paper for several weeks.
Then we had the conversation that never left me and kept Maria in my mind for all these years. We were talking about the ghettos of Moscow and Maria had told me how crime was terrible there. Her own apartment had been broken into just a few days prior. I asked her if the police had caught them yet and she looked at me with such shock. She didn't understand what I meant. Why would I call the police if my apartment had been broken into? I explained to her that that is what we do in the US when someone does such a thing. She couldn't imagine it. In the USSR, she explained, everyone was too afraid to call the police to report a crime. If the police came and decided that they didn't like you, they would take you away and no one would ever see you again. It was my turn to be shocked. I could not imagine living in a country where, on a whim, you could be taken away, forever locked up, for whatever reason. I couldn't imagine living in a country where the people were afraid of the police to the extent that they would prefer to be victims of crimes unreported than perhaps a victim of a government.
When we returned back to our hotel, I gave Maria the most valuable prized thing that I could. I gave her the two rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom of my hotel room. She was so grateful that she cried. I never saw her again. We flew out to Copenhagen the next day and were greeted at the airport by a grinning bearded man with a handwritten sign that said "Welcome back to the free world!!". It was our turn for tears. People might think it strange but so happy we were to be out of the USSR with, its pervasive control and fear, that we kissed the ground. A few kissed the Mercedes symbol, too, on our bus. Freedom was something that we had so dreadfully missed and could taste in the air through the noisy chatter and neon lights of Copenhagen.
The Senate just passed the National Defense Authority Act, which includes language that allows for the indefinite imprisonment of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without charge or trial today. The vote was 93-7. President Obama has stated that he may veto the act should it pass in the House of Representatives. Please contact your representative and urge them to vote "no" so we do not have to rely on presidential veto that may not come.
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