S.L. Sanger

       DINNER WITH JULIE FOLLOWED. We all drank too much vodka leading to hassles over the bill and a moment of panic when I thought I had signed a Visa charge of $645 for drinks.

        Wednesday, 9th of May, Victory Day, celebrating the Soviet Union’s triumph in 1945 over Nazi Germany.  Excellent breakfast at the hotel buffet. The menu was pancakes with blueberry sauce, pickled beets, and a generous selection of yogurt and fruit. After breakfast, we watched the Victory Day parade in Red Square near the Kremlin Wall. Hundreds of soldiers marched to military music. No tanks or rockets visible. We were disappointed.

        Later, we walked past KGB headquarters for no particular reason, although Dick may have wanted impressions for his planned novel. A hot day. Not many stares from Russian folks, probably because by 1984 curious tourists were not a rarity. We considered getting in line for Lenin’s Tomb, but rejected the idea because the line stretched almost out of sight. Julie had been inside the mausoleum earlier and later drew Dick a sketch for background along with details of the mood inside the highly-secure and sacred place. Lenin’s Tomb was to play a key role in his novel. The dissident Russians who stole Lenin’s head faced some formidable obstacles and Dick wanted some plausible basis for success of the macabre head-stealing plot line.  

         Dick’s girlfriend Janice arrived that night from Portland, Oregon. Janice and Dick lived together in the Portland suburb of Beaverton. On a warm night, the four of us watched the Victory Day fireworks over the Kremlin, and joined the walking mass of happy Russians marching up Gorky Street, 10 lanes of them as far as the eye could see. Good humored, singing, laughing, many of them apparently drunk.

         Moscow, except for the presence of so many soldiers, looked much like any large European city. Stately buildings in decent repair. Busy shops and crowds of reasonably well-dressed people. Traffic was often heavy. Puzzling, we thought, that there were so many churches and crosses in a Communist country.

         The day after Victory Day was calmer. The usual excellent buffet breakfast, again with the popular pickled beets and superior pancakes and blueberry sauce. The pickled beets, delicious as they were, did strike us as an odd choice for breakfast.

         We spent some time in Gum’s, across from the Kremlin Wall, the Soviet Union’s largest department store. Crumbling but elegant. We stopped in Intourist shops, including at the Rossiya Hotel. I bought a 13 ½-inch high fake pewter statue of a standing Lenin, weighing almost four pounds. Impressive and hard to fit in a suitcase. We had lunch at the National Hotel, an old and respected establishment. I considered this lunch the best meal of the trip, but for reasons unknown did not write down what we ordered. Some sort of pork, I think, was the entrée. A delicious meal and not memorably expensive.

         That night we four attended a performance of the Kirov Ballet in “Don Quixote” at the Musical Theater for only $2.10 each. We had aimed for the Bolshoi, but this organization was on vacation. We were pleased, though, by the performance, even Dick and me, the two philistines among us.  I gushed in my notebook about “the exquisite art of ballet.”  We marveled, as well, at the little caviar sandwiches served during the intermission. After “Don Quixote,” Julie took a late train to Leningrad and the rest of us went to bed.

         All that was left was sightseeing, which meant walking in Red Square, discouraged again by the endless line waiting outside Lenin’s Tomb, past the Kremlin Wall, the tourist shops, and stopping at a bookstore or two. We browsed the bookstores and were surprised at the English language authors on the shelves, including William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Penn Warren, and Evelyn Waugh.  I bought a copy of Turgenev’s short stories and poems. In the preface, a quote from Turgenev: “Happiness has no tomorrow.”  Another good quote from Pushkin: “In the matter of happiness, I am an atheist; I do not believe in it.”

 

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LENINGRAD, NEXT STOP HELSINKI

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            THE NEXT DAY, MAY 12 at 1:20 p.m., the three of us left on time for Leningrad. I didn’t note how long the about 400-mile ride took, but likely about nine hours. Now, a fast train does it in fewer than five hours. My notes say in 1984 the Russian mud began quickly. A queue standing in front of a drab building were almost ankle-deep in mud.     

       But the view was not all mud by any means. We saw small garden plots prepared neatly for seeding; an elderly lady and a young boy working together in a garden; a woman washing a red piece of clothing in a pond; children placing flowers on graves; a woman wrestling hay into a barn with a great horned beast of a cow staring at her. The nicest scene was of small houses and barns scattered along a valley glimpsed quickly through new leafed birches. The only unpleasant note of the ride was a loud and very obnoxious drunk in the dining car, the first time we experienced a bad drunk in the previous 10,000 kilometers.

       ON ARRIVAL THAT NIGHT, we headed straight for our hotel, the Swedish-built Pribaltiyskaya, now called the Park Inn by Radisson. We met Julie and, running true to form, had a couple of beers with her. Our rooms had a view of the Baltic, very dramatic on the moonlit nights of our three-day stay. My notes are lacking in detail. My main memories of Leningrad, besides the moonlit view of the Baltic, were a river tour and a visit to the Hermitage, a dark place of priceless art, the dark Rembrandts in rooms so dark the paintings were almost invisible. We were annoyed with ourselves when we realized we had overlooked the Impressionists.

       Leningrad was a scenic place of rivers, bridges and canals, with somewhat heavy but stately architecture.  A favorite memory was the tasty fried piroshki, sold hot by street vendors.  We hung around the Baltic Bar, which we called “the no sunset bar.” We got around easily by taxi. The hotel lobby was usually jammed with “gruppa, gruppa.”

         One stop was the Peter the Great’s 300-year-old Summer Palace, which I remember had shallow trenches still evident nearby. We were told these were remnants of the 880-day Siege of Leningrad by mostly German troops beginning in the late summer of 1941. A million civilians died as well as 300,000 Russian soldiers by the time the Soviets ended the siege in January 1944. The Summer Palace itself is a simple stone building, not nearly as grand as subsequent palaces.

         None of us was much interested in sightseeing although we did see the cruiser Aurora, a warship which figured in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. We were thinking of home and were ready for the short train ride, about 240 miles, to Helsinki, Finland. Julie had left the day before and we planned to meet her there.

       Our stay in Leningrad ended on a positive note, a rosy glow almost, of watching drunken Russians singing and dancing at the Baltic Bar. The dominant sense of dictatorial oppression actually had lifted to a large extent in Leningrad, which struck us as a more tolerant place than Moscow or locations farther east. 

         At 11 a.m. on Tuesday the 15th of May we departed on time for Helsinki from the Finland Station. The short distance of not much more than 100 miles to the Finnish border was a pretty stretch of leafy birches and quaint towns of brightly painted houses, mostly blue, yellow and green. The train stopped at Vyborg for money exchange and to allow Soviet customs guards to check luggage. We crossed the border at 2 p.m. and noticed the electrified barbwire fence, guard towers, and soldiers.

            The train stopped on the Finnish side and customs people came aboard, speaking English, smiling and friendly. “Anything to declare?” we were asked.

            “Yes, definitely,” I said, “We are very glad to be here.”